This week on “Sweetness and Light,” it’s a program of lighter music from the northern countries.
We’ll give poor overworked Edvard Grieg a break, with Norway represented by Johan Halvorsen and the now lesser-known pianist-composer Agathe Backer Grøndahl, a pupil of Franz Liszt.
From Sweden, we’ll enjoy two versions of Hugo Alfvén’s evergreen “Swedish Rhapsody No. 1” – first, Mantovani’s popular hit from 1953, then with the composer himself conducting, from the very next year, in the first stereo recording ever made in Sweden.
Speaking of popular hits, we’ll also hear Arthur Fiedler’s bestselling recording of “Jalousie,” by Danish composer Jacob Gade (no relation to Niels Wilhelm Gade), from 1935. Fiedler remade it in stereo, but it’s my show, so I’m keeping it hardcore.
Also from Denmark, we’ll have a folk-music suite by Percy Grainger. Ah! But Grainger was not from the north, you say. He was born in Australia. Quite true. However, as an energetic pianist and composer of insatiable curiosity, he traveled seemingly everywhere, with a particular fondness for the Scandinavian countries. (His wife was Swedish.)
But if authentic Danish composers are more your thing, not to worry, we’ll round out the hour with a galop by Hans Christian Lumbye.
All eyes and ears face north this week on “Sweetness and Light.” I hope you’ll join me for this hour of northern “lights,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
Tag: Percy Grainger
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Classical Music’s Wackiest Composers
If you’re in search of loony tunesmiths, you need look no further than July 8. Today marks the birthday anniversaries of two of classical music’s wackiest pianist-composers.
George Antheil, self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton, NJ on this date in 1900. His “Ballet Mécanique,” scored for synchronized player pianos, airplane propellers, siren and electric bells, provoked one of the great classical music riots at its Paris premiere in 1926.
Antheil would practice the piano with such ferocity that he would have to pause, periodically, to thrust his hands into two fish bowls filled with ice water. Before the start of a recital, he would ostentatiously remove a pistol from a silk holster sewn into his jacket and place it atop the piano, to telegraph the message that he would brook no nonsense.
Later, he became a Hollywood film composer, a war correspondent, the author of a column of advice to the lovelorn, an expert in endocrinology, and co-inventor, with actress Hedy Lamarr, of a frequency-hopping system for the guidance of Allied torpedoes that would become the basis for modern spread-spectrum communications technology. Neither Antheil nor Lamarr would ever see a dime for their invention.
In 1944, he scored a notable success with his Symphony No. 4, after it was taken up by Leopold Stokowski and later Sir Eugene Goossens, who recorded it. Antheil was also the author of a bestselling autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music.” He died of a heart attack at the age of 59. A third recorded cycle of his symphonies was recently completed for the Chandos label. Not bad for a boy from Trenton.
Wouldn’t you know, Percy Aldridge Grainger was also born on this date, outside Melbourne, Australia, in 1882. Another one of classical music’s great eccentrics, Grainger was obsessed with physical fitness. Rather than drive or take the train between towns and recitals, it was his preference to jog. He was also known to throw a ball over one side of a house, and then race through to the other side to catch it.
Enamored with Nordic culture, he went out of his way to use only Anglo-Saxon words, avoiding in his letters anything of Norman or Latin origin. This extended to his scores, in which he eschewed Italian musical terms in favor of faux “Anglo-Saxon” equivalents (“middle fiddle” for viola, “tone-wright” for composer, “louden” for crescendo). In 1928, he married Ella Ström, from Sweden, during a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. On the program was his new work, “To a Nordic Princess.”
Lest his cultural quirks be misconstrued in an increasingly black-and-white world, Grainger’s embrace of “blue-eyed English” was as idiosyncratic as everything else in his character. He bristled against the dominance of German music, he served in the U.S. Army against Germany in WWI, he embraced music from a wide diversity of cultures, all the way to Bali, he championed works by African-Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett, and he adored Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.
Grainger was unusually close to his mother and exhibited sadomasochistic tendencies. He donated whips and blood-stained clothes to the Grainger Museum, which he founded in 1932. His request to have his skeleton displayed – posthumously, of course – was denied.
Later, while living in White Plains, NY, he experimented with electronics and “machine music,” in a sense paralleling an obsession of Antheil, who besides “Ballet Mécanique,” wrote such works as “Airplane Sonata” and “Death of Machines.”
Sadly, only the tiniest portion of Grainger’s output is known by the general public, and he is celebrated as the composer of such folksy trifles as “Country Gardens,” “Molly on the Shore,” and “Shepherd’s Hey.” But Grainger’s treatment of harmony and rhythm could be highly original. He was a brilliant musician, and wholly unconventional in more ways than one.
Grainger died in White Plains in 1961 at the age of 78. His remains, including his skeleton, rest in Adelaide.
Happy birthday, you wacky, wacky boys.
Grainger, “Scotch Strathspey and Reel”
Grainger orchestration of Debussy’s “Pagodes”
His imaginary ballet, “The Warriors”
Grainger plays “Molly on the Shore”
R. Nathaniel Dett’s “Juba”
Antheil, “Ballet Mécanique” – presumably in its revision, because of the use of live pianists – with the annoying Fernand Léger film
Antheil, “Jazz Symphony”
Antheil, Symphony No. 4 “1942”
Antheil, “Specter of the Rose” (from the film score, 1946)
Antheil speaks!
PHOTOS: Antheil packing heat (top), and the multifaceted Grainger
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Herrmann’s Mentor: Percy Grainger
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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Grainger Plays Grieg Rare Footage Surfaces
This rare footage turned up online within the past week or so of Percy Grainger playing music by his friend, Edvard Grieg. Since it’s Father’s Day and I’ve got to be out the door to meet my stepdad for brunch, and since it also happens to be Grieg’s birthday, I thought it would be an easy post, and a fascinating one, if you should choose to follow the link.
If you are ever in the vicinity of White Plains, NY, I highly recommend a visit to the Percy Grainger Home & Studio, the house in which Grainger lived for 40 years. Be sure to contact them in advance, as the house is open only on certain days and by appointment.
I went into great detail about my own highly enjoyable visit on the last of April. If you missed it, hopefully this link will take you to the May 1 post, in which I share my impressions.
Happy birthday, Edvard Grieg!
IMAGES: (left) detail from screenshot of Grainger playing Grieg’s “To Spring,” from the Lyric Pieces, Op. 43; photo of Grieg inscribed to his friend, one of the many treasures on display at the Percy Grainger house
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Percy Grainger’s Home: A Musical May Day
May 1st. Nothing says May Day like a good Morris dance!
It’s all-too-appropriate, then, to report on my day trip yesterday to the Percy Grainger Home & Studio in White Plains, New York.
Grainger (1882-1961) is best-known for his buoyant evocations of Morris dance melodies in works such as “Country Gardens,” “Shepherds Hey,” and “Mock Morris” – which became ubiquitous in arrangements for every conceivable ensemble and combination of instruments – I might add, often to Grainger’s chagrin, although the royalties brought him a steady, comfortable income.
He was also a world-renowned pianist, who played with individuality and panache. He toured with Australian soprano Nellie Melba and played for three American presidents. He packed houses and sold records. His wild, Bohemian hair and striking good looks only served to enhance audience adulation. He may have been born in Melbourne, but he had the energy of a Tasmanian devil à la Looney Tunes.
Grainger was ceaselessly active. He preferred to walk or run between engagements, rather than take a car (although he loved trains). At the start of a recital, the doors would open at the back of the auditorium and he’d run down the aisle to leap onto the stage. One of the best-known Grainger anecdotes is about how he’d throw a ball into the air, over the top of Frederick Delius’ house, run through the open front door, pass out a door at the back, and catch the ball in the yard before it landed.
I suspect he was also easily bored. He may have been a celebrated pianist and an accomplished composer, but he couldn’t practice or sit still for very long. He used to have his wife read to him, often from the Norse sagas, to distract him from the drudgery of working at the keyboard.
Downtown White Plains might not be much to look at these days (the hospital seems to dominate everything, recently even swallowing two properties adjacent the Grainger house), but stepping inside the Grainger home is like walking back in time. The rooms are gratifyingly framed with the rich wood characteristic of the period. There are bronze doorknobs on the closets, “centennial bulbs” in the ceiling fixtures, and stained glass in a leaded landing window. So much of it, in fact, put me in mind of my grandparents’ house, where I was lucky enough to live for five years as a child.
Grainger’s house still brims with evidence of his questing intellect and irrepressible physicality. Across the entrance to the parlor hangs a substantial bamboo pole, held in place by interlaced ropes, on which he did chin-ups. In the basement are the wheel barrows into which he used to toss his luggage or a preferred piano bench before a sprint to the train.
At a certain period of his life, he pushed all the furniture aside to make room for audacious “free music” machines, which he designed to liberate music from the strictures of traditional notation and performance. I don’t pretend to understand the finer points – I’m sure you can read more about them elsewhere – but these seem to me to operate on a similar principle to piano rolls, only homemade, oversized piano rolls, threaded through jerry-rigged contraptions fashioned out of whatever happened to be available and at hand, with the paper running around rolling pins, recorders, and pennywhistles. Cut contours in the paper determine the pitch, volume, and timbre of several oscillators. One machine on display has a scrap of paper taped around the bottom of one of its legs to kept the device stable in the manner of a shim slid under a rocking table. The sounds it produces are rather like those of a theremin. It’s as if the Swiss Family Robinson took a crack at inventing a synthesizer.
Grainger’s handwritten labels are all over everything. Every box and canister bear his signage. For as lively as his mind seems to have been, and for as full as the house is of souvenirs of a vigorous life, he was evidently very organized and, after his fashion, systematic. Among the items inside his gramophone is a piece of a card tailored to fit the curve of a record label, with numbered lines drawn onto it to be used as a guide to specific passages so that he could tell at a glance where to drop the needle.
More than once, I couldn’t help but think that Grainger would have been right at home with the eccentric cast of characters in the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy (and later, Frank Capra film) “You Can’t Take It with You.” On a tangentially-related note, my guide was impressed when my face brightened at the mention of actor Ernest Thesiger, a Grainger acquaintance from England. Thesiger played Dr. Pretorius in “The Bride of Frankenstein.” Come to think of it, his hair was rather like Percy’s in that movie!
It’s interesting that Grainger spent most of his life in the U.S. (he even served in the U.S. Army during World War I), yet he is best-remembered for his works infused with English folk music. He was a pioneer of the ethnomusicological impulse to traverse the English countryside to document authentic folksong before it was plowed under by industrialization. One of the ways he stood out from Vaughan Williams and Holst was that, rather than jot down the songs longhand onto music paper, he rode around with an Edison machine on his bicycle, the better to capture the personalities of the rustic singers. These he worked into some of his best-known compositions.
Grainger came to the United States with his mother, Rose, on whom he doted, in 1917. They settled in White Plains, where Percy lived until his death in 1961. Rumors that they were unnaturally close pushed Rose over the edge, almost literally. She had long been suffering from a chronic illness when she leaped from the 18th floor of New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1922.
Percy had his quirks, kinks, and contradictions, to be sure. The Grainger Museum in Melbourne has an extensive collection of his homemade whips and bloody shirts. I didn’t ask about them in White Plains. I seem to recall, he also offered to donate his skeleton, but Melbourne declined.
He held some fairly outrageous racial views, with a pronounced belief in the superiority of all things Nordic. By coincidence, his wife, the Swedish-born artist and poet Ella Viola Strom, whom he married at the Hollywood Bowl before a crowd of 20,000 (during a concert that included his work “To a Nordic Princess,” written specifically for the occasion and dedicated to her) was born on this date in 1889. To the extent possible, he cleansed his writings and speech of all Romance influences in favor of Anglo-Saxon neologisms (for instance, using made-up words like “louden” for “crescendo”). Yet he was also an enthusiastic champion of Black music and music of the South Seas. His ballet “The Warriors” is an idealized celebration of warring tribes of all cultures. “…[T]he ghosts of male and female warrior types of all times and places are spirited together for an orgy of warlike dances, processions, and merry-makings, broken or accompanied by amorous interludes; their frolics tinged with just that faint suspicion of wistfulness all holiday gladness wears.” So, as with so many aspects of his personality, go figure. Like Whitman, Grainger contained multitudes.
Although he did not live in Australia since he left for school at the Hoch Conservatory at the age of 13, he returned to visit a number of times. His love for his homeland is evident from a boomerang collection displayed on a window sill and a stuffed kookaburra.
At the conservatory, he became the youngest member of the “Frankfurt Gang,” which included Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, and Norman O’Neill. One of the rooms at the Grainger Home is devoted to the lifelong influence of his schoolmates, including photos and the “Cyril Scott piano,” which Scott used to play on visits. In the same room is an inscribed photo of Edvard Grieg, whom Grainger got to know intimately and became one of his most renowned interpreters. Another composer whose influence and friendship is evident is Frederick Delius, whose significance is honored through photos and portraits. This is to say nothing of the Grainger Steinway, one of many brought into the house over the years, and a harmonium.
Of course, photos and portraits of Grainger himself are all over the place, including one painted by Ella of the subject in his “towel clothes,” festive-looking, faux traditional dress, designed by Grainger to be worn by him and his wife, with a sample of such towels displayed on a rack beneath. (The clothes themselves are in Melbourne.) Ella also created a sizeable visual counterpart to “The Warriors,” with scantily-clad, pleasingly-contoured men and women of all races, about as prepared for battle as the half-naked characters on the cover of a Conan paperback. Ella is not the only artist represented. Additional portraits and busts of Grainger abound.
The house is filled with treasures, and you really get to walk around the place. The thorough tour takes you into bedrooms and even down into the basement, which is like any other basement, except it was Percy Grainger’s basement, and so it is outfitted with a dark room and walk-in fireproof vaults, with scores, programs, and paintings stored all over the place. It really is like walking back in time into Percy Grainger’s house. Stunningly, it appears to be run on the good faith that visitors will have the good sense not to touch anything.
I can’t promise everyone will get as much out of a visit to the Percy Grainger Home and Studio as I did, but I personally found it fascinating and richly rewarding. There may not be much else in downtown White Plains, but perhaps you can piggyback a trip onto a tour of Washington Irving’s estate, Sunnyside, in nearby Tarrytown. Copland House in Mount Kisco is not all that far away, nor is Samuel Barber’s Capricorn, the house he shared with Gian Carlo Menotti (although, from what I understand, the latter is currently a private residence, so I’m not sure what is visible of the property from public land).
I hasten to add, a lot of these places are only open during very specific hours or by appointment. The Grainger House and Studio is available for touring on Wednesdays at noon and 1:00 and every third Sunday. I think I’ve got that right. Better check the website. In any case, definitely call or email ahead to set up an appointment. I was there for 70 or 75 minutes (my version of the hour tour) and feel like I took it all in. But of course I came prepared. The Percy Grainger Society’s website about the house (linked below) will keep you occupied for hours. The more you look, the more you’ll find. It really is quite impressive.
The Percy Grainger home was built in 1893 and was declared an historic landmark in 1993. You can’t really tell from the photographs, but as with any house of that vintage, Grainger’s can use some maintenance and restoration TLC. It’s evident the exterior, in particular, is in need of a good paint job. I am sure the Percy Grainger Society would be very grateful for any donations!
Warm thanks to Anne Ocone, the museum coordinator, who was my guide.
“Country Gardens”
Grainger plays “Molly on the Shore”
West Point Band plays “Lincolnshire Posy”
“The Warriors”
Documentary on “free music” machines
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