Grainger On Music

Cyril Scott once described Percy Grainger as a 'lovable eccentric'. The Australian-American pianist, composer, ethnologist, and aspiring 'all-round man' was, however, more eccentric to his own age than to ours. His views on the environment, food, the body, participatory democracy, and sex all anticipated by several decades views more typical of the mid-late twentieth century.

Prolific as a composer, performer, and recording artist, Grainger was an indefatigable writer. This selection of forty-six essays about the production, promotion, and propagation of music is drawn from his over 150 public writings. Written between the turn of the century and the early 1950s, these essays reveal Grainger's youthful compositional plans, his ideas about piano technique, and his enduring high regard for the music of Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius, and 'Frankfurt Group' colleagues Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, and Henry Balfour Gardiner.

Grainger on Music also pursues his evolving thoughts about Nordic music, 'Free Music', instrumental usage, and his occasional suggestions for musical development in Australia and the United States. Review: driving, fresh imagination ... this book shows ... how he kept faith with the ideals of his boyhood ...

There are bracing thoughts here, too, on the chorus as the centre of musical life, on the revival of old music and on music as democratic art. Paul Griffiths, BBC Music Magazine, March 2000