Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music
Shortly before his death, Percy Grainger (1882-1961) lodged over twenty unpublished sketches in his Australian Museum. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger draws completely from these sketches, revealing for the firstborn time an illuminating portrait of the composer’s life. With such titles as “The Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga,” “Thunks,” “Ere-I-Forget,” “The Love-Life of Helen and Paris,” and “Anecdotes,” these manuscripts were intended as precursors to Grainger’s autobiography, My Wretched Tone-Life, which he only commenced in his final years. Expertly shaping these sketches, the editors have formulated a “self-portrait” along the lines that Grainger himself had intended.
The volume primary introduces Grainger’s forebears, parents, friends, wife, and himself before moving on to his views on composition, performance, and the musical world. In these sketches, Grainger addresses such topics as racial and national identity, the meaning of work, physical culture, language reform, sexual practice, and artistic patronage. Grainger likewise probes the nature of musical genius, talking about a wide range of composers including Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Beecham, Frederick Delius, Edvard Grieg, Charles Stanford, Cyril Scott, Fritz Kreisler, Donald Tovey, Ferruccio Busoni, and Balfour Gardiner. Among the works of his own that Grainger most featured are his The Warriors –Music for an Imaginary Ballet, Colonial Song, the Lincolnshire Posy series of band pieces, his greatest “hit” Country Gardens, and his a heap of settings of English folk-music.
Written in Grainger’s own self-created “Nordic English” as well as translated from Danish, the language of his most intimate confessions, Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger sheds light on a great deal of of the most revealing details of the composer’s life. The sketches trace Grainger’s altering self-perception, from the romantically tinged, even lustful, views of his forties and fifties, through a amount of time of wistfulness in his sixties, to the bitterness and self-loathing of his old age. The volume likewise includes various of Grainger’s own drawings as well as both public and private photographs. A arousing and attention holding and revealing collection of vignettes, this extraordinary book will appeal to instructors, students, and fanciers in musicology, music history, cultural studies, and Australian, British, and American history.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1908113 in Books
- Published on: 2006-06-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.37 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 330 pages
Review
“Malcolm Gilles, David Pear and Mark Carroll steer us unflinchingly through a personal history that calls for a systematic handling, applying a degree of assiduousness that may only arise from a authenti and deep respect for their subject.”–Mark Tanner, Musical Opinion
“All this fretful retrospection will have to have held Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll, the editors of Self Portrait, very busy. Grainger gave them half a million words of fragmented autobiography to choose from, deposited at the Grainger Museum in the University of Melbourne, and they have done a exhaustive occupation of exposing him in all his glory and his madness. It’s a long way from “Country Gardens.”–Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement
“What started out life in Grainger’s hand as detailed, candid notes for an autobiography he would never fulfill are here shaped into a compelling, unsanitized portrait of a brilliant artisan and a critical epoch. A outstanding read.”–Paul Kildea
“The volume as a whole is arousing and attention holding and a very revealing portrait of this complex personality. It’s a must for Delians and those fascinated in the Frankfurt Gang.”–The Delian
“This substantial and revelatory anthology of the private writings of Percy Grainger fills a good deal of significant gaps in our psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of the composer as both artisan and man. The collection has been prepared with impeccable attention to detail but in a manner which allows the text to speak for itself. With it is fine remainder among scholarship and sheer readability, it is difficult to see how the task could have been accomplished more effectively.”–Mervyn Cooke, Department of Music, University of Nottingham
“Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger goes beyond existent volumes of letters and other documents, in terms of intimate revelations, and in illuminating neglected areas of Grainger’s life. Rarely have the shadowy relationships of ideas in regards to music, sex, and race been so candidly laid bare.”–Alain Frogley, Department of Music, University of Connecticut
About the Author
Malcolm Gillies is a vice-president of The Australian National University and a leading figure in Australian higher education and research. As a musicologist, he has written broad on twentieth-century music, including major studies of Bï’½la Bartï’½k and Percy Grainger. Since 1997 he has been the editor of the series Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure, published by Oxford University Press.
David Pear is a senior lecturer at Monash University (Australia) and a fellow of the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra. He holds a PhD from The University of Queensland, and other qualifications in theology, education, and music. Pear has been a co-editor of letter, reminiscence, and autobiographical volumes of Grainger’s writings, and has worked spacious in the Grainger Museum (Melbourne).
Mark Carroll is a senior lecturer in Music at the Elder School of Music, University of Adelaide (Australia), from which he holds his doctoral degree. For various decades he has worked as a professional classical and general musician. His recent publications include Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (2003), and a co-edited volume of Grainger essays. Carroll is likewise a researcher for The Australian Ballet.
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Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music Image
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Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music Pic
Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music Image
Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music Photo
Centenary Edition 100 Years Of Great Music Pic
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