Abstract
Today, Percy Grainger is often celebrated as a proto-ethnomusicologist because of his original ideas about and transcriptions of British and Danish folk songs as well as non-Western music. Recently, Graham Freeman investigated the impact of his complex modernist musical aesthetic (read: his conception of “free music”) upon his English folk song collecting.1 Among other things, this chapter complements Freeman’s argument by showing that Grainger’s proto-ethnomusicological research at large was influenced by primitivism. In doing so, it highlights the relationship between his study of European folk songs and non-Western music research. On the whole, it argues that his “world music” research and musical modernism were closely interconnected, and to a great extent part of a cosmopolitan but imperial counterculture.
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Notes
Graham Freeman, “‘That Chief Undercurrent of My Mind’: Percy Grainger and the Aesthetics of English Folk Song,” Folk Music Journal, 9, 4, 2009, 581–617.
Teresa Balough, ed., A Musical Genius from Australia: Selected Writings by and about Percy Grainger, Nedlands: University of Western Australia, 1982, 78.
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Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross, eds., Grainger on Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 17.
Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, New York: G. Schirmer, 1911 (first published 1907), 5, 34.
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Paul Jackson, “Percy Grainger’s Aleatoric Adventures: The Rarotongan Part-Songs,” Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 2012, 1.
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Michelle Wick Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010, 327.
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Timothy B. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 106.
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Percy Grainger, “Free Music,” Typescript, December 6, 1938.
Percy Grainger, “Democracy in Music,” Manuscript dated July 9–10, 1931.
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© 2013 Bob van der Linden
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van der Linden, B. (2013). Percy Grainger: Kipling, Racialism, and All the World’s Folk Music. In: Music and Empire in Britain and India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311641_3
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