Embracing Grainger
Robin Holloway What can it be, this squat semicircular structure nestled inconspicuous yet peculiar amid the faculties and offices along the leafy university stretch of Royal Parade, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia? Looks like a bus station without passengers, a public lavatory without users; perhaps still more (being windowless save for a high band of opaque glass bricks) a wartime bunker or bomb shelter. There's a front door, tightly sealed; the bell yields no answer; the inscription gives nothing away — except to those who already know what they seek. For this singular building houses the inheritance of the most plural composer who ever lived: Percy Grainger, Melbourne's greatest son and the 20th century's most maverick musician.
Mention the name to his compatriots above a certain age and they look affronted.
The irrepressible author of Country Gardens, Mock Morris, Molly on the Shore, Handel in the Strand and Blithe Bells (his comparable take on Bach's 'Sheep may safely graze') is merely a dubious smell, regrettable, embarrassing, to be Airwicked out while looking askance. In England, then the United States, Grainger's reputation as a phenomenon of the first order has steadily grown since Benjamin Britten's late recordings and the excellent biography by John Bird (1976). On his native continent the prophet's honour has been slower to advance; the museum he founded and funded has long been closed, apparently an incubus to its host, to be dispossessed and disposed of as quietly as possible. But things are changing and the liability is increasingly seen as an asset. What he would have most abhorred is coming to pass — the embrace of the Establishment, academic canonisation, the quirky quicksilver set in iconic concrete. Support has been raised to surmount some serious structural problems — rising and falling damp, the curator tells me, and correcting the founder's aversion to electricity for fear of fires; and, most of all, the long indifference if not positive aversion.
Reopening is scheduled for 2008. And meanwhile the curator has arranged an exhibition to display some of this exhibitionist museum's most piquant and expressive contents. They range way beyond what might be expected of any normal shrine, however unusual — portraits, manuscripts, letters, etc. Even these can be odd chez Grainger: hand-drawn blown-up copies of his scores done as his sight began to fail, wholly practical, colour-coded to bring instruments in and out while conducting, yet in the abstract strong and bold as a Matisse paper cut-out or a Leger.
Grainger's visual gift is shown less in the rather anaemic watercolours of picturesque scenes than in the elaborate Heath-Robinson designs for various 'Tone Tools', vehicles on the arduous quest, ultimately unsuccessful, to reproduce the sounds of nature and make art from them. The machines as actually constructed remain for the moment in their creator's American home of his last 40 years: the devout hope, surely just, is that they end up in Melbourne, where this brave free spirit first began to be fascinated by wind and water. One is here already — the 'butterfly piano', delicately adjusted to play microtones, six to the normal one.
But Grainger is far odder than this. Thoroughly upsetting is the pathetic suicide note left by his all-embracing mother before plunging 14 storeys to her death in 1922, torn into fragments by her distraught son then carefully Sellotaped together again. Most disconcerting of all, the notorious sadomasochistic side to this flagrant flagellator, fixated upon baring soul and body to posterity in all-out confessional nakedness, convinced that health and sanity, humanity and creativity, consisted in absolute truth to feeling and impulse wherever they might lead, whatever they might reveal. So we see whips wrought by his own inventive craft, and a series of photographic self-portraits, nude and unabashed — a cross between oldfashioned dirty postcards and the chastely scientific studies of human locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge. But these images are devant et apres sex (or whipping) at the hands of long-suffering Ella, his wife and companion in punishment. No wonder they originally reached the museum in brown envelopes marked 'not to be opened until ten years after my death' (what about hers, one wonders — she outlived him by 20 years).
Though the peculiarities continue, the passages are not all so twisty.There is diversion as well as diversity, hilarity as well as perversion, joy and fun alongside pain and absurdity; all are equally infused with Percy Grainger's insatiable curiosity for human endeavour in its every manifestation. Red Indian beads and moccasins collected and sometimes threaded and sewn by his own restless fingers, annotated books, menus, programmes, timetables, bus tickets; and Grieg's gold watch — gift of his widow to remember him by. Most evocative of all the Edison phonograph and wax cylinders with which he'd set out, a hundred years ago, to capture just in time the folksingers of England and further afield. (Sure enough, every subsequent transcription was dedicated 'lovingly and reverently' to Grieg's memory.) Most hilarious, the suit he concocted of bright-coloured and patterned beach towels, cockily resplendent in its special seethrough glass wardrobe with brass edgings.
Unique, lovable, strange to the dark depths, reaching some strange heights untouched by any other music, Percy Grainger is ensouled in his museum like a fragment of true Cross (or maybe, for him, a stretch of flayed martyrflesh) in its reliquary. If his wish is fulfilled, the mortal remains, also, will return to join the soul under the southern stars to which he aspired.
Previous page
