Embracing Grainger

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

The 20th century's most maverick musician

Mention the name to his compatriots above a certain age and they look affronted. The irrepressible author of Country Gardens, Mock Morris, Molly on the Shore, Handel in the Strand and Blithe Bells (his comparable take on Bach’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’) is merely a dubious smell, regrettable, embarrassing, to be Airwicked out while looking askance. In England, then the United States, Grainger’s reputation as a phenomenon of the first order has steadily grown since Benjamin Britten’s late recordings and the excellent biography by John Bird (1976). On his native continent the prophet’s honour has been slower to advance; the museum he founded and funded has long been closed, apparently an incubus to its host, to be dispossessed and disposed of as quietly as possible. But things are changing and the liability is increasingly seen as an asset. What he would have most abhorred is coming to pass — the embrace of the Establishment, academic canonisation, the quirky quicksilver set in iconic concrete. Support has been raised to surmount some serious structural problems — rising and falling damp, the curator tells me, and correcting the founder’s aversion to electricity for fear of fires; and, most of all, the long indifference if not positive aversion.

Reopening is scheduled for 2008. And meanwhile the curator has arranged an exhibition to display some of this exhibitionist museum’s most piquant and expressive contents. They range way beyond what might be expected of any normal shrine, however unusual — portraits, manuscripts, letters, etc. Even these can be odd chez Grainger: hand-drawn blown-up copies of his scores done as his sight began to fail, wholly practical, colour-coded to bring instruments in and out while conducting, yet in the abstract strong and bold as a Matisse paper cut-out or a Léger.

Grainger’s visual gift is shown less in the rather anaemic watercolours of picturesque scenes than in the elaborate Heath-Robinson designs for various ‘Tone Tools’, vehicles on the arduous quest, ultimately unsuccessful, to reproduce the sounds of nature and make art from them. The machines as actually constructed remain for the moment in their creator’s American home of his last 40 years: the devout hope, surely just, is that they end up in Melbourne, where this brave free spirit first began to be fascinated by wind and water. One is here already — the ‘butterfly piano’, delicately adjusted to play microtones, six to the normal one.

But Grainger is far odder than this. Thoroughly upsetting is the pathetic suicide note left by his all-embracing mother before plunging 14 storeys to her death in 1922, torn into fragments by her distraught son then carefully Sellotaped together again. Most disconcerting of all, the notorious