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  • The New Percy Grainger Companion
  • Mark Carroll
The New Percy Grainger Companion. Ed. by Penelope Thwaites. pp. xxii+310. (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2010, £45. ISBN 978-1-84383-601-8.)

The most intriguing aspect of The New Percy Grainger Companion is not so much the diversity of authors and entries, but rather the assertions made on the dust jacket. Here, we learn that Grainger ‘is one of the least understood figures in musical history’. Is he? That ‘he was a man born out of his time’. Was he? And finally, that ‘many of his ideas, musical and social, sit far more easily in our contemporary world’. Do they?

I’ll negotiate these tired clichés in due course, but for now it should suffice to acknowledge the contribution made by the book in offsetting (or at least working around) them. Whether or not there is some irony in this—what the book giveth the dust jacket taketh away—there remains a stimulating, if at times troublingly uncritical, collection of writings that coincides approximately with the fiftieth anniversary of Grainger’s death.

Penelope Thwaites flags in the introduction that her intention was to encourage readers to [End Page 430]experience Grainger’s music—whether as executants, professional or amateur, or as involved listeners’ (p. 1, her emphasis). The approach taken is disarmingly pragmatic in that the essays, which steer clear of topics such as Grainger’s mother, wife, sexual proclivities, athleticism, and Blue-eyed English, are penned by an array of individuals who have come into contact with Grainger and his music in a range of professional capacities.

There are performers (including Thwaites and Stephen Varcoe), conductors (John Hopkins, Paul Jackson, James Judd, and Timothy Reynish), scholars (Teresa Balough, Roger Covell, Kay Dreyfus, Lewis Foreman—editor of the first (1981) Grainger companion—and Bruce Clunies Ross), curators (Stewart Manville, the custodian of Grainger’s White Plains house and Ella Grainger’s second husband, and the curators of the Grainger Museum in Melbourne), publishers (Barry Peter Ould and Alan Woolgar), programmers (James Koehne), and brief entries by others (including Australia’s cause célèbre Peter Sculthorpe), who offer personal reminiscences of the man himself: a decidedly wholesome all-round paean to an avowedly carnal All-round Man.

The essays are grouped under two main headings, ‘The Music’, and ‘Grainger in Context’, with the bulk given over to the former. Thwaites, who is engaged currently in the ambitious Chandos project to record Grainger’s entire opus, makes a contribution to four chapters, including a study of his orchestral music from the conductor’s perspective, an overview of his music for piano, and a sketch of his family background. Other essays written from the performer/conductor standpoint, including ‘Music for Wind Band’ (Reynish), ‘Grainger for Choirs’ (Jackson), and ‘Singing Grainger Solo’ (Varcoe), offer overviews based upon experiences first-hand of performing and programming Grainger’s music. They do so in ways that are informative and generally free of hyperbole.

To question the extent to which these and other entries, such as the Thwaites and Koehne essay ‘Programming Grainger’ and Ould’s ‘Putting Grainger into Print’, make profound contributions to Grainger scholarship would be to miss the point. They offer practical advice to established and aspiring Graingerphiles. There is no crime in this, especially if it removes Percy from the metaphorical glass case of academe and renders him accessible to practising musicians and programmers. The exception to this in the first section is Jackson and Ould’s ‘Towards a Universal Language’, which at best belongs in the second section dealing with Grainger ‘in context’, and at worst limits itself to previously published research pertaining to Grainger’s involvement with early music, and his idea of what today we would term ‘world music’. As is the case with the inclusion of (yet another) Grainger timeline (pp. xix–xxii), one senses from this that no prior knowledge of Grainger scholarship is assumed. If that is the case then one might question any attempt to paint such a sanitized picture of Grainger.

The second section of the volume concerns itself with contextualizing Grainger. It does so in the belief that, to quote Thwaites, ‘a...

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