Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere"

I didn't get up to White Plains when in New York. I really should have. I've long loved Percy Grainger's music - in many respects he was and still is Australia's premier classical composer - and White Plains is where he spent the second half of his life (1921-61). There are places in New York he would have frequented of course. NYU is where he made that intriguing statement about Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington being the greatest composers.

I like to think Grainger went to my school, though. John Bird, in his biography of Grainger, says that if Grainger had any formal schooling at all it was probably at a state school in South Yarra (Melbourne). I went to South Yarra State School and the older building there was a Victorian-era building which might easily have been around when Grainger was a boy.

I do, also, know Albert Park Lake in Melbourne and was there recently.

Concreted now, it was a natural lagoon when Grainger boated here in the1880s and derived inspiration for his later Free Music experiments from the sight of the wave patterns made by his paddle. Grainger would have hated the fact that it's now concreted. He wrote from North Queensland once about a wild river that was being straightened and made navigable, despairing of the shrinking options in this world for real life and adventure; for the 'chap-who-wants-to-find-the-sagas-everywhere'.

But as I say, he was Australia's premier composer. I remember seeing a front page of The New York Times from 1922. 'GRAINGER'S MOTHER IS KILLED IN FALL' said one of the headlines. No first name, or further explanation. Everyone in New York, it seems, would have been expected to know who Grainger was.

Publicity photograph of Grainger from 1921. Public domain

I doubt if any Australian classical composer, even now, could be identified overseas as easily as that.

But 'Grainger's mother is killed in fall'? Makes me think about the dramatisations I've seen (and even conceived myself) of Grainger's life. They might show his eccentricities, like the way he would throw an egg over a house and run down the centre hallway to catch it on the other side or walked the 75 kms (46 miles) from Yarram to Sale between concerts. They might show him dressing up in his towelling clothes. Or they might tell of his London years when, admittedly, he wrote his best music... but no particular biographical arc is described (apart from the fact that the 'chap who wanted to find the sagas everywhere', who was titillated by Nibelungenlied descriptions of men being hewn to the waist by broadaxes, shipped off to the US rather than risk being conscripted for WWI - not much of an ending.)

But the dramatically compelling real story is how his mother became distraught when rumours of incest surfaced and ended up fallen from the upper storeys of a New York skyscraper. Jumped or fell? There was a chair next to the open window.

How about this for a dramatic shape? How Grainger is away on tour as usual (his daily and sometimes several-times-daily letters home to 'mumsy' being some of the most vivid descriptions of mid-20th century American life you'll find). Up to now, his girlfriends have always accepted that they play second fiddle to his mother's 'smother-love', but now 'E' decides that something is not right and she is jealous. She spreads rumours. Grainger, away on tour, can do nothing to assuage his mother's sense of rising panic. His effusive reassurances only make things worse. Signoffs like the one for the telegram which read: 'LONGING CLASP YOU IN MY ARMS' can hardly calm Rose Grainger's anxieties about making the right impression. And eventually she goes to visit Percy's agent and disappears out a window when Ms Sawyer steps out of the office for a moment.

(Percy and his mother's relationship certainly was strange, even if not incestuous. As John Bird says in his biography: 'Percy Grainger was mad. And he was made mad by a mother who never allowed him to grow up.' (I guess there is a place for stories about how he would throw an egg over a house...))

But to go on: Grainger gets the telegram telling him his mother has died after he has come offstage after playing with the Los Angeles Phil. He takes the long, painful train journey home to New York, tells 'E' he never wants to see her again (of course) and throws himself into his work.

Life is not fun however, and he still has to tour to earn an income. Turning around in a customs queue while coming back from New Zealand he sees Ella Viola-Strom and falls in love at first sight. She is his ideal of the Nordic beauty (the kind of beauty his mother brought him up to idealise?). He woos her. They wed at Hollywood Bowl before between 15,000-23,000 people after a performance that has included To a Nordic Princess. Despite comments to the contrary, Ella has already come to know of Percy's violent sexual preferences, his 'blue roses' as Grainger and Rose called them. In Malcolm Gillies' and David Pear's book, The All-Round Man, there is a letter Grainger wrote to Ella from Kansas City some months before the wedding describing how he saw a mother rain a 'sheaf of quick hand blows' on a little boy. 'Can you not,' he asked Ella, 'be sometimes suddenly masterfully cruel to me as that mother was to her child?....(when you are outoftheway-putout) make me strip & whip me thoroly?' And apparently she did.

But how does Ella reconcile herself to all this? The boy Rose had created? What is the process? Surely she thinks about all those other Edwardian-era women back in London obliging his tastes. And how does she (does she?) come to equal his mother in his eyes? What does she think of his mother? It was easy to put a foot wrong if you didn't share his idolisation. What is the process? Because finally she does come to a way of living with it, of loving him, and nurturing his creativity although 'it was hell to be with him; hell to be without him'.

Here is something to explore dramatically but it's an exploration of relationships, not a biopic of a composer's life. Celebrating his music would not be the primary dramatic intention, except that when he 'throws himself into his work', you could bring in his musical achievements; reveal his futuristic Free Music experiments and compare them with his earlier, delightful folksong arrangements.

I suppose it's not to be wondered at that Australians looking to tell 'our stories' light on Grainger's worth as a composer. Grainger was basically a lovely musician, 'a whale of a pianist' (according to New York critic Harold C. Schonberg), musically open-hearted, breezy, refreshingly tolerant, especially for his age. He embraced and was inspired by all sorts of music from Raratongan part-song (long before the fad for World Music) to barbershop quartets (when no-one would have believed it would now be seeing a revival); I'm glad he got to hear (in 1909) Baldwin Spencer's wax cylinders of chants of the Aranda (who do live with their sagas everywhere and ever-present) and considered them 'more melodic than stupid remarks in music histories'. I'm glad he left behind a treasure trove of really beautiful folksong settings. But I do think there was some sort of disconnect between the grand epic life he believed he led and the miniatures he created. Wildness and violence in his music? A certain vigorous folk-fiddling kind of counterpoint, but inspired as much by Bach's Brandenburgs as by any rawness or brutal chill of down-and-dirty life. The gulf between what he wrote and what he thought he wrote provides perhaps another tragic dimension.

Australia's greatest composer? Still the one with broadest and longest-lasting appeal. But I'm trying to figure out what got me onto this. I supposed it was seeing colleagues at the end of the League of American Orchestras conference last week in Dallas heading home to New York, while I went on to Sydney, and thinking that Grainger is Australian classical music's most famous New Yorker. I reflected on his stature. And the fact that Americans are often surprised to learn he is not one of their own.

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2012
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 September 2012

Influx: part 4 of initial impressions of Dallas

The Dallas that George Grosz, the German Dadaist, depicted in 1952 may have had a certain charm.

Photo taken of Elm Street, Dallas, by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration in 1942

Downtown in those days seems to have been far livelier, even at night. Compare the view above, and all the cars parked kerbside, with essentially the same view in 2012.

You can see The Majestic on the right hand side in both photographs.

But as one of the blurbs at the George Grosz exhibition points out, Grosz would have seen another side to Dallas, had he stayed longer. It was lively yes, but cowboys, Hispanics and African-Americans did not mix in the street as easily as his tableaux depict. Segregation was well and truly alive.

And as I was standing in the Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository five days ago, I wondered how many of the police accompanying (protecting) President Kennedy on the day he was killed would have been sympathetic to Kennedy's views on Civil Rights.

I came out of the hotel the other day though, and the street was booming with the sounds of an Indian wedding.

I learned that over 100,00 Indians (subcontinental Indians, that is) live in Dallas, it's the fourth largest population of expat Indians in the US. And here were the Dallas police supervising the closing off of the street, protecting the celebration. When did so many Indians come here? Was it in the 1950s and 60s? Or more recently with the development of technological industries? It wasn't until 1946 (four years after Rothstein's photograph, six years before Grosz's visit) that President Truman signed into law the Luce-Celler Act, restoring to Indian Americans 'the right to immigrate and naturalize', so I imagine this influx is more recent than that.

But as I watched this wedding, I couldn't help reflecting on the socially-beneficial, liberalising, aspects of that basic human urge: to migrate. And yet, I did remember, as an invader-Australian can't forget, that the only drumming that would once have been heard on this plain would have been that of the Caddos, and those 'Indians' seem to be a forgotten people in the broad scheme of things.

For a review of the Grosz exhibit, see:

http://www.660news.com/entertainment/article/364287--artist-george-grosz-s-series-capturing-dallas-in-1952-goes-on-exhibit-at-museum

Marking the spots

The 'X' on the road marks the spot where John Kennedy's presidency ended.

I can't help thinking of how life hurtled on for everyone else beyond this point. In the life of the nation, one presidency ended and Lyndon Johnson's began. It's quite a punctuation mark.


All this happened nearly 50 years ago (50 years ago, next year in fact). It's history. It happened 'before my time', in the words of the majority of people I know. But so much of it seems to have happened in the modern day: Kennedy's motorcade was flanked by police motorcyclists, the story was covered on live national TV, there are colour images...

So often in the US, history is here in the ever-present. It gives me goosebumps. You can still kind of follow the route:

even if some of the buildings have changed.

I remember when I was interviewing Michael Daugherty about his opera, Jackie O. I asked him if he'd had any contact with the Kennedy family while writing it. No, he had said, but at the premiere he was introduced to Nellie Connally, one of the patrons of the Houston Grand Opera (the commissioning company). He said she'd been very moved. 'And she was', he said, or words to this effect, 'the wife of the Governor of Texas at the time.' I held my breath: '...and sitting in the front seat of the car the day President Kennedy was shot.'

As I repeat to myself, it's one of the sombre realisations I had here at Dealey Plaza: History is printed on the present here.

And what makes this even more overwhelming is that in America, the moments in history and the issues they turn on are huge - civil rights, the extent of liberty, the rapprochement between  East and West, the highest stakes... moon landings, for heaven's sake.

This is why I have always thought their stories were ripe for telling on an operatic scale. However, in the past few weeks I've discovered an Australian story which I think is on the same scale. Of that more anon...

Fifth day here in Dallas and the impressions have become more nuanced. Last night walking back, we heard the most ornate birdsong - in the middle of this glassy skyscraper-scape. I love the big advertisements on the blank walls of buildings.

Later on I might walk over the Dallas Museum of Art. They've got an exhibition of paintings by the 20th century German Expressionist, George Grosz. He came to Dallas and painted it in the 1950s. The exhibition is called Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas.

http://dallasmuseumofart.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984

Fascinating what you see, if you stay and look long enough.

Day Two - Dallas

Second impressions. We walked into I. M.Pei's Meyerson Center last night for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert. I.M. Pei? One of the most famous architects of the past century? There were signs in the foyer mentioning that the Dallas Symphony's Music Director, Jaap van Zweden is Musical America's Conductor of the Year. There are CDs on sale of the DSO's performance (under Zweden) of their commission, August 4, 1964. The piece, by Steven Stucky and Gene Scheer (mentioned also in yesterday's blog), is perceptively set on one of the most poignant days in US history, when the inspirational and tragic trajectories of LBJ's presidency (the passage of Civil Rights legislation and the disastrous Vietnam War) intersected in the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi and the Tonkin Gulf incident. I figure this is a great arts city in light of all this. Then, before the concert, the mayor gets up and says that we are in the largest contiguous arts precinct in the world. Dallas is rising in my estimation.

This afternoon I walked with Raff Wilson, a colleague from the Hong Kong Philharmonic, to Dealey Plaza where Lyndon Johnson's presidency commenced (ie, after President Kennedy was assassinated there).

'This is it,' said Raff as we came to traffic lights in Elm Street.  'What, here?' This small, tight area?

It is so much smaller than I expected. The grassy knoll is not that far away and yet in film footage of people rushing it (in the direction of where they suspected they heard the shots), it looks like quite a distance. I also never realised that the road runs downhill here.

or how close Kennedy was to getting onto the freeway and away.

Across the road I looked up at the former Texas School Book Depository and it was eerie to see a guy standing in the sixth floor window from where Oswald was meant to take aim, unless you have formed the impression that he didn't do it, or that there was a second shooter by the grassy knoll.

But the theme of this blog is to question impressions. What is needed is evidence.

Would this be evidence that Dallas is on the up?

That's what I always associate public transport and light rail with.

First impressions - Dallas

Arriving in Dallas yesterday, I was struck firstly by how wooded and green it is on the outskirts. This often strikes me about the US. I assume that, as a country that has been settled longer than Australia and with a more rapacious attitude toward nature, it would be over-cleared. No, that is Australia's dubious honour.

Downtown, though, is one of those bleak cityscapes that you'd find in a Jeffrey Smart painting -

carparks, glass towers,

at night: not a soul. How do US cities get to this degree of urban desolation? The people drive their cars into underground carparks and then straight up into their towers?

I crossed Elm Street last night, and there were sequences of charming old Art Deco or 1920s buildings, but it's a bit like a mouth that once had a set of good teeth.

Yet, Dallas is a cultured city. It has a symphony orchestra and an opera. Its opera company commissioned Therese Raquin, the piece by Tobias Picker and Gene Scheer that in some respects is the most successful contemporary opera - because Picker and Scheer figured out that lyricism's true province is the broad depiction of love and death.

It will be interesting to see how my impressions vary over the next few days.

‘...above the canopy of stars...’ – Beethoven’s Ninth

A US colleague told me about some of the pieces they’ve got planned next season – Schumann and Beethoven symphonies, Tchaikovsky concertos... Really, I sometimes think artistic planning consists of taking three spinning wheels marked ‘overtures’, ‘concertos’ and ‘symphonies’, and spinning the names of the same two-dozen works in each genre. But it’s got me thinking about a piece I wrote some years ago.

Beethoven’s Ninth was first performed 7 May 1824. In the 188 years since, it has acquired the status of a classic, which means, on one hand, that it’s been accorded the honour it deserves. On the other, that it inherits the perennial handicap of a masterpiece: it seems to be set in stone.

Somehow when we hear a work over and over again, we get to thinking that such a work was always going to turn out the way it did; that it sprang, like Homer’s Athena, ‘fully armed from the head of Zeus’. Such a belief diminishes our appreciation of creation, dulls our responses, and may even blind us to real insights.

Classical music buffs got excited in April 2003 when it was reported that a Beethoven’s Ninth was going under the hammer at Sotheby’s. The 465 pages bound in three volumes may have been the manuscript used at the premiere in 1824, the basis of the first printed edition in 1826. Beethoven’s valued assistant Wenzel Schlemmer had died in 1825, and a number of other hands were evident in the manuscript. ‘Du verfluchter Kerl’ (‘you damned fool’) Beethoven wrote above the music at one point, ‘forgetting,’ as New York Times critic James R. Oestereich has pointed out, ‘universal brotherhood [the theme of the last movement’s Ode to Joy] for an instant.’ There are changes to expression marks and various rethinkings, necessitating in some cases the sewing in of whole new pages. There is even the odd coffee stain, which goes to show that the creation of a masterpiece is a form of industry; the result of labour, second thoughts, crossings out, the work of a supervening genius, but also of a team of helpers who have to overcome the hassles of everyday life to make a work of art which speaks beyond the ages.

We think of Beethoven as the supreme musical architect. But in fact, Beethoven sat on the cusp of the period when composers turned from improvisers into architects. Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper once likened Beethoven’s manner of composition to finding one’s way along a wall which is receding into fog in the distance and only becoming clearer as one gropes along; and he contrasted this with the working method of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), who described musical conception as a house becoming clear in all its details at once. Beethoven’s way of composing seemed to offer fewer guarantees of success; it is remarkable that he was able to make of his pieces such integrated wholes. The fact that they are owed a lot to his galvanising genius.

So Beethoven would basically begin at the beginning - not as common as you’d think. He’d map out the first movement, writing a sort of synopsis of key moments (not particularly worrying about the joins), while noting ideas for the movements ahead (and maybe other works). He would then work on subsequent movements, filling in details behind him as ideas matured, as understanding grew, while nudging a piece forward. With the Ninth, the very first idea actually to be conceived (some time after the winter of 1815) was for a fugue on a theme we now recognise as the main theme of the scherzo second movement, the most popular movement at the work’s first performance. But not long after that, Beethoven came up with something similar to the prophetic opening to the symphony we now know. In the synopsis of the opening to the symphony sketched by Beethoven in the winter of 1815/16, one sees the same doubtful suggestion of A minor, and then the decisive landing on D minor; nebulousness leading to decisiveness, a compositional expression of Beethoven’s customary manner of working.

It was some time later that Beethoven got around to thinking about the fourth movement. The famous choral finale may not have been inevitable. One of Beethoven’s ideas around this time is rather like the last movement of the String Quartet in A minor, Op.132 – but in D minor, the key of the Ninth Symphony. Maybe a string-dominated Allegro appassionato was slated for this work. What a different ending we would then have experienced, if this fast music [I’ve roughly orchestrated it in a sub-Beethoven-type way] had followed upon the radiantly slow third movement...

Audience reactions in the past 188 years may have been a few decibels lower on the applause-meter. 

But Beethoven also wrote under the 'instrumental' sketch of thsi passage the words ‘Before the Freude’, ‘Freude’ being the first word of Schiller’s poem. Could he have been thinking, if not of a completely instrumental last movement, of a different instrumental introduction to the choral finale, before lighting on the brilliant idea of a choral finale preceded by the now well-known 'horror fanfare' and ‘critical review’ of all the preceding movements?

Beethoven had been meaning to set Schiller’s ode To Joy to music for many years. There is mention in a letter to Mrs Schiller dated 1793, over 30 years before the premiere of the Ninth, that a young composer from the Rhineland, that is Beethoven, was intending to set the poem. And in the sketchbooks dating from 1798 there is an early setting of the line ‘muss ein lieber Vater wohnen...’ (‘there must dwell a loving father...’), which Beethoven, back then, set to a melody in C major.

Beethoven had of course written another Choral Fantasia, with an Ode-like melody, not yet the perfect tune he honed for the Ninth, and based on a text in praise of music. But why did it take him more than 30 years to finally set the Schiller?

Political sensitivity? It is well known that Schiller had substituted ‘Freude’ (joy) for ‘Freiheit’ (freedom) to evade the censors. But there’s some justification for thinking that ‘Überm Sternenzelt muss ein lieber Vater wohnen’ was the line that held most significance for Beethoven. ‘Be enfolded, all ye millions, in this kiss of the whole world! Brothers, above the canopy of stars must dwell a loving Father’.

This occurs as the first chorus in Schiller’s version of the poem but Beethoven saves it for later. What he then puts after the first and second verses is Schiller’s fourth chorus: ‘Joyously, as His dazzling suns traverse the heavens, so, brothers, run your course, exultant, as a hero claims victory.’ Beethoven thus edits and rearranges Schiller’s poem in order to create a sequence that takes us effectively from earthly celebration, to the hero who advances to the stars, to the benevolent maker (of us all?) who must be beyond. Is this the real Beethoven, looking towards the open sky, like the prisoners in his opera Fidelio, newly freed from their dungeon cells?

And how would we describe the music for this passage? It is a part of a mysterious adagio that the youthful Beethoven could not have achieved. In his final setting of these words Beethoven makes use of sounds that he discovered while working on certain sections of the Missa solemnis, new sounds intended to depict something beyond the heavens, and inspire a sense of primal awe. It seems that Beethoven’s final view of the ode To Joy had to wait until after the writing of the more heavens-gazing sections of the great Mass in D. The significance of Beethoven having to wait so long before setting Schiller’s poem relates, I think, to his need to find an elevated view of the text, a more universal view.

But also more personal. Beethoven once said that music was a higher revelation than religion or philosophy, but what is revealed by looking behind the scenes at the Ninth? It's more than just an academic exercise. I draw on what I’ve read of Beethoven’s abused childhood, think of the words ‘lieber Vater’, and find great poignancy in Beethoven’s extension of a universal hope for benevolent fathering in the slow section that precedes the tumult and applause-inducing excitement of the loud, prestissimo and oh-so familiar ending of Beethoven’s Ninth.

- first published by Symphony Services International. Reproduced by kind permission

If you are interested in reading other articles of mine on classical music, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012

Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira

I haven't been blogging lately, almost as though I've felt inhibited about commenting on events or things seen here in Australia. Yet there are constant eye-openers.

reproduced by courtesy Warren H. Williams

I met up with my mate, Warren Williams, down from Alice Springs a few weeks ago. He was here promoting his CD Winanjjara, his arrangement (orchestrations virtually) of traditional Warumungu Song, song material from the Tennant Creek area that he is entitled-to through his mother's father. One of Warren's geat-grandfathers, Hesekiel, was mentioned in Journey to Horseshoe Bend, the symphonic cantata Andrew Schultz and I wrote based on Ted Strehlow's novel. As usual, the conversation turned to the Arrernte worldview - who is related to whom, who can speak for what, whose country is whose...

I was reminded of this yesterday as I watched excerpts on YouTube from the Metropolitan Opera's Ring cycle. At the beginning of Act III of Siegfried, Wotan, king of the gods is now wandering the world. Still his voice is thunder (to borrow one of Homer's epithets for Wotan's Greek equivalent, Zeus). And in Robert Lepage's Met production, Wotan's staff actually flashes like lightning.

Warren told me that the great-grandfather of another great-grandfather, Johannes Ntjalka, was Kanjira, 'the thunder god'. I had read about Kanjira in Carl Strehlow's Die Aranda und Loritja-Stamme. 'But,' I said to Warren, 'you mean a reincarnation of Kanjira?' 'No', said Warren, 'the actual thunder god'. I was aware that people say that the Altjira (usually translated as Dreamtime) is maybe only a few generations back (or well, really, since I think of the 'altjira' as the eternally creative substratum of reality, it's ever-present). But commissioners in Aboriginal Land Claims have commented on their difficulty in working out sometimes whether a witness is citing a forebear or a mythological figure. Warren's information was a graphic example to me that Central Australia really is 'the land of Altjira', eternity, as Ted Strehlow once said.

And a graphic example to me also, that there really is a lot to comment on in Australia.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Opera in a land of Song, 20 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow’s The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012