Percy Grainger: a Pioneer of Electronic Music
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Chapter 14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music Andrew Hugill From the vantage-point of today’s era of hardware hacking1 and circuit-bending,2 of infra- instruments3 and ‘dirty’ electronics,4 the case for Percy Grainger as a pioneer of electronic music is relatively easy to make. He foresaw that bricolage, often using fairly cheap and readily available technologies, would become central to what he called a ‘democratic’ approach to music-making. The revolution that the personal computer has wrought in contemporary musical culture has been to place supposedly ‘high end’ performance and production tools in the hands of everyone. No longer are synthesizers or sequencers the preserve of a few university music departments or specialist electronic music centres. Instead, they are the standard media of a host of digital musicians whose creativity blurs the distinctions between performance, composition and listening in ways of which Grainger would have approved. This revolution has affected all aspects of musical culture, from creation to consumption. 1 Hardware hacking involves the creative transformation of consumer electronics. See Nic Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 Circuit-bending is the creative customization of electronic circuitry within low voltage devices. See Reed Ghazala, Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005). 3 ‘In contrast to hyper-, meta- and virtual instruments, we propose infra-instruments as devices of restricted interactive potential, with little sensor enhancement, which engender simple musics with scarce opportunity for conventional virtuosity’. John Bowers and Phil Archer, ‘Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber, but Infra-Instruments’, in Proceedings of the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Conference (Vancouver: NIME, 2005), 5; http://www.nime.org/archive/?mode=ylist&y=2005 (accessed 14 October 2013). 4 ‘“Getting the hands dirty” refers to an approach in which process and performance are inseparably bound. The “performance” begins on the workbench and is extended onto the “stage” through live bricolage’. John Richards, ‘Getting the Hands Dirty’, Leonardo Music Journal 18 (2008): 25. 1 In the twenty-first century, the presence of digital devices has become so pervasive as to be unremarkable. Cars, fridges, phones, and the rest, are all controlled by computers, yet retain their traditional functionality. Music has entered a post-digital era in which physicality and resistance is increasingly being reintegrated into digital instruments. The computer has delivered ease of use, speed and facility. Meanwhile, various genres and sub-cultures have appeared, some of which have echoes of Grainger’s own peculiar outlook, showing a ‘retro’ fascination with pre-digital technologies. ‘Steampunk’, for example, has commandeered instruments such as the theremin in its quest to extend Victorian technologies into the digital age.5 At the heart of Grainger’s experimentation was the idea of the controller, which may be mapped onto a given musical parameter. All his Free Music machines are examples of this concept. Anyone who has ever used a sequencer, or created a patch, will attest that the principle of a soundless, usually graphical, representation is fundamental to electronic music creation today. From the ‘piano roll’ screens of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) sequencers to the chained modules of Max/MSP or pd, the mechanism is always the same: a digital controller acts upon an instrument or sound source to produce a musical outcome whose characteristics stand at one remove from the production system itself. Grainger chose sound sources such as theremins or solovoxes or Morse code practice machines, some of which remain popular as electronic instruments today. Grainger died in 1961, three years after Max Mathews created the first music programming language (MUSIC1) at Bell Laboratories. The MIDI standard, which has enabled the widespread use of controllers, was not introduced until 1981. No doubt Grainger, like so many of the more progressive digital musicians today, would have been somewhat dissatisfied with MIDI, but nevertheless the principle of separate control of every parameter of the music 5 See, for example, Lorin Parker and Sarah Seelig, Electric Western (2013), http://www.electricwestern.com (accessed 11 October 2013). 1 would have enabled him to realize his musical ideas quickly and easily. Wheels and quantization offer exactly the kind of minutely detailed control over pitch glide and rhythmic complexity that he sought. Had such tools been available to him, he might have been inspired to experiment still further or, individualist as he was, he might have reacted against computers and allied himself with the ‘post-digital’ tendency that critiques the apparent perfectionism of computers in music.6 Either way, Grainger’s hard-won musical experiments present few technical challenges today, and it is no surprise to find the Free Music no. 1 appearing on social media websites such as YouTube in a version for iPhone theremins, complete with scrolling score on graph paper directly reproduced from his original.7 The enthusiastic rehabilitation of Grainger in the twenty-first century, however, should not blind us to the inherent difficulties of placing him accurately within the historical development of electronic music. His own account of himself tends to complicate matters, since he seems to both overstate the extent of his influence and downplay the scale of his achievement. Nor are the accounts of those contemporaries who were aware of the truth necessarily very reliable. Suzanne Robinson has shown how Henry Cowell, for example, publicly marginalized Grainger’s position within the avant-garde, whilst privately acknowledging his crucial importance as a pioneer: [In an] article [in Musical Quarterly], published two months after he received from Grainger an explanation of his works for electronic instruments, Cowell discussed Vladimir Ussachevsky’s tape experiments. Cowell was in a unique position to bridge the distance between Grainger and younger composers, but for some reason refrained. … 6 See, for example, Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2007): 12–18. 7 Decibel New Music Ensemble, ‘Free Music No. 1 by Percy Grainger’ (2011), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQrnTXjKlw8&noredirect=1 (accessed 11 October 2013). 1 Only in private was Cowell willing to make grandiloquent claims for Grainger. In a letter dating from 1947 Cowell assured Grainger that ‘I consider you one of the great composers of this age – one who has had a great deal of influence on the thought and style of me, and of many others (most of whom probably don’t realize where it comes from).8 It is probable that Cowell was, as Robinson suggests, somewhat embarrassed to be publicly associated with such a figure as Grainger. On a musical level, his reputation as a composer of popular ‘light’ music could scarcely have been an advantage when trying to establish avant- garde credentials. Nor was there much evidence that the Free Music experiments would deliver anything that could be presented in public soon – indeed, that was not Grainger’s intention. On a more personal level, Grainger’s sexual proclivities had been one of the reasons why he had supported Cowell during his incarceration in San Quentin, and had afterwards employed him as secretary. He ‘viewed Cowell’s apparent sexual transgressions as evidence not of immorality but of “heaven-inspired genius”’.9 Cowell, on the other hand, had clearly decided on his release from prison to ‘toe the line’: indeed, that was in effect a precondition of his freedom. Grainger was therefore a potentially risky associate, despite his immense generosity. As Joel Sachs points out, Cowell ‘could not leave the prison until Grainger had been investigated. If the inquiry uncovered Grainger’s peculiar heterosexual practices, such as flagellation, their plan would be dead’.10 Cowell’s reticence may also have been strengthened by the fact that he probably did not think of Grainger as an American (despite the latter’s US citizenship being granted in 1918) or even by his highly problematic racial theories, although there is no evidence that this was the case. Whatever the truth, it was to be another critic/composer, Richard Franko Goldman, who in 1955 first drew public attention to the Free Music experiments, comparing Grainger favourably 8 Suzanne Robinson, ‘Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell: Concurrences between Two “Hyper-Moderns”’, Musical Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2011): 309. 9 Robinson, ‘Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell’, 294. 10 Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 344. 1 with Charles Ives, but also introducing the label of eccentricity which persists to the present day.11 In order to reach the fullest possible understanding of Grainger’s role as a pioneer of electronic music and his involvement in its evolution, it is important to examine his musical and/or personal relationships with other key figures, such as Ferruccio Busoni, Edgard Varèse, Léon Theremin, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and the electronic music scene in Europe and the USA. Grainger shared with many of these a Romantic vision of untrammeled nature that became transformed into a modern vision of technology. Nowhere is this more evident than in this extraordinarily prescient passage in the ‘Free Music’ statement, written on 6 December 1938, but surely the result of thoughts dating from much earlier than that: Free Music demands a non-human performance. Like most true music, it is an emotional, not a cerebral, product and should pass directly from the imagination of the composer to the ear of the listener by way of delicately controlled musical machines. Too long has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand, and subject to the interfering interpretations of a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct.