Grainger on Music.(Review)

Grainger on Music, edited by Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross, with Bronwyn Arthur and David Pear; Oxford University Press, 1999, $125.

PERCY GRAINGER was first laid bare, so to speak, in John Bird's 1976 biography. It came as something of a shock. Bird was frank. The larrikin pianist-composer, internationally recognised and constantly newsworthy, turned out to be a sexually deviant racist, or so it seemed.

Not quite so, as the subsequent literature strives to prove. That literature now includes several major works on the subject: The Percy Grainger Companion edited by Lewis Foreman, which appeared in 1981; Teresa Balough's A Musical Genius from Australia, 1982; a second biography, Eileen Dorum's Percy Grainger: The Man behind the Music, 1986; and John Blacking's A Commonsense View of all Music, 1987, which takes Grainger's twelve ABC broadcast lectures on music of 1934 as a point of departure for a journey into ethno-musicological theory. These were fleshed out y two books of letters: a 1901-14 selection, edited by Kay Dreyfus and published as The Farthest North of Humanness in 1985, and another culling from 1914-61 edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, published as The All-Round Man (1994).

Theses, articles, catalogues and recordings of his music abound. There are plays (including my own A Whip Round for Percy Grainger, produced by Playbox in 1982, the year of the centenary of Grainger's birth, and published in 1984), and film scripts, notably Passion, a film produced last year purporting to be based on Grainger's early years.

In other words, Grainger is now an industry. These days we are expected to take him very seriously indeed.

Grainger on Music goes about this task with an enviable sobriety. Gore is the Grainger of old, the "lovable eccentric" of the fly-leaf primer, the sado-masochist obsessed with flagellism of the popular Australian imagination. Now he is seen as "more eccentric to his own age than our own". Gone is the over-devoted son bound to a mother who committed suicide leaping off a tall building when she realised she was entering the last stages of syphilis, contracted from Percy's father after he was born. No such drama intrudes. Real life has retreated to make way for the portrait of the mind. In that Grainger's place is a man of vision, an all-round man, Australian and American, pianist and composer, ethnologist and prolific writer of literally many thousands of letters on a thousand topics. His views on "the environment, food, the body, participatory democracy, and sex" are claimed to have "anticipated by several decades views more typical of the mid-late twentieth century".

What follows, however, is something else again. Included are forty-six of Grainger's essays on music, divided into five chronologically ordered sections. They are drawn, according to the introduction, from Grainger's writings on "composition, folk music, notation, music technology, instrumentation, piano technique, performance, music history, early music, national, political, and racial musical characteristics, and about the work of the composers whom he particularly admired: Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius, and Cyril Scott". The composite voice of the editors, Malcolm Gillies (at the time of publication Professor of Music at the University of Queensland and President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and now Professor of Music at the University of Adelaide) and Bruce Clunies Ross (Professor in the English Institute of the University of Copenhagen), surfaces only in the densely argued introduction. Their associates, Arthur and David Pear, are credited on the title page but are mute, though David Pear's name appears with Gillies' above the opening chronology and solo as the compiler of the appended list of Grainger's writings, both as vital to an understanding of the texts as those lists of names at the beginning of Russian novels.