Music by Percy Aldridge Grainger
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GRAINGER MUSEUM UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE CATALOGUE 4 Percy Grainger Music Collection Part III: 1st Supplementary List and Index Music by Percy Aldridge Grainger Kay Dreyfus TILE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Published by the Grainger Museum (The University of Melbourne Library) The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3052 © The Grainger Museum (The University of Melbourne Library), 1995 ISBN Volume Number 0 86839 695 8 Layout and typesetting by the Grainger Museum Printing by the Desktop, Design & Copy Centre, The University of Melbourne I Dedication This volume is dedicated to the memory of Burnett Cross, a loyal, loving and courageous friend to Percy Grainger, his Free Music and his Museum. Burnett died in New York on 4 March 1996. i iii Foreword Percy Grainger led a hero's life, ever striving to bring enlightenment and understanding to music and to life. True to his beloved Nordic ancestry, he faced the world as a musical Viking, travelling to unknown musical shores and continually struggling with the elements of the "powers that be". Even in death his restless spirit still seems to struggle to make itself known, not so much for its own individual worth as for the legacy of ideas available to benefit all humankind. In 1934 he founded the Grainger Museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne as a centre for ethnomusicological research, the repository of a lifetime's collection of cultural artefacts, and a library of his own musical compositions. Grainger was fascinated by the enormous questions posed by the act of artistic creation: what is it that causes an artist to create; what are the wellsprings, the sources of creation; what debt is owed by the artist to society, friends and loved ones? These are questions that he was unable to answer for himself, but he had faith that a future humanity would be able to answer them and to benefit from the answers; and he saw the Grainger Museum as one of the keys in this future study. It was for this reason that he wanted the Museum holdings to be as complete as possible. When he died in 1961, Grainger willed that all of his original musical manuscripts be sent to the Museum and copies distributed to other libraries around the world. As Dr. Dreyfus explains in her Introduction, the terms of the will were not always complied with and resulted in another Viking effort being undertaken by the final executor of the will, Mr. Burnett Cross, Grainger's close friend and colleague in the production of Free Music, to retain for the Museum original manuscripts that had been sent elsewhere. As Mr. Cross wrote to me in November of 1977: "By the terms of Percy's will, I am entrusted with the making of copies and sending originals to the Museum. You can bet that I will see to it that Percy's wishes are carried out." And so we have this wonderful new addition to the Museum's list of holdings as compiled by that ultimate of Grainger scholars, Dr. Kay Dreyfus, who completed the first catalogue of the Museum's holdings, Music by Percy Aldridge Grainger, nearly twenty years ago in 1976. This addition will bring to all students of Grainger's music a larger comprehension of not only the individual works but also of the larger plan from which Grainger worked, a plan so large that it sometimes seems to try to encompass all the forms and expressions of humanity. Kay Dreyfus, Burnett Cross, and Percy Grainger all working together and supported by Rosemary Florrimell, Curator of the Grainger Museum, have provided us with fresh insights and opportunities for study for which we should be forever grateful. Teresa Balough Old Lyme, Connecticut September, 1995. v Introduction When Percy Grainger died, in February 1961, things were not going so well for his Museum in Melbourne, although it had been gladly accepted as his gift to the University in 1933. The interest from the capital he had provided had never been enough to pay for proper curatorial care of the Museum and its collections and although devoted part-time curators had done their best, the building was falling into disrepair and silverfish were nibbling at the contents. The University, at that time, provided neither funds nor resources for the Museum: it was seen as a liability. Understandably, Ella Grainger, Grainger's wife and executor of his will, was reluctant to see any more of his precious manuscripts lodged so precariously. Accordingly, faced with the enormous task of disposing of his material legacy, she continued something Grainger had begun himself before his death and made substantial donations of thematically unified material to major libraries in the United States of America and Great Britain. Unfortunately Ella distributed uncopied originals, instead of the copies Grainger requested in his will so that original manuscripts could go to the Museum. In the mid-1970's, the University took up its responsibility and the Museum and its contents began to be put in order. As assessment and cataloguing of the collections proceeded it became clear that Ella Grainger's gifts to these other libraries, however carefully considered, had been to the detriment of the Museum's collections, as the material given away created large and important gaps in the material already held in the Museum. This was particularly true of the large amount of correspondence given to the Library of Congress. The catalogue shows many instances where the separation of the related items mediated any kind of understanding of the true nature of Grainger's output. After some thought and discussion I decided that an approach should be made to the Library of Congress for the material to be sent to the Grainger Museum, in accordance with the terms of Grainger's will. The approach was made, and successfully, by Burnett Cross, Grainger's executor after Ella Grainger's death. Subsequently, similar approaches were made by Burnett Cross, also successfully, to the New York Public Library and the Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. More material has come directly from Grainger's house in White plains, in 1977, before Ella Grainger's death in 1979, and after, in 1980. In all cases copies were retained by the relinquishing library. The generosity of the American libraries in agreeing to the transfer of their treasured Grainger manuscripts stands against the uncooperative attitudes of the libraries in Great Britain, which preferred to keep theirs, taking advantage of the reluctance of the executor to engage in legal action in England, Ireland and Scotland at the same time. A large part of this supplementary catalogue, then, concerns these significant acquisitions. vii Grainger was careful, during his lifetime, to see most of his important compositions published, often paying half the publishing costs himself. Much of this material has now gone out of print: the Museum functions importantly in ensuring its continuing availability. But in recent years, the efforts of devoted individuals have seen a number of important works published for the first time. Groups One and Two document these publications: by Don Gillespie at C F Peters in New York, by Barry Ould at Bardic Edition, by Geoffrey and Michael Brand at R. Smith and Company in England, by R. Mark Rogers at Southern Music Company in San Antonio, Texas, and by Frederick and Elizabeth Fennell at the Ludwig Music Publishing Company in the United States. The painstaking editorial work of such Grainger scholars and performers as Ronald Stevenson, Patrick O'Shaugnessy, Frederick Fennell and Keith Brion is well represented here. The continuing popularity of Grainger's music for concert band has ensured its publication and reprinting. Frederick Fennell's monumental new edition of the Lincolnshire Posy is a significant contribution to this genre. The Museum has benefited, and continues to benefit, from numerous gifts and donations. The provenance of each item added to the supplementary list in the Catalogue has been noted and an Index is provided which pulls together the material listed in this and the Museum's first catalogue, Music by Percy Aldridge Grainger. In my Introductory Note to the first catalogue, I made the observation that working on Grainger's music manuscripts was like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle. At that time, many of the pieces were scattered world-wide. This catalogue brings more of the pieces into view, in a single place. My study, Percy Grainger's Kipling Settings: A Study of the Manuscript Sources, is offered as a model of how the pieces might fit together. Kay Dreyfus September, 1995. EXPLANATION OF THE CATALOGUING SYSTEM For the clarity of listing it permits this supplementary catalogue follows Dr. T.C.Slattery's division of Grainger's works into "Original compositions and folksong settings" and "Arrangements of other composers' music." " The material is grouped according to type: published music, manuscripts, photostat copies of manuscripts and so on. The letter prefix "MG" has been given to all music in the Percy Grainger Music Collection, to distinguish the music from the other categories of material in the Grainger collection. The letter prefix and the number of the Group appear before a diagonal stroke. Numbers after the stroke indicate titles, arrangements, editions and items. The colon is used to separate off the numbering of individual parts in a set or groups of sketches or miscellaneous items. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This Catalogue was prepared on the initiative of Rosemary Florrimell, Curator of the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne. Kay Dreyfus would like to thank Catherine Morgan, James Nolen, Karen Vidler and especially Julian Kennedy and Alessandro Servadei for patiently transcribing this catalogue, in all its complexity, onto computer.