Embracing Grainger

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

The 20th century's most maverick musician

sadomasochistic side to this flagrant flagellator, fixated upon baring soul and body to posterity in all-out confessional nakedness, convinced that health and sanity, humanity and creativity, consisted in absolute truth to feeling and impulse wherever they might lead, whatever they might reveal. So we see whips wrought by his own inventive craft, and a series of photographic self-portraits, nude and unabashed — a cross between old-fashioned dirty postcards and the chastely scientific studies of human locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge. But these images are devant et après sex (or whipping) at the hands of long-suffering Ella, his wife and companion in punishment. No wonder they originally reached the museum in brown envelopes marked ‘not to be opened until ten years after my death’ (what about hers, one wonders — she outlived him by 20 years).

Though the peculiarities continue, the passages are not all so twisty.There is diversion as well as diversity, hilarity as well as perversion, joy and fun alongside pain and absurdity; all are equally infused with Percy Grainger’s insatiable curiosity for human endeavour in its every manifestation. Red Indian beads and moccasins collected and sometimes threaded and sewn by his own restless fingers, annotated books, menus, programmes, timetables, bus tickets; and Grieg’s gold watch — gift of his widow to remember him by. Most evocative of all the Edison phonograph and wax cylinders with which he’d set out, a hundred years ago, to capture just in time the folksingers of England and further afield. (Sure enough, every subsequent transcription was dedicated ‘lovingly and reverently’ to Grieg’s memory.) Most hilarious, the suit he concocted of bright-coloured and patterned beach towels, cockily resplendent in its special see-through glass wardrobe with brass edgings.

Unique, lovable, strange to the dark depths, reaching some strange heights untouched by any other music, Percy Grainger is ensouled in his museum like a fragment of true Cross (or maybe, for him, a stretch of flayed martyrflesh) in its reliquary. If his wish is fulfilled, the mortal remains, also, will return to join the soul under the southern stars to which he aspired.