The undone vast
J. B. Steane Percy Grainger is that blessed exception, a composer who has not-been 'done'. In the first place, nobody knows exactly how much of him there is, and though this never prevents people from passing judg- ment it has effectively protected him from mummification in the definitive study. More important, he has still not• quite been accepted as a 'serious' composer. Gramophone records are the indicators here, and by modern standards the Grain- ger discography is on a fairly small scale: his orchestral works have not been recorded a third, second or even first time by Herbert von Karajan and there is no boxed set of his songs by Fischer-Dieskau. He himself became bitter about the lack of interest in his compositions. Yet the recognition he craved could only have come about by his absorption into the world of 'good taste' which he despised (`My life has been one of kicking out into space, while the world around me is dying of "good taste" '). Liv- ing till 1961, he survived nearly all his con- temporaries, the later years involving him in a constant struggle to establish the two monuments to his life and work that his heart was set upon, the Museum in Melbourne and the Library at his home in White Plains. Most of the musical world smilingly indulged, or dismissively ignored, him; he seems in those years to have become an anachronistic lonely figure. But he was not without friends. Some of them, with a new generation to whom the rediscovery of graingerism has evidently meant a good deal, have come together in producing this collection of memoirs and studies, and they have done his memory good service.
He is of course a marvellous subject for memoirs. He leapt through windows and jumped down stairs and raced old Delius around in his wheel chair as though they were at Brand's Hatch and got married in front of thousands in the Hollywood Bowl. Probably none of the accounts of him here is quite so vivid as Eric Fenby's in Delius as I knew him but they still make lively reading. Sir Peter Pears draws entertaining- ly on Gervase. Elwes's reminiscences (Grain- ger jumping downstairs once too often and spraining his ankle, but still pedalling away on his bicycle with one foot in the air). Lionel Carley traces the Delius connec- tion, throwing up interesting things about the earlier friendship with Grieg: mildly shocking, though, to find Grainger writing about 'darling sweet little Grieg's death' in the style of his extraordinary mother, who
herself would rather shockingly refer to `dear little Beecham'. A piece from a manuscript by Cyril Scott tells something of the Frankfurt years and David Tall con- tributes a useful chapter on Grainger's pioneering work collecting folk songs; he cut (for example) 216 cylinder recordings of old countryfolk singing their songs, mostly in Lincolnshire and Gloucester, between 1906 and 1909. Perhaps most vivid among the biographical chapters is Dorothy Payne's on Grainger as a teacher: he is still 'Mr Grainger' to her and she gives a delightfully specific account of lessons that were always alive with ideas and ex- periments.
What really matters is that Grainger was indeed a 'serious' composer. John Bird, the author of the standard biography, quotes his saying, 'The object of my music is not to entertain, but to agonise' and he applies this remark to that strangely mournful arrangement of the Londonderry Air in- cluded in Volume 2 of Decca's Salute to Percy Grainger. I was playing this myself shortly before beginning to read the book, and marvelled at the pain, the haunted character of the harmonisation. But it is very much one with the intense concentra- tion of Shaller Brown, which I remember from long ago as making a strong first im- pression of the depth that there was in Grainger.
In his chapter on the songs (a useful one written by a singer with an eye to singers' practical problems), David Wilson-Johnson speaks about that song as his own introduc- tion to Grainger. It lends credibility to the claim that in so many of these rarely-heard major works there is not just a rare beauty of unusual sounds but also a depth and in- dividuality of feeling that Grainger could express only (as he put it) by 'kicking out into space': developing his ideas of 'free music', 'elastic scoring' and so forth. At the heart of the book, I would say, lie three studies which substantiate this — one by Ronald Stevenson on the piano music, one on the music for wind instruments by Thomas Slattery, and, most valuable, Bryan Fairfax's chapter on the orchestral music. This is the longest section and it has the most to say. There are fascinating ex- amples and explanations of Grainger's scor- ing. His liking for 'unrespectable' in- struments (harmonium, saxophone, solovox, banjo, ukelele etc.,) is related to his comment 'Salvation Army Booth ob- jected to the devil having all the good tunes. I object to jazz and vaudeville having all the best instruments'. Nine selected works are discussed in economical detail, again with practical help for performers (though ap- proximate timings would have been useful). Above all, the account is appetising. Gra- inger's manuscript sketch of Random Round, for instance, looks virtually incom- prehensible, but Fairfax's description of its attractiveness in performance means it must be heard. The Warriors, with its potential as a spectacular ballet, seems, as we read of it here, to be not only Grainger's larges,t work but also quite probably one of the
most creative musical works of the 20th century.
But what a lifetime it was. The infant prodigy in Australia, the virtuoso pianist in Europe and the States, the folk-song collec- tor in England and Scandinavia, the mother's boy (and his despair at her suicide in 1922), the pioneer recorder, the builder of musical machines (an interesting chapter on this), the teacher: all of these sides of the man, with a fine collection of photographs, are documented. in this 'Companion'. As
for the composer, one is newly impressed and intrigued. As Bryan Fairfax says, Grainger, with his eye and ear for the value of materials, and human material above all, must be valued 'in a world that now realises the prime urgency of actually maintaining life, let alone enriching it'. Even with this substantial volume beside us, we are left well aware that rich discoveries are still to be made in the material that Grainger left behind him. The faith implicit throughout this book is that his time is to come.
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