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Percy Grainger 1882–1961

by Cyril Scott

The death of Percy Grainger at 78 after a long illness has not only meant the loss of a composer whose music has given so much delight to thousands of people, but also one of the most original, dynamic and lovable personalities of the present century. And yet only his more intimate friends – nearly all of them now deceased – were in a position to appreciate his really great qualities as a man, although even those persons who met him just casually were struck by his unreserved and immediate friendliness.

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born at Brighton, near Melbourne, Australia, on 8 July 1882. His father was an architect by profession, an Englishman, his mother a woman of striking beauty, with an intense love of music. Percy was her only child; and it may be of some significance to psychologists that all the time she was expecting him she concentrated hard on his becoming a musician. In any case the result was that be became a musical Wunderkind, and as such made his first appearance in public at Melbourne while he was only eleven.

His début was such a success that a number of influential and discriminating Melbourne people thought, as did Mrs Grainger herself, that Australia was not the best place for a boy so talented to receive his musical education. The upshot was that she finally took him to Frankfort. And there I first met him, he being thirteen at the time, and I three years older.

Even at that age he had already begun to compose, and the composition he showed me, although of a distinctly Handelian flavour, was not the sort of naive thing one would have expected from so young a lad. Within about two years or less he was writing harmonies and progressions which his professors and fellow students thought shocking or merely ridiculous! The fact was that, having shed the Handelian influence, he had no use for the academic. Not that that prevented him from writing in later years the piece which he rather amusingly called Handel in the Strand . . . though why especially in the Strand is left to the imagination.

One has met many eminent artists in the course of one’s life, all with their distinguishing characteristics, including perhaps their foibles; and yet what made Grainger almost unique was that his own characteristics were the last one would expect to find in a serious composer and creative artist. For paradoxical though it may seem, where his own music was concerned he hated anything which at any rate in those bygone days was termed artistic. He loved and admired all that denoted strength, virility, and what one might almost call a prize-fighter’s or weight-lifter’s robustness. That is why he himself would often be seen staggering along the road under the weight of heavy suitcases. He also admired athletic agility, and would usually jump down a whole flight of stairs instead of negotiating them in he proper manner! This is not to say he had no use for the pleasures of the mind; on the contrary, he had an especial love for Nordic literature, the reading aloud of which he would enjoy with his Norwegian wife, Ella Ström, who gave herself unsparingly to all his work and interests. Nevertheless most of his inspiration was derived from or in some way associated with the kind of happiness which normally goes with a sense of physical fitness – the fitness of the peasant, the yokel, in a word, the folk. And so, because Percy loved the characteristics of the folk, he wanted to express them in his music even when he was not actually arranging folksongs. True, many composers had introduced folk-elements into their music long before Grainger’s day, but not to the same degree or in the same way.

The extent of his prodigious output is not as yet known to the public at large nor even to the cultured music lover. To assess him correctly as a creative artist one needs to have heard some of his big (albeit not lengthy) orchestral works – powerful, original though not ponderous ones, for he had no liking for ponderosity: but the trouble is that these more important works are seldom if ever performed. Nor is one of the reasons far to seek. When a composer writes so many short pieces, even though they may be what Chesterton called ‘tremendous trifles’, he is all too apt to be classified as purely a ‘musical miniaturist’, which at any rate in the case of Grainger, would be a wrong evaluation.

Percy Grainger died in New York on February 20.

Musical Times, April 1961