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Abstract
Percy Grainger's years in London coincided almost exactly with the pre-war era known as Edwardian by extension into the first years of George V's reign. In this article two things are argued: that he was uncommonly, perhaps uniquely responsive to the whole range of forms and genres characteristic of the time and place, especially those of popular music; and that these were the most fecund years of his compositional imagination. In a way, then, he is the paradigmatic Edwardian composer. The case is pursued by taking the chapter divisions of Ronald Pearsall's 1975 book Edwardian Popular Music and, with some omissions, matching a work by Grainger to a musical piece or topic illustrative of each of them: musical comedy, music hall, the shop ballad, highbrows and lowbrows, the musical evening, folk music, the choral tradition, and the coming of ragtime. The essay proceeds by way of generous provision and discussion of musical examples.
Acknowledgements
This article is an edited transcript of the Annual Grainger Lecture for the year 2000, delivered on 12 September in Melba Hall at the University of Melbourne during a three-month visit funded by a Miegunyah Fellowship. I realize now that the subject had been germinating in my mind solely because David Josephson opened up my ears and thought to what was going on in Edwardian England, in terms of cultural struggle, when I first met him in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in the autumn of 1975. If I remember rightly, I had contacted him not about Grainger but Henry Balfour Gardiner. To David I really owe my political education in music (as well as a personal introduction to Paul Henry Lang and Charles Seeger). The published version of what I think he was saying to me can be found in David Josephson, ‘The Case for Percy Grainger, Edwardian Musician, on his Centenary’, in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates in collaboration with Christopher Hatch (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1984), 350–62. I am also grateful to Kay Dreyfus for updating me on recent (and some not so recent) Grainger scholarship.
Notes
1 Quoted in David Josephson, ‘Grainger, (George) Percy (Aldridge)’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 7, 616.
2 Quoted in John Bird, Percy Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73, n. 2.
3 Ronald Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975).
4 ‘Theatres’, The Times (17 October 1905), 8.
5 David Josephson, ‘The Case for Percy Grainger, Edwardian Musician, on his Centenary’, in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates in collaboration with Christopher Hatch (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1984), 352–3. Grainger thought George Grossmith had sung the song with the line ‘Always merry and bright’, but Grossmith was not in The Arcadians; it was Alfred Lester, with the refrain ‘I've got a motter [motto]’, not mother.
6 Ibid., 354.
7 Published score, prefatory material.
8 Ibid.
9 The current Grove's ‘1899–1901’ reflects the chronology of the work's essential composition. It was revised ‘1940–43’.
10 Grainger's very last lecture-recital, on ‘The Influence of Folk-song on Art Music’ and given 29 April 1960 in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, took ‘English Waltz’ as one of its examples. It is intriguing to think what he may have said about it. Grainger Museum, PD1/Grainger Programmes, 1954–1960.
11 C. Hubert H. Parry, Style in Musical Art (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911), 114.
12 Published score, prefatory material.
13 George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1892).
14 HMV C-577, recorded 1 June 1915, reissued on Music from the New York Stage (Pearl, GEMM CDs 9050-61, 1993), vol. 3, CD 2, track 9.
15 Letter to Rose Grainger, 19 August 1912, in The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901–1914, ed. Kay Dreyfus (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985), 46 and n. 32.
16 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
17 Published score, prefatory material.
18 Date from prefatory material, published score.
19 Bird, Percy Grainger, 248.
20 Quoted in ibid., 150, citing Grainger's autobiographical essay ‘Together Life of Helen and Paris’.
21 Conversation with David Josephson, Providence, R.I., 1975.
22 Emily Kilpatrick, ‘Grainger and the “New Iconoclasts”: Forays into Modernist French Music’, in Grainger the Modernist, ed. Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus (London: Ashgate, 2015), 114.
23 Published score, prefatory material.
24 Ibid.
25 Percy Grainger, ‘Beecham's Cheek about “Colonial Song”’ (Ere-I-Forget, 1942), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 188.
26 Wilfrid Mellers rather takes the opposite line by suggesting that Grainger backed off from his Sentimentals as a result of Beecham's criticism. Wilfrid Mellers, Percy Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 44.
27 Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music, 120–1.
28 See Anne-Marie Forbes, ‘Grainger in Edwardian London’, Australasian Music Research 5 (2000), 1–16 for a detailed guide to Grainger's salon appearances and connections.
29 Published score, prefatory material.
30 Billy Bartle, ‘Come all you Garners Gay’, A Century of Song: a Celebration of Traditional Singers since 1898 (EFDSS CD02, 1998), track 3.
31 His phonograph transcriptions, in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, UK, Percy Grainger Manuscript Collection PG/5/26, are available online: http://www.vwml.org/search/, accessed 24 June 2015.
32 For the controversial nature of this, see Josephson, ‘The Case for Percy Grainger’, 355–6; and more recently, Graham Freeman, ‘Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Fong’, in Robinson and Dreyfus (eds), Grainger the Modernist, 33–54.
33 Salute to Percy Grainger (Decca, ELOQUENCE 480 2205, 1968), track 12 on current CD compilation.
34 Gramophone Company 78 rpm recording 8747e, reissued as Unto Brigg Fair: Joseph Taylor and other Traditional Lincolnshire Singers (Leader LP, LEA 4050, 1972), track 1.
35 For further consideration of Grainger's compositional aesthetic as applied to his folk-song settings, see the recent work of Graham Freeman: ‘“That Chief Undercurrent of my Mind”: Percy Grainger and the Aesthetics of English Folk Song’, Folk Music Journal 9 (2009), 581–617; ‘“It Wants all the Creases Ironing out”: the Folk Song Society and the Ideology of the Archive’, Music and Letters 92 (2011), 410–36; and ‘“Into a Cocked-hat”: The Folk Song Arrangements of Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp and Benjamin Britten’, Grainger Studies 2 (2012), 33–53. In ‘That Chief Undercurrent of my Mind’ (418), Freeman cites Grainger quoting H.G. Wells about Grainger's attempt to capture not just a singer's performance, but his or her artistic life. See Percy Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality in Unwritten Music’, Musical Quarterly 1/3 (July 1915), 420. The emotional life imagined in a Grainger setting is perhaps best brought out by Wilfrid Mellers in his critique of ‘Shallow Brown’: Mellers, Percy Grainger, 86–7.
36 Daniel Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006).
37 Published score, prefatory material.
38 See Percy Grainger Manuscript Collection, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, UK, PG/19/3/4, PG/1/56, PG/2/30, and PG/5/104.
39 Tony Rees, ‘Joseph Taylor’, Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and other Good Music, http://mainlynorfolk.info/joseph.taylor/, accessed 24 June 2015.
40 Ravenscroft's traditional song transcriptions and arrangements, originally published in Pammelia (1609), Deuteromelia (1609), Melismata (1611) and A Brief Discourse (1614), are available in modern transcriptions in John Morehen and David Mateer (eds.), Thomas Ravenscroft: Rounds, Canons and Songs from Printed Sources (London: Musica Britannica 93, 2012).
41 Forbes gives a full account of this friendship (Forbes, ‘Grainger in Edwardian London’, 6–8) and transcribes Stanford's letters to Grainger (ibid., 10–16).
42 For an exhaustive account of Grainger's engagement with minstrelsy, the cakewalk, and ragtime, see John Whiteoak, ‘Minstrelsy, Ragtime, “Improvisatory Music” and Percy Grainger's “Unwritten Music”’, in Robinson and Dreyfus (eds.), Grainger the Modernist, 139–62. Whiteoak points out (‘Minstrelsy, Ragtime’, 151) that Grainger may not actually have seen In Dahomey on the stage.
43 Ibid, 152.
44 Note that in Example 7a I have retained Ronald Stevenson's fingerings from his edition of 1987; where virtuosity is concerned, it took one to know one. Eleanor Tan, however, seems to think that they are Grainger's own: Eleanor Tan, ‘Grainger the Performer’, in Facing Percy Grainger, ed. David Pear (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006), 16.
45 Stephen Banfield, ‘Voice, Speech and Accent in England (and Australia?)’, Context 19 (Spring 2000), 5–18.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Banfield
Stephen Banfield is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, UK and honorary principal research fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Australia. He is the author of Sensibility and English Song and detailed monographs on composers Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Kern, and Gerald Finzi, as well as many articles and book chapters on music in Britain and popular musical theatre in the USA. He founded the Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth (CHOMBEC) at Bristol in 2006. Email: [email protected]