ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0856-9168
Current Organisations
University of Adelaide
,
University of Iowa
,
University of Tasmania
,
Kansas State University
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2014
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 25-05-2015
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 24-02-2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 08-06-2018
DOI: 10.1017/S1479409817000581
Abstract: Between 1905 and 1908 Percy Grainger made a major contribution to the corpus of British folk-song, collecting melodies and words of ballads, shanties and work songs, and devoting himself not just to the faithful capture of pitch and rhythm, but also the nuances of performance, with his pioneering use of the phonograph. These folk-songs became for Grainger a wellspring of compositional inspiration to which he returned time and time again. Yet while he was still a student in Frankfurt, Grainger had been making settings of British traditional tunes sourced from published collections. This article contends that these early arrangements hold the key to a deeper understanding of his later persistence in folk-song arranging and collecting, and that they prefigure the recurrent textual themes in the songs he later chose to arrange. It is argued that Grainger’s attraction to folk-song was textual and musical, tied to notions of purity, freedom and an unorthodox spirituality inspired by nature and shaped by the writings of Whitman, whereby Grainger perceived folk-song as a universal utterance. For Grainger, British folk-song was not simply a source of profound melody for appropriation the window into a nation’s soul became a door into the souls of all humanity.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2021
Start Date: 2018
End Date: 2018
Funder: University of Tasmania
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2017
End Date: 2017
Funder: University of Tasmania
View Funded Activity