Brief biography of Australian-born American Percy Aldridge Grainger, prolific composer, music educator, virtuoso pianist, innovator, and facilitator for languages.
Percy Grainger was a pianist, music educator, composer, and a designer & facilitator of languages. He pioneered in electronic music and was known for his “free music” works. A virtuoso pianist, he was an interpreter of Edvard Grieg's music. His works include: The Warriors, "Irish Tune from County Derry" and "Molly on the Shore."
As a musician with an international reputation, Australia considers him its greatest composer; the U.S., where he lived most of his life, regards him as a music educator, composer and arranger of band music; and England considers him important in the preservation and arrangement of English folk songs. His creative life - compositions, recordings, archive and eclectic collection of artifacts - forms the Grainger Collection at the University of Melbourne - housed in the Grainger Museum.
Grainger's Early Life
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was born in Melbourne, Australia. He received his first piano lessons from his mother. In later years he left for Europe to study at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt where he became close friends with Busoni, and then Grieg and Delius.
The American Music Teacher and Conductor
He settled in London in 1901 and started his career as a concert pianist, and then left for the USA, becoming an American citizen in 1918, aged 36, although he's probably considered the greatest Australian composer. He taught in Chicago and New York. In his mid-40s, he married Swedish painter and poet Ella Strom during a Hollywood Bowl concert and on that occasion, he conducted his To a Nordic Princess, which he dedicated to his wife.
Grainger Museum of Australian Music in Melbourne
Despite busy schedules in the U.S., he still visited Australia several times, helping the establishment of the Grainger Museum of Australian Music in Melbourne which he founded in 1935. Some of his manuscripts and other memorabilia are preserved there.
The Concert Pianist and Experimental Composer
Grainger was known to be eccentric in private life and as a performer. During the next decade he appeared widely as a concert pianist.
He was an experimental composer and pianist remembered for piano transcriptions, for his piano arrangements of folk songs such as Irish Tune from County Derry inspired by Londonderry Air (which dates back to 1855), Molly on the Shore (1921), and instrumental pieces drawing on folk idioms, including Country Gardens, Green Bushes, Molly on the Shore, and Shepherds' Hey.
Grainger died in White Plains, New York, aged 79. He also took part in the folksong movement, collecting and arranging numerous songs, by using the gramophone to record harmonic variations. He shared his friend Ferruccio Busoni’s vision of this “free music”, devising a synthesizer and composing machine far ahead of its time.
Recommended Link:
Image Source:
- Grainger Photograph / Ruskin Studios, Melbourne, 1926.
Text Sources:
The Encyclopedia of Music, by Max Wade-Matthews & Wendy Thompson, Hermes House (2002)
The Grove concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie (1994)
The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham (2002)
