GRAINGER—PLAY-BOY OF THE MUSICAL WORLD

Charles L. Buchanan

WHEN Percy Grainger arrived in this country last October he was practically unknown in America. To-day his drawing ability (and the amount of interest felt in him) is almost equal to that of the most popular artists. An Australian by birth, a cosmopolite by education and intuition, it was as a pianist that Grainger entered upon his public career. The fundamental common sense of the man is amply testified to by the way in which he disciplined his desire to compose and publish. Not until he was, comparatively speaking, financially independent, did he indulge his desire for composition which he had always held in abeyance.

Young and essentially poetic as Grainger is, he is also a dynamic force. He is a modern of moderns in his recognition and utilization of contemporary characteristics. He tells me —and I know he is quite genuine—that he finds the American atmosphere, musically and otherwise, uniquely inspiriting. He responds to the curiously crude, brazen vernacular of a "rag" in different degree, but quite as comprehensively as he responds to the wistful folk music of County Derry.

The point of view and the artistic attitude of Percy Grainger is summed up in the one word "sanity." At a time when art has almost become amalgamated with science, and when an electrician is called in to illustrate Scriabine's tone poem, the work of a man like Grainger comes to us like a breath of fresh air.

He is perhaps the latest word in musical modernism because of the utter simplicity, reasonableness and buoyant open-airiness of his work. A thorough discussion of the technical aspects of his work is hardly in order here. They are at once piquant, breezy, a trifle impertinent and quite invigoratingly youthful.

The very look of his printed pages is startlingly novel. Open the "Irish Tune" or the "Colonial Song" and, in place of the usual academic indications of tempo and expression, you are confronted by a new language, a language as pithy as those conglomerations of sound which Wagner invented for parts of his "Ring." For example, "Slowish, but not dragged," "Tune to the fore," "Slightly lingeringly," "Louder," "Speed at will," "Slow off, lots."

His compositions are arranged and rearranged ("dished up" is the expression he uses) in every possible combination of instruments. Even that light o' love, the guitar, and the democratic banjo are not excluded from his instrumentation.

His titles are always significant. "Mock Morris," "Shepherd's Hey," "Handel in the Strand," "I'm Seventeen, come Sunday."

The impression which his work and his point of view conveys to us is, primarily, one of animation. Although technically profound, it is, nevertheless, so essentially alive that it appeals instantly to the listener as a sort of real and inevitable thing. It might be an excess of enthusiasm to endow Percy Grainger with the highest musical genius. Perhaps great art and popular idiom are incompatible. Grainger's music is a kind of exquisite slanginess.

His sanity, his love of idiom, his youth and his fine poetic fire are a very welcome note in the somewhat effete music of our day. Musically speaking, we might be forgiven for calling him "The Play-boy of the Musical World."

The splendid sketch of him which accompanies this note is from the hand of Grainger's American friend, John Singer Sargent.