Percy Aldridge Grainger - an Adonis who wrote astonishingly beautiful music

An Australian/American composer who wrote music of astonishing beauty, but be careful, he is like a rich dessert, don’t overdo him. Many of his pieces are small jewels and folk songs arranged for orchestra. He is a composer of last resort, one you go to when your music palate is jaded. I am always misfiling, tripping over and misplacing Percy Grainger records as they seem to have a life of their own. The playlist below contains the best of a two CD set of his works and below the jump is a short playlist of his “experimental” music.

 Percy Aldridge Grainger

   


Grainger’s best compositions were recorded by Mercury Records in the late 1950’s and released on their Living Presence and Golden Imports labels. In good used condition they sell for $75.00 and are thought to be one of the best recordings ever made. Mercury did such a smashing job with Grainger and some other composers and works that most big labels have mostly avoided them ever since. Unfortunately Mercury hasn’t licensed these “classic” classical recordings to internet music services like Lala where people can listen to them for small charge or for free. So we must either buy Mercury CD’s or MP3’s from Amazon or ITunes, or wait until someone gives us a new great recording (and this is what we have here). The North Texas Wind Symphony has produced a wonderful new recording, with great “punch” and a solid alternative  to the Grainger-Mercury recording. (At last).

Grainger was a complex man and his Wikipedia entry will fill you in on his eccentric habits. He was a man of many eccentricities, a vegetarian who  loved running and liked to start concerts exhausted. He once ran 65 miles in one day from one performance to the next, so he often burst into the concert hall in running shorts with his tuxedo under his arm. He weighed 145 pounds all his life and slept in the winter with open windows and no blankets. He designed, made and wore his own beaded and colorful clothes and apparently never took a bad photograph. He married a devoted Nordic Princess (in the Hollywood bowl before 10,000 people).

His work with electronics and obscure rhythms anticipated modern music and electronic synthesizers and foreshadowed later modern composers (the few that are actually listenable) like Steve Reich. He called his experimental music "free" or "beatless" music and the playlist  below has three examples. Grainger disliked conventional music notations and categories and made up his own. He pioneered player piano technology which captured both the notes played, the intensity with which they were struck and pedal action so we now have from preserved rolls, modern recordings of his performances including the Grieg Piano Concerto which he was famous for popularizing. Modern orchestras can play along with a player piano as soloist so there are recent recordings of him playing the piano. He was an early adopter of technology that allowed sound recordings in the field and greatly contributed to preserving and popularizing folk songs.



Before record players were popular his sheet music particularly the song Country Gardens set international records for sales and made him rich and famous, but in the last few decades before he died in 1961 his music fell out of fashion and his once wildly popular concerts for which he charged astounding fees were reduced to occasional free public concerts where he could find them. He was an aggressive supporter of black music and performers before it was popular and contributed to black causes. He held and promoted all his life what were then, and now thought to be crackpot ideas on many aspects of music, musicians and life.