The Music of Mr. Grainger

Terry Teachout recently acquired a caricature of composer Percy Grainger, the acquisition of which proved to be quite the tale.

I first encountered Grainger in my very first days of my freshman year in college, where two works by Grainger -- Irish Tune from County Derry (a tune better known as "Danny Boy") and Shepherd's Hey -- were the very first pieces the concert band rehearsed that year. At that time I'd never heard of Grainger, but I was at least partly ready for his sound-world, based as it is on English folk song, by virtue of the fact that in my senior year in high school I had discovered the symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose work -- although vastly different from Grainger's -- also drew on Britain's deep well of folk material.

Of course, being seventeen-going-on-eighteen at the time, I wasn't equipped to appreciate Grainger for a while. At first, I thought that the Irish Tune was a pretty thing, pleasantly lyrical and not too demanding. Luckily for me, it didn't take long before I realized that the piece is anything but simple -- the harmonies are constantly shifting and are structured in the ensemble such that one never realizes just how dissonant some of those chords really are. Such a work, I soon realized, cannot be pulled off convincingly if the ensemble attempting it doesn't have rock-solid command of dynamics and intonation. For a young musician with the young musician's tendency to judge a work's difficulty by the tempo and the number of sixteenth notes in the score, the Irish Tune from County Derry eventually made me realize just how hard it can be to play a work that has a very slow tempo and consists of nothing but quarter-notes.

Shepherd's Hey was different. This piece is a folk dance, and it's very brief -- just two minutes long. But in those two minutes, every voice in the band is featured and the dynamic rises from an intimate dance to a raucous reel that feels like a railroad car about to careen off the rails. I've made an MP3 of Shepherd's Hey; play it and listen to what I mean. (But only for a week or so. Then I'll be taking it down.) In particular, pay attention to the piece's ending: the main melody crashes to a loud chord, there is one final whirlwind statement, and then an amazing effect occurs as two lines, one ascending and one descending, cross each other before the final smash. This is the wind-ensemble's emulation of a pianistic effect, that of the "double run", in which the pianist starts one hand at one end of the keyboard, the other at the other end, and then executes an ascending run and a descending one simultaneously. Grainger was a great pianist, and this effect springs right from that part of his imagination. Wonderful stuff.

We dabbled with some other Grainger works over the next two years, the most memorable of which (to me) was the Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away, and the brilliant Lincolnshire Posy, which is a collection of six short -- but remarkable -- settings of folk songs.

Grainger fascinates me for some of the same reasons that Berlioz fascinates me: he eschews "standard" forms, in favor of rigorously following his own ideas and musical ideals. If you want a fresh listening experience and you've never heard Grainger, go treat yourself.

UPDATE: As of 6-26-04, I have removed the MP3 of "Shepherd's Hey".