Bernard Herrmann may be best-recognized as the greatest film composer the United States ever produced, but he was also a passionate Anglophile. I’ve written a lot about Herrmann over the years, from many different perspectives, but in light of my recent visit to the Percy Grainger Home & Studio in White Plains, NY (where Grainger lived for 40 years), I thought I’d share a little bit about the relationship of these two artists today, for the anniversary of Herrmann’s birth.
Herrmann studied composition with Grainger at New York University in the early 1930s. Even in untested youth, his extensive knowledge and passion for English music (and music in general) endeared him to his mentor – they also shared an ear for unusual orchestration – and a genuine affection sprang up between them. In particular, they both adored Frederick Delius, whom Grainger got to know fairly well in the early years of the 20th century. (Grainger, born in Melbourne, lived in England from 1901-14.)
For Herrmann, Grainger was like a magic fountain of information about many of the living composers he so admired. Herrmann himself would later get to know some of them himself during guest conducting engagements with the BBC Symphony, the Halle Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Here’s a little more about Grainger and Herrmann, largely drawn from Steven C. Smith’s Herrmann biography, “A Heart at Fire’s Center.” I’ve read Smith’s book, of course, but for convenience’s sake, I am cutting and pasting this excerpt from an article about Herrmann’s Anglophilia compiled by Ian Lace for the MusicWeb International website. To access the complete article, which would certainly be worth your while, if it’s a topic that interests you, look for the link below.
From Lace’s piece:
Also in 1932 Herrmann attended a bi-weekly course in advanced composition and orchestration led by the brilliant but wildly unorthodox Percy Grainger.
‘Percy Grainger was Australia’s most innovative advocate of music past and present, from his childhood days as “the flaxen-haired phenomenon” of Melbourne to his years of international fame as folk song collector, composer, and recitalist. At the heart of Grainger’s unstable, erratic character was a fixation on truth, contempt for tradition and a passion for the outrageous.
‘Since becoming head of NYU’s music department in 1931, Grainger had offered a syllabus of musical eccentricity and frequent brilliance that left many students puzzled and unimpressed. The class of 1932, however, had one exception. In Grainger, Herrmann saw qualities he himself was cultivating: individualism and dedication to one’s craft and beliefs, however unpopular and unfashionable.
‘The relationship between the fifty-year-old teacher and the twenty-one year old student was one of mutual respect. “Grainger did not place orchestration examples before [his students],” Grainger biographer John Bird wrote, “Instead, he allowed them to choose their pieces and gave them advice when and where needed. Herrmann for instance, decided to orchestrate MacDowell’s Celtic Sonata and felt the need to employ the sonorities of a tenor tuba. The Australian knew little of this unusual piece of plumbing, so together, they familiarised themselves with the instrument and found suitable moments to include it.”
‘Herrmann and Grainger also discovered a shared love of Whitman and the music of Delius. One of Herrmann’s favourite NYU memories peripherally involved the latter: one morning the gaunt, sprightly Grainger leapt onto the lecture stage and announced, “The three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington. Unfortunately Bach is dead, Delius is very ill – but we are happy to have with us today the Duke!” Ellington and his band then mounted the stage and played for the next two hours.
‘If other Grainger lectures were less dramatic, they were no less influential to Herrmann: ancient monophony, folk music, atonality, polyphony, the indigenous rhythms of Africa, Asia, and the South Seas – each was examined by Grainger with alternating lucidity and jumbled mysticism. When the scholastic year ended in mid-August 1933, Grainger considered his work a failure, as few students had been as responsive as Herrmann; but it cemented a friendship between him and his intense young pupil that affected Herrmann for the rest of his life.’
For more about Grainger and Herrmann (and Herrmann’s chum Jerome Moross), there’s also this entry on the Percy Grainger Society website.
https://percygrainger.org/blog/8103609
Happy birthday, Bernard Herrmann!
PHOTOS (clockwise from upper left): Herrmann conducting at CBS radio in the 1930s; Grainger conducting the National High School Orchestra at Interlochen in 1937; Grainger with Duke Ellington at New York University in 1932; Herrmann and Orson Welles at CBS
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