London Symphony Orchestra

He contained multitudes, many of them (self-) contradictory but all feeding into the musical encyclopaedia that went by the name of George Percy Grainger. A contemporary standpoint that looks with anger rather than amused bewilderment on his obsession with ‘blue-eyed English’, and the attendant quest for a dictionary purged of words derived from Latin and Greek, might choose to ignore the fact, for instance, that a progressive New York programme he curated in 1925 included handing over the baton to black Canadian composer Nathaniel Dett for a performance of his Negro Folk Song Derivatives alongside works by Hindemith, Schreker and ethnomusicologist-composer Natalie Davis (Memories of New Mexico).

The music featured tonight touches on Grainger’s native Australia, Scotland, Norway, America, Nepal, France and Germany. The melodies are both those of others’ – from folk to Bach – and Grainger’s own, often as catchy as the ones he dressed up in unlikely clothing.

A lively starting-point, syncopations and all, is the wind band version of The Lads of Wamphray. The title is Walter Scott’s, a piece of unfinished juvenilia from the 1802 collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border about the ‘noted feud’ between the Johnstone and Maxwell families. Grainger’s original setting was for double men’s chorus and orchestra; there has been a lively attempt at a performing version by reconstructing it with full choir and soloists by Chalon L Ragsdale. The March was played for the first time in 1905 by the Band of the Coldstream Guards, and fellow composer Edvard Grieg enthused over it when Grainger played it through to him at his home in Troldhaugen, not long before Grieg's death in 1907. Nearly three decades later, Grainger made another version of it for the annual Grand Concert and Convention of the American Band Masters’ Association in Milwaukee, writing out all the band parts himself.

Why the Scottish subject, though? Possibly because of a three-day walking trip the 18-year-old Grainger took in West Argyllshire on a holiday from the rigours of Frankfurt’s Hoch Conservatorium (Grainger was a precociously brilliant pianist who went on to become one of the world’s best – his Melbourne recital two days before his 13th birthday funded the travel and the study). Certainly he described the discovery of Scottish landscape, people and bagpipes as the most important single experience of his life – though this may have been typical hyperbole – and raised his impressions to the highest form of musical art in his two Hill Songs (where he was careful to bring in the influence of Himalayan ‘hill-men’ too). The format of The Lads of Wamphray – March reflects the changing moods of the ballad and is typical for Grainger, a mix of rondo form with contrasting episodes and variations, ever more harmonically adventurous, on the main theme.

The next two miniatures are among the treasury of what Grainger tended to call 'free rambles' on the inspirations of others. The eclectic choices included two piano fantasias (one on Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier, the other on Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’) and a very wide range in what he called Chosen Gems for Winds, from the anonymous ‘Angelus ad Virginem' to Liszt, Fauré and Eugene Goossens. The original Ballade No 1 by Guillaume de Machaut (ca 1300–77) has a quirkiness which must have been attractive to Grainger: each of the three voices has a different text to deliver – from the male perspective in voices one and three, from the female in voice two. So the full title is a long one, no doubt to Grainger’s taste: ‘Sans cuer m'en vois, dolens et esplourez / Amis, dolens, maz et desconfortez / Dame, par vous me sens reconfortez’. What’s left are the canonic and harmonic originality of the setting; there’s little ramble-interference here.

Likewise with Blithe Bells, despite the liberality indicated in its heading: ‘Free ramble on J S Bach’s aria ‘Sheep May Graze in Safety When a Goodly Shepherd Watches Over Them’ from the Secular Cantata ‘Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd’’ . The scoring, like that of so many of Grainger's works, is described as ‘elastic’, in that much of it is optional; but an immovable fixture is the pair of flutes at the beginning. It is not to be confused with Bell Piece, a much later, and exquisite, arrangement of Dowland’s ‘Now, O now I needs must part’.

At the core of the programme are two of Grainger’s most original works. The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart is his longest movement for wind and brass. Ideas for it took their first shape in 1918, at the end of World War One, during part of which, as John Bird puts it in his Grainger biography, ‘the world-famous piano virtuoso was … a Bandsman 2nd Class in the 15th Band, Coast Artillery Corps’ (a citizen of New York since 1915, he was discharged from the US army in 1919). The title ill expresses the motivation behind the piece, which Grainger explains better, if at length, in writing about it:

‘[In wartime,] men who hate killing each other are forced to become soldiers. And other men, though not unwilling to be soldiers, are horrified to find themselves called upon to fight in the ranks of their enemies. The sight of young recruits doing bayonet practice, in the First World War, gave the first impulse to this composition, which, however, is not in any sense programme music and does not not portray the drama of actual events. It is merely the unfolding of musical feelings that were started by thoughts of the eternal agony of the Individual Soul [originally the early Christian] in conflict with The-Powers-That-Be [originally Imperial Rome].’

Ambiguity drives the work’s unusual structure. It begins with weird, rootless chromatics from a ‘pipe or electric organ’; Grainger asks for a vibrato that should be ‘theatrical’ and ‘non-churchy’. Ensembles then lurch between the themes of ‘The Lonely Man’ and ‘The Power of Rome’, though the contrasts are not as extreme as the labels might suggest – the second theme is vintage Grainger, verging on the banal but too free and rhythmically varied to be so. Rhapsodic interchanges are accompanied by the typical English-language injunctions Grainger preferred (though not exclusively) to Italian musical terminology (‘slow off’ is a favourite substitute for ‘rallentando’). Later the music becomes almost Strauss-ian, ‘very feelingly’, before the organ returns to lead to an open ending. Grainger made the definitive version of the work in a commission from the League of Composers for composer and conductor Edwin Franko Goldman’s 70th birthday.

The Immovable Do, dedicated ‘to my merry wife Ella’, is much simpler and does what it says on the tin (taking ‘Do’ to be the tonic in the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ sequence). Sitting at his harmonium in 1933, Grainger found the mechanics of its high C broken, causing it to come through whatever he played (hence the alternative title, ‘The Ciphering C’). The rolling riffs around it, though, are more or less settled in the key of F; accents and dynamics must be carefully observed. The composer was typically ‘elastic’ in his thoughts about scoring – in his preface, he tells us:

‘I conceived the number for any or all of the following mediums, singly or combined: for organ (or reed organ), for mixed chorus, for wind band or wind groups, for full or small orchestra, for string orchestra or eight single strings. It seemed natural for me to plan it simultaneously for the different mediums, seeing that such music hinges upon intervallic appeal rather than upon effects of tone colour.’

It is the wind band version we hear in this concert.

Grainger’s original approach to folk music informs the next seven miniatures. Country Gardens has often been attributed to him, though its tune is one given to him by the pioneer of song-collecting Cecil Sharp, one of his Morris Dance Tunes – a Handkerchief Dance. The piano version came to plague Grainger, though the royalties can’t have been too annoying (Sharp had been offered half, and must have regretted turning Grainger down). He was clearly tickled by the challenge to make a new version of the piece by Leopold Stokowski (with whom as soloist he performed Grieg's Piano Concerto, among other works). Requesting the chance to record seven of Grainger’s most popular numbers in January 1947, Stokowski asked ‘would you be willing to orchestrate them yourself? … My thought was that each time a theme is repeated, fresh instruments would play’. This version of Country Gardens enters wryly mid-tune, as it were; Grainger included a discreet role for himself as pianist, and appears on the recordings, though he only got an orchestral fee.

Country gardens are evoked in the title of Grainger’s most original folksong collection, Lincolnshire Posy; he was perhaps recalling the garden he cultivated of weeds as a youth in Melbourne. He dedicated this ‘bunch of wildflowers’ to ‘the singers who sang so sweetly to me’ around Lincolnshire in 1905 to 1906, and in a long introductory note to the score which amounts to an essay, he lavished attention on the ‘acquaintances pictured within’ (for each number, he wrote, is a kind of portrait). As character studies or simple folksong variations, these are surprisingly complex pieces, several of them beyond the abilities of the players at that same 1937 American Band Convention for which he tailored The Lads of Wamphray; they were, Grainger wryly noted, ‘keener on their beer than on their music’.

There are six movements to Lincolnshire Posy. ‘Lisbon’ (originally ‘Dublin Bay’) was sung for him by Mr Deane of the workhouse in Brigg, who broke down at first but was encouraged to continue when Grainger returned with recordings of other versions. Starting brightly in triads, it neatly counterpoints in one of the variations another Grainger work, The Duke of Marlborough’s Fanfare. ‘Horkstow Grange’, originally delivered by Mr George Gouldsthorpe of Goxhill, starts nobly with horn tones but becomes increasingly more dissonant and elegiac, reflecting the ballad which was originally subtitled ‘The Miser and his Man – a local Tragedy’. Most original in terms of sonorities is ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, perhaps to reflect the singular character of Joseph Taylor, who was celebrated for the rendition of another Grainger work, Brigg Fair, which inspired not only Grainger but also composers George Butterworth and Frederick Delius. ‘The Brisk Young Sailor’ is more straightforward until its surprise conclusion; one Mrs Thompson originally sang to Grainger in Barrow-on-Humber.

Rhythmically the most complex, harking back to the constant metre-changes of the Hill Songs – composed some years before Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Grainger claimed not to have heard live until a Bernstein concert in 1958 – is ‘Lord Melbourne’; it starts in free time (ie no bar lines) and then reverts to changing bar-signatures. Grainger was grateful for venturing into a Brigg pub, ‘a smelly, evil place’ to hear Mr George Wray sing it on 28 July 1906. A regular lilting waltz for buoyant conclusion is ‘The Lost Lady Found’. Though he recorded Mr Fred Atkinson of Redbourne singing it in 1905. Grainger preferred to dedicate it to Lucy E Broadwood. The editor at one point of the Folk Song Society Journal, which published a selection of Grainger’s 77-strong folksong collection, Ms Broadwood remembered her Lincolnshire nurse singing it to her.

The last tune of the concert, ‘The Gum-Suckers’ March is all Grainger’s own invention. He made an elaborate arrangement of it for his Suite In a Nutshell, the orchestral equal of Lincolnshire Posy, before making it the only candidate from the Suite for wind band arrangement in 1942. Again Grainger gives the best explanation:

‘Gum-sucker’ is an Australian nickname for Australians born in Victoria (the home state of the composer). The eucalyptus trees that about in Victoria are called ‘gums’, and the young shoots at the bottom of the trunk are called ‘suckers’, so ‘gum-sucker’ came to mean a young native son of Victoria. In my march I have made use of my Australian Up-Country Song melody, written to typify Australia.'

Most tender in its piano-miniature version, the anthemic melody was sung at the ceremony for Grainger’s wedding to Ella on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. No doubt about it, though, the main, typically syncopated march melody is the one that should earworm you after the concert is over.

_{Notes by David Nice}

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Programme Contributors

David Nice writes, lectures and broadcasts on music, notably for BBC Radio 3 and BBC Music Magazine. His books include studies of Strauss, Elgar, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and a Prokofiev biography, From Russia to the West 1891–1935.