Percy Grainger - Legacy

Legacy

Grainger considered himself an Australian composer who, he said, wrote music "in the hopes of bringing honor and fame to my native land". However, much of Grainger's working life was spent elsewhere, and the extent to which he influenced Australian music, within his lifetime and thereafter, is debatable. His efforts to educate the Australian musical public in the mid-1930s were indifferently received, and did not attract disciples; writing in 2010, the academic and critic Roger Covell identifies only one significant contemporary Australian musician – the English-born horn player, pianist and conductor David Stanhope – working in the Grainger idiom. In 1956, the suggestion by the composer Keith Humble that Grainger be invited to write music for the opening of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne had been rejected by the organisers of the Games.

Grainger was a life-long atheist and believed he would only endure in the body of work he left behind. He took an unusual course of action to ensure that survival by establishing a personal museum dedicated to his own life. The Grainger Museum was given little attention before the mid-1970s; it was initially regarded as evidence either of an over-large ego or of extreme eccentricity. Since then the University of Melbourne's commitment to the museum has, Covell asserts, "rescued permanently from academic denigration and belittlement". Its vast quantities of materials have been used to investigate not only Grainger's life and works, but those of contemporaries whom Grainger had known: Grieg, Delius, Scott and others. The Grainger home at 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, is now the Percy Grainger Library and is a further repository of memorabilia and historic performance material, open to researchers and visitors.

In Britain, Grainger's main legacy is the revival of interest in folk music. His pioneering work in the recording and setting of folksongs greatly influenced the following generation of English composers; Benjamin Britten acknowledged the Australian as his master in this respect. After hearing a broadcast of some Grainger settings, Britten reportedly declared that these " all the Vaughan Williams and R. O. Morris arrangements into a cocked hat". In the United States, Grainger left a strong educational legacy through his involvement, over 40 years, with high school, summer school and college students. Likewise, his innovative approaches to instrumentation and scoring have left their mark on modern American band music; Timothy Reynish, a conductor and teacher of band music in Europe and America, has described him as "the only composer of stature to consider military bands the equal, if not the superior, in expressive potential to symphony orchestras." Grainger's attempts to produce "free music" by mechanical and later electronic means, which he considered his most important work, produced no follow-up; they were quickly overtaken and nullified by new technological advances. Covell nevertheless remarks that in this endeavour, Grainger's dogged resourcefulness and ingenious use of available materials demonstrate a particularly Australian aspect of the composer's character – one of which Grainger would have been proud.