Percy Grainger, composer of beloved, albeit quirky arrangements of familiar English folk songs and Morris dance tunes, was also a pioneer of “free music.” Here’s a fascinating look at the experimental machines he worked on at his home in White Plains, NY. The sounds they generate anticipated the electronic sound synthesizer.

“In 1938, Grainger wrote that he first heard ‘free music’ in his head when, as a boy in Melbourne [Australia], he watched the sea at Brighton and Albert Park. He could never see why, in a scientific age, music shouldn’t be as free and as infinitely variable as the waves.”

Percy Grainger’s Synthesizers

The first programmable electronic sound synthesizer, the RCA Mark II (nicknamed Victor), an instrument of heroic dimensions, was developed by American acoustical engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar in 1955, at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) laboratories in Princeton, NJ. It was installed at the legendary Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center at Columbia University in 1957. Controlled by punch cards and employing hundreds of vacuum tubes, the interconnected components filled an entire room.

Gain a greater appreciation for the amount of sweat that went into synthesized composition prior to the invention of the Moog!

PHOTO: Grainger (right) with Burnett Cross, standing before one of his “free music” machines, in 1951