Grainger: Marching Song of Democracy

This disc contains works by Grainger in versions for large choral forces, performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under its new Chief Conductor, Sir Andrew Davis, and featuring the Sydney Chamber Choir and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus. The recording continues on from our nineteen-disc Grainger Edition box and brings our long-running Grainger survey to an end.

Percy Grainger had a lifelong interest in poetry and prose. When he was a young boy, his mother would sing him to sleep with Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races, the memories of which were later recalled in the musical extravaganza Tribute to Foster. In his youth, Grainger was intrigued by the Icelandic sagas, which led to a deep fascination with all things Norse, and ultimately inspired works such as The Wraith of Odin. The books by Kipling were another great inspiration during Grainger’s student days in Frankfurt; Danny Deever, from Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, is a grim depiction of the execution of Deever for the murder of a fellow soldier. From passages of the ‘Song of Solomon’ sprang the mammoth setting King Solomon’s Espousals.

Marching Song of Democracy was inspired by the poetry by Walt Whitman and a chance encounter with a public statue of George Washington at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Grainger’s original plan was to write the work for voices and whistlers only, and to have it performed by a chorus of men, women, and children singing and whistling to the rhythmic accompaniment of their tramping feet as they marched along in the open air. Later Grainger realised the need for instrumental colour, and this led him to score it for the concert hall – although he did stress that ‘an athletic, out-of-door spirit must be understood to be behind the piece from start to finish’.

The setting of Swinburne’s The Bride’s Tragedy is considered to be one of Grainger’s most intensely personal works. The story tells of a girl who is to be married to a man she detests, and Grainger saw this work as ‘a personal protest against the sex-negation… that our capitalist world offered to young talents like me’.

The Hunter in His Career is a traditional ballad which takes its words from William Chappell’s collection Old English Popular Music (1838 – 40). For his setting of Sir Eglamore, Grainger turned to John Stafford Smith’s 1812 collection Musica Antiqua, in which the knight battles giants and wild boars for his beloved. The Lads of Wamphray is based on a folk-poem from Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; it is an account of the noted feud between the families of Maxwell and Johnstone. Of Thanksgiving Song, Grainger wrote: ‘My Thanksgiving Song is honour-tokened to all my life’s sweethearts – to those I loved long and fully, but also to those I merely looked at but never spoke to.’

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Percy Grainger’s death in 1961, we are re-issuing The Grainger Edition, Volumes 1 – 19, in a nineteen-disc box set, which will be available at a very special price: 19 CDs for the price of 4. The box set demonstrates the extraordinary range of Grainger’s compositional styles, including orchestral works, works for wind orchestra and for chorus and orchestra, solo songs, works for chamber ensemble, as well as works for solo piano, here performed by Penelope Thwaites. On Volume 16, Works for Solo Piano 1 (CHAN 9895), Fanfare wrote: ‘Rarely has the precociousness of his [Grainger’s] talent been better demonstrated than on this new disc… the rarities, like the more familiar pieces, are played with unapologetic conviction. Penelope Thwaites paints the music in bold strokes… a major contribution to the Grainger discography.’

Grainger, the Australian-born composer and pianist, was one of music’s most original voices and his compositions, especially his arrangements of folksongs, include some of the world’s most well-loved pieces. He studied piano from an early age and, by the time he reached the age of twenty, had already thought out or formulated the majority of his compositions. The following years saw him feverishly reworking and re-arranging these pieces for different forces; in fact it was Grainger who conceived the idea of ‘elastic’ scoring: a work having an almost limitless number of performable versions, all showing a wonderful sense of instrumental colouring. In his various approaches to a single work, Grainger would explore the possibilities of instrumentation from solo piano to wind band and to full orchestra, harmonic textures varying from simple support of the well-known melody to highly contrapuntal settings involving unusual harmonic progressions.

An enthusiastic participant in the English folksong movement, Grainger collected more than 500 folksongs on which he drew both for his impressive original works and for his imaginative arrangements, ‘Country Gardens’ and ‘Molly on the Shore’ being among the best-known. His involvement with British folksong led Grainger to cherish the voice, which became an essential ingredient in his music, and as an arranger of folksongs he was hard to surpass, Benjamin Britten exclaiming: ‘In the art of folksong arrangements, Grainger is my master!’

Towards the end of his life, Grainger became fascinated with the idea of ‘Free Music’; music not limited by time or pitch intervals. The mechanical devices he created in partnership with the scientist Burnett Cross are today regarded as crude forerunners to the modern electronic synthesiser. Grainger’s huge collection of musical materials, instruments and musical devices were eventually housed in a building in the grounds of the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum, as it is now generally known, is today a veritable treasure trove, invaluable for the exploration of Grainger’s vast compositional output.