dormouse1953 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dormouse1953) wrote2010-10-01 12:04 pm
dormouse1953) wrote2010-10-01 12:04 pm
A whip-round for Percy Grainger
When I started getting interested in music in the late sixties, early seventies, the Australian-born composer Percy Grainger seemed to be a peripheral figure. He had been a folk song collector and a virtuoso pianist, but I don't recall his music being played much. There was a song, much played on the radio in the sixties, called In an English Country Garden which was based on one of his pieces, but I didn't find that out till much later.
This changed in the seventies with the publication of a biography and many revelations about his sex life, which seems to have involved whips. Apparently a play called A Whip-round for Percy Grainger was performed in Melbourne in the the year of the centenary of his birth, 1982. And his music did start to get played.
When I went to Australia for the first time in 1985, the Melbourne Arts Centre had an exhibition about him which I visited. I particularly remember a recording of Shallow Brown, his setting of an old sea shanty, being played as I wandered about the room. When I got home, I bought a record (vinyl) of some of his music, and have since acquired a few CDs.
The exhibition also mentioned a Percy Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne but I didn't have time to get to that. When I got back to Melbourne in 1999, I finally got to visit it. (By a lucky chance, I got there just as music students from the university were putting on a concert of new pieces.) The exhibition includes a number of his whips, and the confession he wrote, to be opened ten years after his death, detailing his sexual predilections.
There was also a poster for a film called Passion, which dramatised an incident from Grainger's life when he had an affair with one of his piano students. This film turned up on Channel 4 in the UK a couple of year later, broadcast in the early hours of the morning. This was at the time when Sarah Michelle Gellar was fronting an ad campaign for Maybelline cosmetics. I remember this, because after a particularly torrid scene in the film involving many whips, it cut to an ad break and there was Buffy herself advertising mascara with the slogan, "Give me the lashes I love." I wonder if this was a deliberate joke by someone at Channel 4.
Also on display were some of Grainger's free music machines. Grainger disliked the limitations of traditional instruments and performers and built machines to produce sounds from electronic oscillators controlled by paper rolls, driven by old vacuum cleaner motors, it would appear.
So, having arrived in Melbourne this year, the first thing I did the next morning was to walk up to the university in the pouring rain to visit the museum.
It was closed. There was a café round the back (called Percy's Place) and I asked there. They said the re-opening of the museum keeps on being put back and it was now due to re-open in September. I presume the place was being renovated. The Grainger Museum website still doesn't say the place had re-opened.
So I went shopping.
This changed in the seventies with the publication of a biography and many revelations about his sex life, which seems to have involved whips. Apparently a play called A Whip-round for Percy Grainger was performed in Melbourne in the the year of the centenary of his birth, 1982. And his music did start to get played.
When I went to Australia for the first time in 1985, the Melbourne Arts Centre had an exhibition about him which I visited. I particularly remember a recording of Shallow Brown, his setting of an old sea shanty, being played as I wandered about the room. When I got home, I bought a record (vinyl) of some of his music, and have since acquired a few CDs.
The exhibition also mentioned a Percy Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne but I didn't have time to get to that. When I got back to Melbourne in 1999, I finally got to visit it. (By a lucky chance, I got there just as music students from the university were putting on a concert of new pieces.) The exhibition includes a number of his whips, and the confession he wrote, to be opened ten years after his death, detailing his sexual predilections.
There was also a poster for a film called Passion, which dramatised an incident from Grainger's life when he had an affair with one of his piano students. This film turned up on Channel 4 in the UK a couple of year later, broadcast in the early hours of the morning. This was at the time when Sarah Michelle Gellar was fronting an ad campaign for Maybelline cosmetics. I remember this, because after a particularly torrid scene in the film involving many whips, it cut to an ad break and there was Buffy herself advertising mascara with the slogan, "Give me the lashes I love." I wonder if this was a deliberate joke by someone at Channel 4.
Also on display were some of Grainger's free music machines. Grainger disliked the limitations of traditional instruments and performers and built machines to produce sounds from electronic oscillators controlled by paper rolls, driven by old vacuum cleaner motors, it would appear.
So, having arrived in Melbourne this year, the first thing I did the next morning was to walk up to the university in the pouring rain to visit the museum.
It was closed. There was a café round the back (called Percy's Place) and I asked there. They said the re-opening of the museum keeps on being put back and it was now due to re-open in September. I presume the place was being renovated. The Grainger Museum website still doesn't say the place had re-opened.
So I went shopping.