In few creative figures can such artistic brilliance, demonic drive, idiosyncracy and uncompromising ideology be so inextricably mixed as in the extraordinary life of Australia's Percy Grainger. One of the world's most popular pianists, he was also Australia's most innovative composer and instrument maker, a significant folk-song collector, an obsessive athlete and a teeming intellect. On the dark side his frank letters reveal his notorious masochistic sexuality, his lifelong absorption with his mother, his Nordic triumphalism and his curious Anglo-Saxon form of language. The 1990s has seen a reassessment of Grainger's contribution with major new recordings of his work and a feature film of his life.
'Suite for Percy Grainger: a biography' is an experimental poetic work on the life and times of one of Australia's most innovative and diversely accomplished musicians and composers, Percy Grainger. Alongside his immense musical output - including original compositions and folk-song arrangements - Grainger was also a keen essayist, a voracious reader, a dedicated letter writer, and an eager archivist, establishing the Grainger Museum as a repository for over 100,000 items including correspondence, clothing, musical manuscripts, instruments and everyday objects (not to forget his infamous whip collection). Of interest to Wilkinson, as a poet with one eye wandering into historical archives, is how one might write a biography sympathetic to Grainger's personality, lifestyle and philosophies. "Jessica L. Wilkinson is the patient recorder of the rhythms and riffs of Percy Grainger's life and the brilliant medium hosting his artistic vision. In its wild, spooling energies, this book is an anatomy of creativity and life writing, celebrating point and counterpoint of the poetics of music and music's poetry."- Felicity Plunkett Jessica L. Wilkinson's first book of poetry 'marionette: a biography of miss marion davies' was published by Vagabond Press in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Prize. She is the founding editor of RABBIT: a journal for nonfiction poetry. In 2014, Jessica won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and was the recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.
This collection is filled with songs that tell of the pleasures and pains of love, the patterns of the countryside and the lives of ordinary people. Here are unfaithful soldiers, ghostly lovers, whalers on stormy seas, cuckolds and tricksters. By turns funny, plain-speaking and melancholic, these songs evoke a lost world and, with their melodies provided, record a vital musical tradition. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside � but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land � as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man�s relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
The two men soon found that, despite their half-century difference in age, they had many affinities. Both were pianists of staggering abilities and composers who combined a love for folk-music and working-class art with an aesthetic that proposed a `world music' to include the farthest reaches of humanity. Both made an art of piano trascription of a wide variety of works and were champions of little-known music and composers. And both revered the work of Walt Whitman, that great poet of inclusivity, the pioneering spirit and the open road. --
What goes into the making of a creative genius and how can their gifts be used to help uplift humankind? These were questions that led the Australian/American pianist, composer, and music educator Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) to exhaustively document his life, his thoughts, and his associations and establish in the country of his birth a museum dedicated to helping answer those questions. Grainger was a creative genius who thought more in terms of the future than of the present and was an advocate for the role that music can play in creating a more harmonious and loving future for humankind. This book is the first attempt to bring together in one volume the details of Grainger’s life as they relate to his music using his own words and those of the people who knew him. It makes use of many heretofore unpublished documents and musical examples and is written in such a way as to be accessible to all while also offering a detailed study of his musical works.
"Grainger's music is being revived at a growing rate, especially in the United States, Britain and his native Australia. This is a riveting look at the driven, engaging personality who composed such fascinating pieces."--BOOK JACKET.
