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‘The Art of Agony’: Aspects of Negativity in Grainger’s Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
Abstract
Throughout his life, Grainger claimed that he sought to put his music at the service of ‘the complicated facts & problems of modern life’, a task he thought required engaging his audience in a ‘pilgrimage to sorrow’. On the whole, however, audiences and critics alike have tended instead to associate Grainger with the works of his that sound anything but downbeat. Nevertheless, Grainger’s self assessment was genuine. He had a painfully ambivalent relationship to many of the emerging features of modernity, a state of mind for which he found a fellow-traveller in Rudyard Kipling. Both men found a means to express elements of this ambivalence via an unusually strong interest in both local and foreign vernacular cultures. Grainger’s original text settings and folksong arrangements alike do not merely celebrate the global reach of the British world or try to preserve the dying folk music traditions of rural England and Scandinavia, but instead are an attempt to express what he considered to be particular fissures in the modern psyche, not least his own. He believed that any lasting accommodation with the emerging features of modern life required us to confront what we had lost along the way.
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- Research Article
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- © Cambridge University Press 2018
Footnotes
I wish to express my thanks to Jennifer Hill and Matthew Lorenzon for their help with the preparation of music examples for this article.
References
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8 See, for instance: Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002); The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914–1961, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), reprinted in 2002; and Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
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36 The two poets were closely associated in Grainger’s own mind because of their shared interest in vernacular expression and their choice of subject matter. He later declared that ‘it is only Kipling’s & Swinburne’s sad poems that have any special value for me’. Percy Grainger, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, 175, 177.
37 Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 59.
38 ‘The Brides Tragedy’ was a text that Oscar Wilde described as having a ‘fierce intensity of passion’. See Oscar Wilde, ‘Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads’, in Criticisms and Review (London: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), p. 455. In addition, Wilde singled out Swinburne’s ‘Reiver’s Neck Verse’, which Grainger also set. Swinburne shared Kipling’s and Grainger’s interest in dialect, as well a particular interest in Northumberland, and Grainger later recalled ‘my father telling me that Percy was linked up with the Earl Percy of Northumberland & that the name meant “Pierce-Eye”, one of the Northumbrian earls having had someone’s eyes struck out’. Percy Grainger, ‘John H. Grainger’ (1956) and ‘[George Percy]’ (1933), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 15, 125.
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46 After hearing the work performed by the Goldman Band at Carnegie Hall in 1948, Grainger declared ‘I loathed every note. I hated its commonplace chords, its oily wellsoundingness, its meaningless tonelines. My tonery has been growing more and more commonplace ever since I was about 20 or 22’. Quoted in Mellers, Percy Grainger, 43.
47 Grainger, foreword to the conductor’s full score of the ‘final scoring’ of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart for wind band, string orchestra and organ (1943), Grainger Musuem, Melbourne, MG7/20-1.
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53 Grainger, letter to Nathaniel Dett, 6 March 1925; quoted in Balough, ‘Grainger as Author’, 92.
54 Typescript of radio broadcast on WEVD (New York), 20 June 1933, Grainger Museum, Melbourne; reprinted in Grainger on Music, 250.
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56 Grainger, introduction to the published score of the Danish Folk-Music Suite (New York: Schirmer, c. 1950).
57 Grainger, introduction to the published score of the Danish Folk-Music Suite
58 See Grainger, Percy, ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society 12 (1908): 147–242 Google Scholar.
59 The tune has been used as the theme music for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) children’s programme The Friendly Giant (1958–1985) and was also the character Frank Spencer’s choice of song in the BBC situation comedy Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em (1973–78).
60 Mellers, Percy Grainger, 5.
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70 Charles W. Hughes, ‘Percy Grainger, Cosmopolitan Composer’, 127. I have argued elsewhere, however, that Grainger’s music might indeed be considered ‘ironic’ in at least one respect. I agree with Mellers that the ‘over-arranged’ quality of his folk-song arrangements produces a ‘distancing effect’ that reminds us of our own distance from the historical and social context from where the folk song came. See ‘Giving Voice to “The Painfulness of Human Life”: Grainger’s Folk Song Settings and Musical Irony’, in Grainger the Modernist, 93–105.
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72 Meyer, Leonard B., Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 39 Google Scholar. Earlier in this book he writes: ‘Only through our encounters with the world, through what we suffer, do we achieve self-realization as particular men and women’ (35).