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aking Grainger's views as his starting point and heading each chapter with a quotation from Grainger's writings, John Blacking restates and reflects upon observations and attitudes relevant to contemporary problems of ethnomusicology and music education.Professor Blacking discusses these issues in the light of his own research, musical experience and convictions. 'For those who wish to question current thought and practice in Western musical life and education, Blacking's testimony will be essential reading.' -- Music Teacher 'The first chapter ... evaluates Grainger's contribution to ethnomusicology ... through the succeeding six chapters Blacking discusses many philosophical and political points touching on the nature of art and art objects, the relationship of individual to universal musical experience, the task of ethnomusicology, the origins of musical ideas, the definition of music in terms of human behaviour rather than just an artifact of organised sound and, significantly, the extension of music education to cover world music ... [Blacking] comes close to the heart of all debate on the nature of musical art: from where do musical ideas come?' -- The Musical Times ... Read more

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----------------------------------------------------------- This extensively revised edition of John Bird's acclaimed biography of Percy Grainger gives the first circumstantial account of the life and works of one of the strangest figures in twentieth-century music. Behind Grainger's highly original compositional achievements, folksong collecting, and glittering career as a virtuoso concert pianist lay a tragic and chaotic personal life, long domination by his mother, unorthodox sexual predilections, an eccentric athleticism, a demonic spiritual drive, and a wildly inconsistent personal philosophy with Anglo-Saxon obsessions such as his famous "Blue-Eyed English". A list of published compositions, a current discography of performances by Grainger, and a selection of his seminal writings complete what has already proved to be a standard work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Excellent
I found this biography of Percy Grainger to be very informative and interesting to read.It accurately describes the musician's life and should be read by anyone interested in the man or his works.

A valuable resource
As with many composers, to understand the man is essential to understanding how to interpret his music.My reserach on "Lincolnshire Posy" would have been incomplete without this book.There is a lot of persistence on the author's part to present an accurate and indepth portrayal of one of the more eccentric figures in music.A shame that all biographies are not constructed with such care.

The revised edition of THE Grainger biography by John Bird.
In this biography, John Bird masterly tells us about the live, thoughts and 'adventures' of one of the strangest music makers of all times, composer and pianist Percy Aldridge Grainger. A very complete book, whichis special, for, as the author stresses in his preface, making anunderstandable view of the complicated life of Grainger, is not a simpletask. Besides all important facts about 'Perks', the book contains lots ofinteresting backgroud information, letting us know under whichcircumstances and in what time the composer lived. Also an updateddiscography and a list of all places where manuscripts etc are to be foundare included. The current edition is fully revised, the first print wasreleased in the mid seventies. In one word: brilliant!!! ... Read more

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Shortly before his death, Percy Grainger (1882-1961) lodged over twenty unpublished sketches in his Australian Museum. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger draws exclusively from these sketches, revealing for the first time an illuminating portrait of the composer's life. With such titles as "The Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga," "Thunks," "Ere-I-Forget," "The Love-Life of Helen and Paris," and "Anecdotes," these manuscripts were intended as precursors to Grainger's autobiography, My Wretched Tone-Life, which he only commenced in his final years. Expertly shaping these sketches, the editors have created a "self-portrait" along the lines that Grainger himself had intended.

The volume first introduces Grainger's forebears, parents, friends, wife, and himself before moving on to his views on composition, performance, and the musical world. In these sketches, Grainger addresses such topics as racial and national identity, the meaning of work, physical culture, language reform, sexual practice, and artistic patronage. Grainger also probes the nature of musical genius, discussing a broad range of composers including Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Beecham, Frederick Delius, Edvard Grieg, Charles Stanford, Cyril Scott, Fritz Kreisler, Donald Tovey, Ferruccio Busoni, and Balfour Gardiner. Among the works of his own that Grainger most featured are his The Warriors --Music for an Imaginary Ballet, Colonial Song, the Lincolnshire Posy series of band pieces, his greatest "hit" Country Gardens, and his many settings of English folk-music.

Written in Grainger's own self-created "Nordic English" as well as translated from Danish, the language of his most intimate confessions, Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger sheds light on some of the most revealing details of the composer's life. The sketches trace Grainger's changing self-perception, from the romantically tinged, even lustful, views of his forties and fifties, through a period of wistfulness in his sixties, to the bitterness and self-loathing of his old age. The volume also includes several of Grainger's own drawings as well as both public and private photographs. A fascinating and revealing collection of vignettes, this extraordinary book will appeal to instructors, students, and enthusiasts in musicology, music history, cultural studies, and Australian, British, and American history. ... Read more

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This study examines the orchestrational techniques in four of Percy Grainger's wind band compositions: "Colonial Song", "Irish Tune From County Derry", "Molly on the Shore", and five movements from "Lincolnshire Posy": "Lisbon", "Horkstow Grange", "The Brisk Young Sailor", and "The Lost Lady Found". These are works which are representative of Grainger's techniques. This information has been used to newly orchestrate three of Grainger's pieces for band: "The Cutting of the Hay", "Lord Maxwell's Goodnight" and "British Waterside" (or "The Jolly Sailor"). This study shows specifically why Grainger's wind band music is so readily identifiable, asserting that his sound is a function of recurring orchestrational techniques rather than other compositional elements such as melody or harmony. ... Read more

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A man of extraordinary charisma, Percy Grainger was at once a legendary virtuoso pianist, a composer of highly original music, an arranger, and a "disher up" of folk music who pierced to the music's heart, and figure of some historical significance in relation to ethnomusicology and music education.A study of the music of this paradoxical figure, this book looks at the musical influence on his compositions of folk-song and of Grieg, and of those apparent polar opposites, Delius and Bach.It examines some of his more significant pieces in detail; considers his work in recreating traditional material and the music of others; sees him as a champion and transcriber of what is now known as Early Music; and looks at his sometimes alarmingly eccentric notions as to music's nature and purpose.Overriding barriers between art, folk, and pop music, Grainger is difficult to categorize, and is, in the history of music, unique. ... Read more

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Percy Grainger (1882-1961) was a pianist, composer, ethnographer, essayist, and much more. The Australian-American musician aspired to the condition of a polymath, with strong interests in language, culture, ecology and technology. In an age of increasing specialisation Grainger held to a breathless all-roundedness.This book looks at the scrabbling diversity of Grainger's life through the eyes of others. Family and friends, pupils, musical associates and chance acquaintances recall their experiences of Percy Grainger from his boyhood in colonial Australia, through his conservatorium years in Germany, on to his early professional years in London, and further to the zenith of his career and then years of decline in the United States. In the final chapter, Grainger himself explains the driving passions of his life. Fifty illustrations, including architectural drawings, scores and machine plans, vividly depict the enthusiasms described in over ninety recollections of Grainger.A composer of over four hundred compositions and virtuoso performer in some three thousand concerts, Grainger left a large legacy. He was an important influence upon the folk-song movement in Britain, and, through such masterworks as Lincolnshire Posy, he was enduringly popular with the band movement in America. On a personal level, his development of the language of 'blue-eyed English' was stillborn, and his muscular style of pianism found few adherents among the next generation of performers. His frankly expressed views on sexual licence were also many decades ahead of their time. Today, however, Grainger the musician is again in the ascendant. His more innovative works are gaining a belated hearing, while his standards, such as Country Gardens, remain firm favorites. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear are co-editors of Grainger on Music and 'The All-Round Man': Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961 ... Read more

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Chapters: English Folk-Song Collectors, Sabine Baring-Gould, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp, A. L. Lloyd, Peter Warlock, Lucy Broadwood, Ernest John Moeran, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Percy, George Butterworth, David Lewiston, William B. Sandys, Henry Balfour Gardiner, John Bagford, Frank Kidson, William Chappell, Kate Lee, Steve Roud, James William Elliott. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 108. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Ralph Vaughan Williams OM (pronounced ) (12 October 1872 26 August 1958) was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also a collector of English folk music and song which influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, containing many folk song arrangements set as hymn tunes, in addition to several original compositions. Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where his father, the Revd Arthur Vaughan Williams (the surname Vaughan Williams is an unhyphenated double-barrelled name), was vicar. Following his father's death in 1875 he was taken by his mother, Margaret Susan née Wedgwood (18431937), the great-granddaughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, to live with her family at Leith Hill Place, a Wedgwood family home in the North Downs. He was also related to the Darwins, Charles Darwin being a great-uncle. Though born into the privileged intellectual upper middle class, Vaughan Williams never took it for granted and worked all his life for the democratic and egalitarian ideals in which he believed. The Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family tree, showing Vaughan Williams's relationships to Charles Darwin and Josiah WedgwoodAs a student he had studied piano, "which I never could play, and the violin, which was my musical salvati...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=79448 ... Read more

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In 1957 the Australian-American composer Percy Grainger, then 75 and in failing health, received a letter from another pianist-composer, the young Ronald Stevenson, writing from his home in West Linton, below Edinburgh. That first contact - requesting Grainger's reminiscences of Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he had studied - led to an exchange of 32 letters over the four years before Grainger's death in February 1961. The two men soon found that, despite their 46-year age-difference, they had many affinities. Both were pianists of staggering abilities and composers who combined a love for folk-music and working-class art with an aesthetic that proposed a `world music' to include the farthest reaches of humanity. Both made an art of piano transcription of a wide variety of works and were champions of little-known music and composers. And both revered the work of Walt Whitman, that great poet of inclusivity, the pioneering spirit and the open road. This book presents both the complete Grainger-Stevenson correspondence and Ronald Stevenson's many articles and lectures on Grainger and his music, edited by Teresa Balough, whose two interviews with Stevenson open and close the volume - which includes a CD of a lecture-recital on Grainger that Stevenson presented in Grainger's home in White Plains, New York, in 1976. ... Read more