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Chapter 14

Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music

Andrew Hugill

From the vantage-point of today’s era of hardware hacking1 and circuit-bending,2 of infra-

instruments3 and ‘dirty’ electronics,4 the case for Percy Grainger as a pioneer of electronic

music is relatively easy to make. He foresaw that bricolage, often using fairly cheap and readily

available technologies, would become central to what he called a ‘democratic’ approach to

music-making. The revolution that the personal computer has wrought in contemporary musical

culture has been to place supposedly ‘high end’ performance and production tools in the hands

of everyone. No longer are synthesizers or sequencers the preserve of a few university music

departments or specialist electronic music centres. Instead, they are the standard media of a host

of digital musicians whose creativity blurs the distinctions between performance, composition

and listening in ways of which Grainger would have approved. This revolution has affected all

aspects of musical culture, from creation to consumption.

1 Hardware hacking involves the creative transformation of consumer electronics. See Nic Collins, Handmade

Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Routledge, 2006).

2 Circuit-bending is the creative customization of electronic circuitry within low voltage devices. See Reed Ghazala,

Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005).

3 ‘In contrast to hyper-, meta- and virtual instruments, we propose infra-instruments as devices of restricted

interactive potential, with little sensor enhancement, which engender simple musics with scarce opportunity for

conventional virtuosity’. John Bowers and Phil Archer, ‘Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber, but Infra-Instruments’, in

Proceedings of the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Conference (Vancouver: NIME, 2005), 5;

http://www.nime.org/archive/?mode=ylist&y=2005 (accessed 14 October 2013).

4 ‘“Getting the hands dirty” refers to an approach in which process and performance are inseparably bound. The

“performance” begins on the workbench and is extended onto the “stage” through live bricolage’. John Richards,

‘Getting the Hands Dirty’, Leonardo Music Journal 18 (2008): 25.

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In the twenty-first century, the presence of digital devices has become so pervasive as to

be unremarkable. Cars, fridges, phones, and the rest, are all controlled by computers, yet retain

their traditional functionality. Music has entered a post-digital era in which physicality and

resistance is increasingly being reintegrated into digital instruments. The computer has

delivered ease of use, speed and facility. Meanwhile, various genres and sub-cultures have

appeared, some of which have echoes of Grainger’s own peculiar outlook, showing a ‘retro’

fascination with pre-digital technologies. ‘Steampunk’, for example, has commandeered

instruments such as the theremin in its quest to extend Victorian technologies into the digital

age.5

At the heart of Grainger’s experimentation was the idea of the controller, which may be

mapped onto a given musical parameter. All his Free Music machines are examples of this

concept. Anyone who has ever used a sequencer, or created a patch, will attest that the principle

of a soundless, usually graphical, representation is fundamental to electronic music creation

today. From the ‘piano roll’ screens of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) sequencers

to the chained modules of Max/MSP or pd, the mechanism is always the same: a digital

controller acts upon an instrument or sound source to produce a musical outcome whose

characteristics stand at one remove from the production system itself. Grainger chose sound

sources such as theremins or solovoxes or Morse code practice machines, some of which remain

popular as electronic instruments today.

Grainger died in 1961, three years after Max Mathews created the first music

programming language (MUSIC1) at Bell Laboratories. The MIDI standard, which has enabled

the widespread use of controllers, was not introduced until 1981. No doubt Grainger, like so

many of the more progressive digital musicians today, would have been somewhat dissatisfied

with MIDI, but nevertheless the principle of separate control of every parameter of the music

5 See, for example, Lorin Parker and Sarah Seelig, Electric Western (2013), http://www.electricwestern.com

(accessed 11 October 2013).

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would have enabled him to realize his musical ideas quickly and easily. Wheels and

quantization offer exactly the kind of minutely detailed control over pitch glide and rhythmic

complexity that he sought.

Had such tools been available to him, he might have been inspired to experiment still

further or, individualist as he was, he might have reacted against computers and allied himself

with the ‘post-digital’ tendency that critiques the apparent perfectionism of computers in

music.6 Either way, Grainger’s hard-won musical experiments present few technical challenges

today, and it is no surprise to find the Free Music no. 1 appearing on social media websites such

as YouTube in a version for iPhone theremins, complete with scrolling score on graph paper

directly reproduced from his original.7

The enthusiastic rehabilitation of Grainger in the twenty-first century, however, should

not blind us to the inherent difficulties of placing him accurately within the historical

development of electronic music. His own account of himself tends to complicate matters, since

he seems to both overstate the extent of his influence and downplay the scale of his

achievement. Nor are the accounts of those contemporaries who were aware of the truth

necessarily very reliable. Suzanne Robinson has shown how Henry Cowell, for example,

publicly marginalized Grainger’s position within the avant-garde, whilst privately

acknowledging his crucial importance as a pioneer:

[In an] article [in Musical Quarterly], published two months after he received

from Grainger an explanation of his works for electronic instruments, Cowell

discussed Vladimir Ussachevsky’s tape experiments. Cowell was in a unique

position to bridge the distance between Grainger and younger composers, but

for some reason refrained. …

6 See, for example, Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer

Music’, Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2007): 12–18.

7 Decibel New Music Ensemble, ‘Free Music No. 1 by Percy Grainger’ (2011),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQrnTXjKlw8&noredirect=1 (accessed 11 October 2013).

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Only in private was Cowell willing to make grandiloquent claims for

Grainger. In a letter dating from 1947 Cowell assured Grainger that ‘I

consider you one of the great composers of this age – one who has had a great

deal of influence on the thought and style of me, and of many others (most of

whom probably don’t realize where it comes from).8

It is probable that Cowell was, as Robinson suggests, somewhat embarrassed to be publicly

associated with such a figure as Grainger. On a musical level, his reputation as a composer of

popular ‘light’ music could scarcely have been an advantage when trying to establish avant-

garde credentials. Nor was there much evidence that the Free Music experiments would deliver

anything that could be presented in public soon – indeed, that was not Grainger’s intention. On

a more personal level, Grainger’s sexual proclivities had been one of the reasons why he had

supported Cowell during his incarceration in San Quentin, and had afterwards employed him as

secretary. He ‘viewed Cowell’s apparent sexual transgressions as evidence not of immorality

but of “heaven-inspired genius”’.9 Cowell, on the other hand, had clearly decided on his release

from prison to ‘toe the line’: indeed, that was in effect a precondition of his freedom. Grainger

was therefore a potentially risky associate, despite his immense generosity. As Joel Sachs points

out, Cowell ‘could not leave the prison until Grainger had been investigated. If the inquiry

uncovered Grainger’s peculiar heterosexual practices, such as flagellation, their plan would be

dead’.10 Cowell’s reticence may also have been strengthened by the fact that he probably did

not think of Grainger as an American (despite the latter’s US citizenship being granted in 1918)

or even by his highly problematic racial theories, although there is no evidence that this was the

case. Whatever the truth, it was to be another critic/composer, Richard Franko Goldman, who in

1955 first drew public attention to the Free Music experiments, comparing Grainger favourably

8 Suzanne Robinson, ‘Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell: Concurrences between Two “Hyper-Moderns”’, Musical

Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2011): 309.

9 Robinson, ‘Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell’, 294.

10 Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 344.

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with Charles Ives, but also introducing the label of eccentricity which persists to the present

day.11

In order to reach the fullest possible understanding of Grainger’s role as a pioneer of

electronic music and his involvement in its evolution, it is important to examine his musical

and/or personal relationships with other key figures, such as Ferruccio Busoni, Edgard Varèse,

Léon Theremin, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and the

electronic music scene in Europe and the USA. Grainger shared with many of these a Romantic

vision of untrammeled nature that became transformed into a modern vision of technology.

Nowhere is this more evident than in this extraordinarily prescient passage in the ‘Free Music’

statement, written on 6 December 1938, but surely the result of thoughts dating from much

earlier than that:

Free Music demands a non-human performance. Like most true music, it is an

emotional, not a cerebral, product and should pass directly from the

imagination of the composer to the ear of the listener by way of delicately

controlled musical machines. Too long has music been subject to the

limitations of the human hand, and subject to the interfering interpretations of

a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct.

Machines (if properly constructed and properly written for) are capable of

niceties of emotional expression impossible to a human performer.12

This was written at a time when the fashion for excessive personal intervention by the performer

was at its height. Grainger himself was a notable example of this tendency. Yet his Free Music

vision sees not, as many would have feared, a collapse of human expressivity into mechanical

performance, but rather a more nuanced and even ‘natural’ musical communication based on

‘universal’ principles. He envisioned that such a transformation would blur the distinction

between composer and performer in a way that is very evident today. He understood that direct

11 Richard Franko Goldman, ‘Percy Grainger’s “Free Music”’, Julliard Review 2, no. 3 (Fall 1955): 43–6.

12 Percy Grainger, ‘Free Music (1938)’, in Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), 294.

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expression through technology had the capability to overcome many of the limitations imposed

by musical conventions and, implicit in this statement but more fully articulated elsewhere, that

the whole world of sound is open to the composer and capable of becoming ‘musical’. His

vision was of a music that ‘tallies with the streaming, surging, forces of the non-human nature

… or the wholly impersonal treads of mankind-as-a-whole’.13

A ‘message sent not by men but by gods’

That the roots of Grainger’s modernism lay in Romanticisim is evidenced by his youthful

encounter with the Aeolian harp of telegraph wires stretched across the Australian outback. For

the Romantics, the Aeolian harp represented a metaphysical ideal of the free play of nature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1795) would have been known in

most well-to-do households, and especially one in which Rose Grainger set aside time each day

for reading aloud:14

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all?15

Such images of natural spontaneity would have been formative for the young Grainger, not only

through literature but also through the music regularly played in the house: the improvisatory

Beethoven, the Schubert of the impromptus, Schumann, Chopin, Grieg.

In 1839, another writer, with whom the Graingers were less likely to have been familiar,

had a formative experience which signalled the beginnings of the integration of technology into

13 Percy Grainger, ‘Typescript sketch for “My Wretched Tone-Life”’ (1953), in Thomas P. Lewis, A Source Guide to

the Music of Percy Grainger, http://www.percygrainger.org/prognot3.htm (accessed 11 October 2013).

14 John Bird, Percy Grainger (London: Faber and Faber, 1982): 11.

15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Eolian Harp, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/183957 (accessed 11 October

2013).

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this vision. In his first major text, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry David

Thoreau described an encounter with the ‘telegraph harp’:

Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here about twenty

miles, from Caleb Harriman’s tavern in Hampstead toward Haverhill, when I

reached the railroad in Plaistow, I heard at some distance a faint music in the

air like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the

cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and

applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the

telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not

by men, but by gods.16

Thoreau and Grainger had much in common. Their belief in an ideal spiritual state, full of

insights achieved through personal intuition, led to a rejection of organized religion in favour of

a kind of wild humanism. Grainger was not satisfied with merely evoking the Aeolian harp (as

Cowell did in his celebrated piano piece Aeolian Harp of 1923), he wanted to recreate the

actual sounds of the telegraph harp. Thus a Romantic instrument was transformed by

technology into a modern machine, and the utilitarian purpose of the wires was similarly

transformed by the transcendent artist into an aesthetic experience. Had Thoreau or Grainger

stumbled upon an Aeolian harp laid out in some remote spot for the purpose of poetic

contemplation, they might have been charmed, but hardly transported. The much larger

telegraph harp, on the other hand, with its discovered sonic by-product of human

communications whose nature remained unknowable, renewed Romantic energies through its

distinctively modern arbitrariness. The importance of this insight was repeatedly cited by

Grainger:

There is such an infinite variety in sound – the waves that lap against a boat,

the delicate variation in the hum of telegraph wires as you pass – so many

things I wanted to put to music. But there was no instrument.17

16 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Radford, VA: Wilder, 2008), 122.

17 Quoted in Barbara Walliss, ‘He Composes on a Grand Scale’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 19 October 1955, 19.

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Out in nature, men have long known how to enjoy

discordant combinations. A

telegraph wire humming B flat, a bird piping a flat B natural and factory

whistles chiming in with notes resembling D and F sharp; the mournful appeal

of such accidental ensembles has frequently awakened emotional response.

But a musician in 1890 would have been inclined to enjoy such sounds as

merely part of ‘nature’ and with no bearing upon his ‘art’, whereas we to-day

are more apt to find compositional hints in such occurrences.18

Notice how the soundscape has been absorbed into the palette of musical possibilities in a way

that seems entirely in accordance with modern sensibilities, but also there is a recognition of the

need to turn to new technologies to realize this new music (‘there was no instrument’).

Grainger named his idea ‘Free Music’, to signal its transcending of all established

musical (and even moral) systems and conventions. He insisted upon its primacy:

Personally, I have heard free music in my head since I was a boy of 11 or 12

in Auburn, Melbourne. It is my only important contribution to music. My

impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave

movements in the sea that I first observed as a young child at Brighton,

Victoria, and Albert Park, Melbourne.19

In later accounts, he elaborated that it was both the singing qualities of the sounds and the

irregular rhythms of the water lapping against the side of the boat that entranced him. He also

drew inspiration from the contours of the hills and dales of Adelaide. Ros Bandt notes that ‘One

of his childhood notebooks has sketches of these shapes in multiple coloured waves, using

different coloured pencils to distinguish between them, picking out different relationships of the

rising and falling in each line.’20 Thus these wave movements and contours were to become the

‘hills and dales’ of the Kangaroo-Pouch machine and other such controllers. Grainger ‘read’ the

18 Percy Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality in Unwritten Music’, Musical Quarterly 1, no. 3 (July 1915): 430.

19 Percy Grainger, ‘Free Music (1938)’, 294.

20 Ros Bandt, ‘Hearing the Free Music: Percy Grainger, Australian Visionary of the Soundscape, Creator of Electro-

Acoustic Free Music and Sound Machines’, Soundscape: The International Journal of Acoustic Ecology 8, no. 1

(2008): 9.

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landscape as a form of graphic notation which mapped onto melody and rhythm. He grasped

that in nature such undulations have a potentially infinite pitch gradation, which the stepped

scales of human music lack. This is what he meant by ‘tonal freedom’, a characteristic that he

extended to encompass freedom from both the rigid constraints of tonality and the forms (such

as sonata form) it engendered.

Grainger remained a committed melodist throughout his career. The Free Music is both

highly melodic and contrapuntal in nature. Although it was later to become evident that

electronic means would be the best way to realize what he heard in his head, he seems never to

have challenged the idea that melody is the foremost aspect of a composition, with rhythm an

aspect of the melodic experience, and timbre subsidiary to both.

Realizing Free Music was to become the central goal of his creative life. It was the

knowledge that this could only be achieved through developing new specialized technologies

that drove his subsequent experimentations with both mechanical and electrical devices. In the

process, he discovered a number of techniques which have become part of the arsenal of

electronic music: multi-track recording, sequencing, continuous modulation, timbral synthesis

and so on. He was not the only person to have made these innovations, but he did so largely by

and for himself.

Beatless Music

Grainger’s early experiments were mechanical in nature and some were destined to remain only

thought-experiments. So, for example, there was the imagined device operated by an ‘orchestral

supervisor’ which would pass instrumental parts on strips across a mechanical music desk.21

This was described to Cyril Scott and others in 1897 and carries the typical Grainger hallmark

of the replacement of the over-glorified individual with the baton in favour of a more artisanal

approach to music-making. The concept has had to wait until the present day for its realization.

21 Bird, Percy Grainger, 36.

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In 2012, the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra finally abandoned paper scores altogether and

now play from digital screens.22

More achievable were his attempts to create ‘music in which no standard duration of

beat occurs, but in which all rhythms are free, without beat cohesion between the various

polyphonic parts’.23 The beginning of this lifelong project was his description of a ‘Beatless-

Notation Machine’, written in 1902–03.24 The machine is powered by electricity, which turns

the rotating wheels at a steady pace. However, the notation mechanism itself is mechanical and

has obvious similarities to a piano roll. Notes are defined by duration (expressed as a

rectangular shape of varying length) and by pitch (expressed by their relative vertical position

on a grid of evenly spaced horizontal lines). Such graphical notation, Grainger argued, would

allow for much greater rhythmic sophistication as players interpret the size and position of the

rectangles, rather than having to relate to a beat given by a conductor. It also opens up a

possibility of moving beyond equal temperament to what Grainger called ‘absolute tuning’,

using sliding chords that sub-divide the octave into more than 12 regular divisions. In a note at

the end of the text, Grainger also states that such a notation device could assist in ‘taking down

Eastern, native, or any music run on another scale than our European’.25

Although it was never actually constructed, the basic design of the Beatless-Notation

Machine was to crop up again in several of the later Free Music machines. At the same time,

Grainger’s conventionally notated music of the period also strove towards beatless music, by

deploying rapidly changing time signatures in works such as the Marching Song of Democracy

22 ‘Le Brussels Philharmonic passe aux partitions digitales’, RTL.be, 24 March, 2012,

http://static1.www.rtl.be/info/magazine/musique/919954/le-brussels-philharmonic-passe-aux-partitions-digitales

(accessed 11 October 2013).

23 Margaret Hee-Leng Tan quoted in Lewis, A Source Guide, http://www.percygrainger.org/prognot3.htm (accessed

14 October 2013).

24 Percy Grainger, ‘Beatless-Notation Machine (1902/3)’, in Gillies and Clunies Ross, Grainger on Music, 29–34.

25 Grainger, ‘Beatless-Notation Machine (1902/3)’, 34.

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(1901), the two Hill-Songs (also begun in 1901) and, most extraordinary of all, the Sea Song

Sketch (1907), written originally for piano then scored onto graph paper and rearranged for

pianola in 1922.

The Phonograph

Grainger acquired an Edison Bell cylinder phonograph for the purpose of collecting folk songs.

He was the first person to make live recordings in the British Isles and, in the period between

1906 and 1915, assembled hundreds of tunes from around the world.26 His relationship with the

phonograph evolved with the technology, as he kept abreast of the latest innovations. In 1933,

for example, he was keenly transferring parts of his cylinder collection to disc using a

phonograph machine rented by Henry Cowell.27

The phonograph was more than just a recording device for him: it was in many respects

a creative tool. Its ability to play back slower than the original recording offered the possibility

to transcribe the irregular rhythms and microtonal inflections of folk music with more accuracy,

but also to enter into the sound itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the transcriptions

of Rarotongan part-songs that Grainger made in 1909, working from recordings first made by

Alfred J. Knocks in 1907. He heard therein both irregular rhythms and an approach to harmony

which was ‘free from the kind of harmonic consciousness which art-musicians have gradually

built up through the centuries’.28 As Paul Jackson observes, this ‘polyphonic music – with its

free-flowing and subtly interdependent melodic lines – becomes, for Grainger, an embodiment

in sound of a democratic pursuit’.29

Grainger also became very interested in the possibility that the phonograph could

translate sound directly into notation. This was an idea born out of necessity, because the labour



28 Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality’, 425.

29 Paul Jackson, ‘Percy Grainger’s Aleatoric Adventures: The Rarotongan Part-Songs’, Grainger Studies: An

Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (2012): 6.

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involved in transcribing folk songs was very great. Throughout 1907–09 he tried to find

machines that could help. Colin Symes describes how Grainger first read of a device that

‘allowed the vibrations of the recording style to be written on a travelling sheet of smoked

paper’ in an article on musical ethnology by Charles S. Myers, supplied to him by Cecil Sharp.30

This was followed by a similar device created by a Dr Marage for diction classes, then a

machine called the Parolograph which rendered vocal sounds as ‘a series of “waves and

curves”’.31 In 1909, Grainger wrote to Benjamin Ives Gilman, who had invented a method of

‘phonographic notation’, who referred him on in turn to E. M. von Hornbostel and Otto

Abraham at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv who were analysing phonographic recordings.

However, none of these devices was technically able to deliver the kind of detailed results

Grainger sought and, as Symes comments, by 1909 ‘he was more interested in recording his

own performances than those of folk musicians’.32 Nevertheless, once again, Grainger’s

imagination anticipated much later developments in audio pattern recognition and feature

extraction techniques, as well as machine listening. The day when a score may be printed

directly from a live performance is not far away.33

Much later, Grainger was to use the phonograph in a series of experiments that were

very early examples of multi-tracked recording. In 1949–50, he worked with a home recording

device to create a series of six 78 rpm discs of his piece The Lonely Desert Man Sees the Tents

of the Happy Tribes. The Grainger Museum lists in its catalogue a ‘set of parts for a fragment of

the composition, perhaps intended for a sound trial’, as follows: E@ Alto Saxophone, n.d.; Cello,

8 August 1949; Guitar, 1, 2–3 August 1949; Vibraharp or Harp, 19 March 1950; Clarinets III,

30 Colin Symes, ‘“Mechanical Notators”: Percy Grainger and Early Voice Recognition Devices’, Hoard House: News

from the Grainger Museum 8 (2008): 1.

31 Symes, ‘“Mechanical Notators”’, 1.

32 Symes, ‘“Mechanical Notators”’, 2.

33 See, for example, a host of projects listed by the Digital Music Research Network,

http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/index.html (accessed 11 October 2013).

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IV, 19 March 1950.34 There is also a sheet labelled simply ‘Burnett’, referring to the engineer

and long-time collaborator Burnett Cross who, with his brother Howard (Howie), worked on the

session. Also in this collection are various other fragmentary parts: for ‘lead-line’, for piano and

for marimbas. Warren Burt, who recently went through the resulting recordings, heard ‘various

parts for reed organ, marimba, voices, and what sounds like either a cello or a Solovox – an

early monophonic synthesizer made by the Hammond corporation’.35 It is easy to imagine that

Grainger and Cross would have read from parts nominally for other instruments in order to

make these recordings. Whatever the precise instrumentation, the method was clear to Burt:

I realized that what was happening was that Grainger was recording a part on

one 78 rpm disc recorder, then playing back that back on another 78 rpm disc

player, playing along with that, recording the result, and then playing that

recording back while recording another part along with the mix. This was a

primitive, but still very effective way of multitracking.36

Grainger may not have been the very first to use this method (Paul Hindemith had tried

something like it several years earlier, and Pierre Schaeffer was also working in a similar way)

but he certainly invented the method for himself, and in advance of the best-known instances.

Although stereo recording had been developed as early as 1943, it was not made commercially

available until the early 1950s. Les Paul used tape to create his first private monophonic multi-

tracked recordings in 1947. He then moved on to a disc-cutting technique similar to Grainger’s,

before releasing a string of recordings from 1951 onwards that used the famous ‘sound on

sound’ method of overdubbing.

Grainger, Busoni and Varèse

34 Kay Dreyfus, Music by Percy Aldridge Grainger (Parkville, Vic.: University of Melbourne, 1995), 65.

35 Warren Burt, ‘Picking up the Threads of a History More Extensive Than Previously Known: Grainger’s Work with

Music Technology’, in Ghost in the Machine: Performance Practice in Electronic Music, Proceedings of the 2004

Australasian Computer Music Conference, Victoria University, Wellington, 1–3 July 2004 (ACMA Inc, 2011), 2,

http://acma.asn.au/conferences/acmc2011/ (accessed 8 January 2013).

36 Burt, ‘Picking up the Threads’, 2.

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In 1903, Grainger went to Berlin to study with Ferruccio Busoni. Their relationship has been

well documented elsewhere.37 It foundered as Grainger realized that he had no respect for

Busoni as a composer, while Busoni equally had little time for Grainger as a pianist, eventually

(in 1911) calling him a ‘charlatan’.38 Nevertheless, during the early period at least, they got

along very well and shared many ideas together. Grainger’s unpublished ‘Anecdotes’ charts the

relationship thoroughly, but concentrates upon personal matters, issues of pianism and his own

instrumental compositions, whose irregular rhythms clearly did not faze Busoni.39 In 1907 they

met and played through the two-piano version of Hill-Song no. 2, a work for which the Italian

expressed great admiration, while criticizing the way in which the rhythms were notated.

At the end of that the same year (or possibly the beginning of 1908), Edgard Varèse

arrived in Berlin to work under Busoni’s protection and tutelage. Varèse was, in many ways, the

composer whose journey into electronic music most closely paralleled that of Grainger. Yet it

seems they only ever met on a single occasion, by chance, after a lecture given by Leopold

Stokowski at the Musicological Society meeting in New York on 20 April 1943. This was not

for want of trying on Grainger’s part. John Bird records that ‘The Australian had tried on many

occasions to establish contact with him, but Varèse had not answered his letters. Grainger

wanted to talk over many ideas concerning his Free Music, but this brief meeting, about which

no information has been handed down, was to be their only one’.40 Whether Busoni’s view of

Grainger, or indeed Grainger’s view of Busoni and the whole European tradition of which he

was a prime exponent, influenced Varèse’s aversion is a matter of speculation. However, there

is no doubt that the three men shared a common view of music which is propounded firstly and

most powerfully in Busoni’s Entwurfeiner neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Sketch for a New

37 See, for example, Bird, Percy Grainger, 76–82.


39 Percy Grainger, ‘Anecdotes’ (1949–54), 26, Acc. no. 03.2001, Grainger Museum collection, University of

Melbourne.


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Aesthetic of Music), first published in German in 1907 and in an English edition in 1911, in

which he calls for the abandonment of classical instruments and harmonic conventions in favor

of microtonalism.41 He set out a system of notation for microtonal music using a six-line staff,

but acknowledged that electronic instruments would ultimately be the best way to realize these

ideas, enthusiastically citing Thaddeus Cahill’s recently invented Telharmonium as a portent of

what was to come.

It is inconceivable that at least some of the ideas about musical emancipation in this text

would not have been discussed by Busoni with both Grainger and Varèse during their meetings.

Varèse was to write that ‘the evolution of music is coming to grief on our musical instruments

[because of] their ranges, their timbres, and their possibilities of execution’,42 while Grainger’s

view of these issues was expressed frequently, not least in the ‘Free Music’ statement with its

declaration:

Existing conventional music (whether ‘classical’ or popular) is tied down by

set scales, a tyrannical (whether metrical or irregular) rhythmic pulse that

holds the whole tonal fabric in a vice-like grasp and a set of harmonic

procedures (whether key-bound or atonal) that are merely habits, and certainly

do not deserve to be called laws.43

Despite such common ancestry, there were some profound differences between Varèse and

Grainger, which were to be most fully revealed by their electronic music. For Varèse the

‘liberation of sound’ was not simply a matter of freeing music from the conventions of harmony

and the limitations of instruments. It was about the integration of sounds previously considered

‘unmusical’ into composition or, as he preferred to call it, ‘sound organization’. Rooted in

41 Ferruccio Busoni, ‘Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music’, trans. Th. Baker in Three Classics in the Aesthetics of

Music (New York: Dover, 1962): 73–97.

42 Edgard Varèse, ‘Que la musique sonne’, quoted in Jürg Stenzl, ‘“Daily Life: Slavishly Imitated”: Edgard Varèse

and Italian Futurism’, in Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, ed. Felix Meyer and Heidy

Zimmerman (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2006), 145.

43 Grainger, ‘Free Music (1938)’, 293.

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Italian Futurism, works such as the Poème electronique (1957) display an imperviousness not

only to traditional notions of harmony, but also to melody. The change that Varèse wrought was

to make timbre the primary component of the music. As he said in his lecture ‘New Instruments

and New Music’, delivered at Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, in 1936, a lecture that was to

become the first item in the collection entitled The Liberation of Sound:

When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking

the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound-masses, of

shifting planes, will be clearly perceived. … The role of color or timbre [will]

be completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or

picturesque; it would become an agent of delineation, like the different colors

on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form.44

It is central to the grand narrative of modernism in music that the breakdown of tonality led to

an ever-increasing focus on timbre as a structuring device, from Schoenberg’s ‘Farben’ from the

Fünf Orchesterstück (Five Orchestral Pieces) op. 16, composed in 1909, through to the

‘spectral’ compositions of today. The position of Varèse in this line of development is crucial,

as someone whose electronic music contained pure timbres, or objets sonores (as Pierre

Schaeffer would have called them). In Varèse’s aesthetic, ‘musical’ terms such as melody,

harmony, even rhythm, were gradually replaced by more scientific words such as frequency,

spectrum, periodicity and so on.

While Grainger was by no means indifferent to timbre, it did remain relatively

incidental when compared to the importance of achieving continuous gliding tones, or irregular

rhythms, as Margaret Hee-Leng Tan points out when discussing the Kangaroo-Pouch Machine:

‘The instrument produced a clear reedy tone somewhat like that of a clarinet. Its most obvious

limitation was its inability to produce variations in the tone colour. Grainger felt, however, that

44 Edgard Varèse and Chou Wen-Chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 11.

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at this stage of his Free Music development, timbre was a secondary consideration.’45 Grainger

was similarly open to the idea of incorporating some aspects of the soundscape into music, as

has already been discussed, but he nevertheless retained a sense of discrimination. Musique

concrète, with its use of noise, seems not to have interested him much, nor an architectural

approach to form. His frame of reference consequently remained apparently wedded to the

cultural legacy of the Romantic era: tunes, harmonies, rhythms. Whereas the titles and rhetoric

surrounding Varèse’s music aspired to the a priori truths of mathematics, Grainger’s

universalism was rooted in the experiences of humanity.

This comparison may appear to leave Grainger lagging behind Varèse in the evolution

of modernism, but the true position was rather more complicated than that. Grainger was very

familiar with Varèse’s Ionisation for 13 percussion (1929–31), having been in the audience for

the New York première in 1933 (Cowell was a pianist in this performance). Furthermore, he had

attended the London première of Schoenberg’s Fünf Orchesterstück in 1912 (which he loved,

despite the controversy) and was to attend a lecture entitled ‘New Instruments and Electronic

Music’ given on 3 November 1958 by Karlheinz Stockhausen at the McMillin Theatre,

Columbia University. Grainger knew very well the trajectory and concerns of European

modernism, yet he positioned himself outside that line of development, connecting more with

the American experimental tradition that included John Cage.

If we consider, for example, the use of gliding pitches in their work, a clearer sense of

the distinction between the two composers emerges. Varèse’s siren functioned mainly as a

structural and rhetorical device (evoking wartime memories). Grainger ignored the siren, mainly

because of the lack of control of the instrument, preferring instead to use a theremin. Controlled

use of sliding pitches was to constitute the whole of the Free Music, providing both rhythmic

and melodic content in a contrapuntal weave that was fluid and formally emergent. It was the

45 Margaret Hee-Leng Tan and Alan Stout, ‘The Free Music of Percy Grainger’, in Lewis, A Source Guide,

http://www.percygrainger.org/prognot3.htm (accessed 14 October 2013).

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extent of his working through of that idea towards his ideal of a universal and objective music

that was his original contribution.

In the end, the two men probably had more in common than the histories have hitherto

acknowledged. Both saw music as essentially an artisanal activity created by ‘tone-smiths’

(Grainger) or ‘workers in rhythms, frequencies and intensities’ (Varèse).46 They knew that

notation would have to change, or be replaced entirely, and that the electronic medium would be

the only one capable of realizing this new music.

Grainger’s Electronic Music

As Warren Burt points out, the corpus of Grainger’s electronic output was rather more

substantial than people generally realize, for far from the two or three minutes of recorded

material that is the common perception of Grainger’s recorded Free Music output, there is fact

about an hour of recorded material, as well as a volume of sketches, scores and plans.47

The recorded material includes:

• seven recordings of the Butterfly Piano;

• two Sea Song recordings;

• a version of Early One Morning on solovoxes and reed organ;

• seven multi-tracked discs of The Lonely Desert Man Sees the Tents of the Happy

Tribes;

• ten recordings of the Reed Box, featuring reversed playback, gliding tones and timbral

synthesis;

• four recordings of oscillator tests;

• a Kangaroo Pouch recording lasting 82 seconds;

• two realizations of Free Music no. 1 and one of Free Music no. 2;

• Grainger singing and playing ‘Rufford Park Poachers’ and ‘Lord Melbourne’;

46 Varèse and Wen-Chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 18.


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• various spoken introductions by Burnett Cross.

To all this may be added the mechanical and instrumental compositions in which he tried out

ideas that pave the way for the Free Music: Random Round (begun in 1912) which was a

chance-based piece, and Tribute to Foster (1914), in which, as one reviewer noted, the use of

massed wineglasses by the chorus sounds like ‘the noise of telephone wires on a windy day’.48

By 1922 he was able to realize the Sea Song Sketch by cutting piano rolls by hand, and he

continued to use the electrical reproducing Duo Art grand piano for beatless music for several

years.

In the early 1920s, he set about trying to find electronic instruments that could realize

his Free Music ideas. In 1922, as part of his lecture series at New York University, he attended a

demonstration of the rhythmicon, which was an early drum machine built by Léon Theremin to

a commission from Henry Cowell. The rhythmicon could layer up to 16 beat tracks that become

progressively more complex in accordance with the same laws that govern the harmonic series:

a ‘fundamental’ beat is sub-divided rhythmically track by track into two, three and so on. An

additional key enabled syncopation. The beats were controlled by light passing through punched

holes in spinning discs to electric photoreceptors that trigger percussive sounds.

However, it was the possibility of creating music made of continuously gliding pitches

that most preoccupied him. In 1922 he attended a concert of works for theremin, an instrument

he described as ‘perfectly able to carry out my intentions’.49 Later, in 1932, he discovered the

‘Polytone’, a keyboard instrument that subdivided the octave into 60 steps. Its inventor, the

composer Arthur Fickénscher, had also composed a quintet that included brief passages of

microtonal writing, something that fascinated Grainger. But it was the theremin that remained

48 ‘Grainger’s Busy Evening’, Star (Melbourne), 5 August 1935, 16, quoted in Robinson, ‘Percy Grainger and Henry

Cowell’, 281.

49 Grainger, letter dated 1937 to John Tasker Howard, printed in Howard, Our Contemporary Composers: American

Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), 274, quoted in Robinson, ‘Grainger and

Cowell’, 292.

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his instrument of choice, although his ambitions to work more closely with Léon Theremin were

to be thwarted in 1938, when the Russian suddenly returned home in what has subsequently

been revealed to have been a staged kidnapping.50

Even so, the second version of Free Music no. 1 (1936–7) was scored for four

theremins, and Free Music no. 2 was scored for six theremins. As Ros Bandt observes, the ‘hills

and dales’ of the notations correspond to the two-handed nature of the instrument, with the left

hand controlling the amplitude or volume, and the right the pitch.51 This is a formula that was

subsequently reproduced in the Kangaroo Pouch Machine, which similarly maps the

undulations of its hills and dales onto the pitch and amplitude of its eight valve oscillators. This

in itself confirms the hierarchy of Grainger’s musical concerns: melody first, rhythm as a

product of melody, timbre as an inherent property of the instrument used.

The theremin scores for Free Music no. 1 are drawn on graph paper, giving detailed and

precise instructions about both rate of glide and range of amplitude, with colours used to

distinguish between the two parameters.52 Although the y-axis of the graph indicates a pitch

range from A# below middle C upwards for two octaves, and an amplitude range from ppp to

fff, the flowing lines constantly cross the lines of the grid as time flows along the x-axis,

rendering the ‘musical’ notation as merely a guideline.

The aim is constant, smooth and free motion. As Grainger remarked in the ‘Free Music’

statement, ‘it seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying and yet not be able to execute tonal

glides and curves’. This was his ‘music of the future’, that is both inevitable and necessary:

Yet the matter of Free Music is hardly a personal one. If I do not write it

someone else certainly will, for it is the goal that all music is clearly heading


51 Bandt, ‘Hearing the Free Music’, 11.

52 Free Music no. 1 was first scored in 1935 for string quartet or, to use Grainger’s terminology, ‘4-some’. This

version was broadcast on ABC Radio the following year, conducted by Percy Code. Grainger specifies that the string

players should execute slow glides between notes.

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for now and has been heading for through the centuries. It seems to me the

only music logically suitable to a scientific age.53

Theremins have one major drawback: they still require human performers. The frequent popular

performances on these instruments by artists such as Clara Rockmore seemed to be trying to

place them within the classical tradition. Grainger’s project required a machine performance

that would be delivered by a programmable controller. In the absence of a computer, the only

solution was to construct devices which could realize the full extent of his vision. The years

from 1945 to his death in 1961 saw him working continuously on this project in collaboration

with the engineer Burnett Cross, with contributions from Cross’s brother Howard and

Grainger’s wife Ella.

The design and construction of the Free Music machines has been extensively discussed

elsewhere54 and space does not permit a detailed account here. There were seven main

instruments, along with several subsidiary experiments and variations:

• Sliding Pipes Free Music Invention (1946). Swanee whistles controlled by an

undulating cardboard ‘score’ (see Figure 14.1). A more developed version of the same

idea, dating from 1950, used slits cut in paper rolls to control the glides in whistles and

recorders (see Figure 14.2). Grainger also used an organ pipe to create gliding tones.

Here, the holes are cut or drilled at one-third of a half-tone apart, and the pitch is

controlled by rolling perforated paper over the pipe (see Figure 14.3).

• Solovox (initially melanette) instrument controlled by a piano roll (1948–50). Three

solovoxes (monophonic synthesizers) were tuned a third of a semitone apart and

triggered by strings attached to the piano keyboard (see Figure 14.4).

53 Grainger, ‘Free Music (1938)’, 294.

54 See, for example, Rainer Linz, ‘The Free Music Machines of Percy Grainger’, Experimental Music Instruments 12,

no. 4 (1997): 10–12; or Burnett Cross, ‘Grainger’s Free Music Machine’, in Lewis, A Source Guide,

http://www.percygrainger.org/prognot3.htm (accessed 14 October 2013).

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• Estey-Reed Tonetool (or Free Music Tone-Tool) (1951). A bed of harmonium reeds

tuned in eighth tones, activated by air from a vacuum cleaner and controlled by passing

a perforated paper roll across the front of the instrument (see Figure 14.5).

• Oscillator-Playing Tone-Tool (1951). A hand-drill mounted on a Singer sewing

machine, controlling the variable pitch (over three octaves) of a Codemaster Morse

code practice machine.

• Kangaroo-Pouch Machine (1952). Eight overlapping oscillators, giving a full piano

range, controlled by paper hill-and-dale graphs passing through a metal cage between

two revolving turrets (see Figure 14.6).

• Butterfly Piano (1952). A re-strung Knoxville piano tuned to just over one octave of 36-

tone equal temperament.

• Electric-Eye Tone-Tool (1954). Seven sine wave oscillators controlled by variations in

light falling on a series of fourteen photocells, created by a moving plastic sheet cut to

hills and dales (see Figure 14.7). This machine was destroyed sometime after

Grainger’s death.

Grainger showed no interest in the first programmable synthesizer, the RCA Mark II, built at the

Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1957, which was a mere 30 minutes’ drive from

his home at White Plains. This was not because he was hostile to electronic music: in 1956, for

example, he attended several screenings of the film Forbidden Planet expressly because he was

so interested in Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack. John Bird suggests that he had an aversion

to machines developed first by engineers rather than composers, and that the inaccessibility and

complexity of such devices was off-putting to someone who was so intensely practical.55 The

lack of interest was mutual: the Columbia-Princeton crowd showed no awareness of Grainger

either. But in the public mind, composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky and later Milton

Babbitt came to embody the ultra-modern tendency in electronic music.

55 Bird, Percy Grainger, 233–4.

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[insert Figure 14.1 here – landscape]

Figure 14.1 Sliding Pipe Free Music Invention (1946), constructed from masonite, wire, string

and tape

Acc. no. 01.0002, Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Percy

Aldridge Grainger

[insert Figures 14.2 and 14.3 here – portrait]

Figure 14.2 ‘Cross-Grainger Free Music experiment’ (February 1950): Gliding tones on whistle

and notes on recorders produced by holes and slits cut in paper rolls


Aldridge Grainger

Figure 14.3 Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross testing the Cross-Grainger Free Music

Experiment (February 1950)


Aldridge Grainger

[insert Figure 14.4 here – landscape]

Figure 14.4 Cross-Grainger Free Music Experiment: ‘“Sea-Song” sketch, three solovoxes,

played by pianola roll’ (1950)


Aldridge Grainger

[insert Figure 14.5, 14.6, 14.7 here – portrait]

Figure 14.5 Percy and Ella Grainger with the Free Music Tone-Tool (August 1951)


Aldridge Grainger

Figure 14.6 Ella Grainger, seated at her writing desk in the living room at home in White Plains,

contemplates the Kangaroo-Pouch Machine (mid-1950s)

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Aldridge Grainger

Figure 14.7 Burnett Cross, drawing of the Electric-Eye Tone-Tool


Aldridge Grainger

Grainger Compared with Other Composers of Electronic Music

Grainger’s influence was felt by other composers of the period, most notably Henry Cowell,

who nevertheless wrote no electronic music. Suzanne Robinson makes a convincing case for

Grainger’s indirect influence on John Cage: ‘In the latter months of 1940 – when Cowell was

living in Grainger’s home – Cage had proposed to Cowell a “center of experimental music” that

would make oscillators and other electronic resources available to composers. It seems

inconceivable that Cowell did not convey to Grainger what Cage envisioned.’56 Grainger would

presumably have sympathized with the text of Cage’s lecture ‘The Future of Music – Credo’,

which had been delivered in 1937 (although not published in print until 1958), with its Varèse-

like insistence on electronic means of production. But it is Cage’s 1939 composition, Imaginary

Landscape No. 1, scored for two variable-speed turntables, test-tone recordings, muted piano

and cymbal that seems to bear the closest relationship to Grainger’s Free Music, as Robinson

points out.57 The title alone is enough to evoke the ‘hills and dales’ of Grainger’s machines, but

the music itself, with its gliding electronic test-tones, piano strings strummed with the hand as

well as a gong beater, and gamelan-sounding stopped piano notes and cymbal, sounds more

reminiscent of Grainger’s free approach than Cowell’s rather more rhythmically organized

music.



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It has often been observed that the use of chance in Grainger’s Random Round, first

created in 1912 and revised in 1943, anticipates Cage’s aleatoric composition.58 Likewise, the

infinitely variable wavy lines and grid overlay of Cage’s score for the Fontana Mix (1958)

seems to evoke Grainger’s graphic scores. The number of tape pieces subsequently derived

from Fontana Mix suggests a recurring idea that resembles the principle, if not the actual

sounds, of Free Music. These wavy lines are as arbitrary and abundant as those found in nature,

and it matters not which particular combination may be used to generate the music. In fact, the

very arbitrariness is precisely the point: something to which the electronic medium, with its

infinite capacity for repetition and variation, is ideally suited.

Comparisons have also been drawn between Grainger and both Harry Partch and

Conlon Nancarrow.59 Neither of these relates directly to electronic music, but are instructive

nevertheless. In the case of Partch, it was self-built instruments in just intonation, and especially

the Chromelodeon (a re-tuned harmonium), that make the parallel. For Nancarrow, the cutting

of player-piano rolls to realize rhythms that are beyond the capacities of human performers was

the connection. Goldman makes the point that both Grainger and Nancarrow anticipated Cage’s

development of the prepared piano in 1946.

A less obvious, but nonetheless illuminating, comparison may be made with Iannis

Xenakis, whose orchestral pieces Metastasis (1953) and Pithoprakta (1955) anticipated his later

electronic works. At the core of Xenakis’s composition was the gliding note, or glissando,

whose shape was equivalent in mathematics to a straight or curved line, in physics to a wave or

border, and in music to a sine wave.60 In passages of great power, the members of the string

section of Xenakis’s orchestra pursue highly controlled individual paths through complex

clouds of glissandos. These complexes are also derived from nature, such as the behaviour of

58 See, for example, Linz, ‘The Free Music Machines of Percy Grainger’, 10.

59 Burt, ‘Picking up the Threads’, 4 (Partch); Goldman, ‘Percy Grainger’s “Free Music”’, 43–6 (Nancarrow).

60 Mihu Iliescu, ‘Glissandi and Traces: A Study of the Relationship between Musical and Extra-musical Fields’,

International Symposium Iannis Xenakis (Athens: October, 2006): 49.

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flocks of birds, or leaves on trees. In Xenakis’s later computer music, such stochasticism

becomes the main compositional principle, mathematically formalized but nevertheless

liberating. Xenakis’s idea of line/glissando is very similar to Grainger’s and they shared a desire

to find ways to draw lines directly into sound. Xenakis was finally able to realize this when he

created his homespun UPIC computer system and drew on screen dendritic ‘arborescences’,

such as the one for Mycènes-Alpha (1978). Of course, there was never any contact between

Xenakis and Grainger, and it seems unlikely that either was aware of the other’s work. Yet they

shared a belief in a kind of wild natural state in which music was free from all the accumulated

cultural baggage of the intervening centuries, and sought out new means of expression in a

highly individualistic way.

In more recent times, Grainger has influenced a whole generation of Australian

composers, including Warren Burt, Ros Bandt and Alan Lamb. These artists all tend to situate

Grainger both in the rugged tradition of Australian experimentalism and, crucially, in the

landscape, or rather soundscape. As Bandt observes, ‘Grainger’s innovations as a visionary of

the soundscape and creator of color graphic notation, microtonality and free music can be traced

prior to 1938. This situates him in a prominent position in the canon of Western art music

history as a leader of the soundscape.’61 Alan Lamb’s work is often based upon contact-

microphone field recordings of the varying vibrations of telephone wires. As he says:

The principals [sic] of aeolian vibration are relatively easy to understand,

although there is as yet no satisfactory mathematical description, owing to the

emergence of complex functions resulting from neighborhood interactions

along the length of the wire. These are also responsible for the great diversity

and complexity of harmony, timbre and rhythm.62

61 Bandt, ‘Hearing the Free Music’, 13.

62 Rainer Linz, ‘Alan Lamb’, in 22 Contemporary Australian Composers,

http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/lamb.html (accessed 11 October 2013).

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The arbitrariness of the Aeolian response stands in contrast to the more controlled and scientific

approach of Alvin Lucier, whose Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977) exploits similar sonic

characteristics but in what amounts to a laboratory setting. The unknowability of Lamb’s

vibrations differs in both intention and aspiration from the controlled unpredictably of Lucier’s

phenomena.

But perhaps the most complete (if often unaware) inheritors of Grainger’s ideas are the

many musical hackers, sound artists and digital musicians who are willing to patch and share,

experimenting with an openness to the unexpected and a certain liberty of approach. As the

engineer and the artist have increasingly merged into one in the digital age, so Grainger’s ideal

of a Free Music has come ever closer. The constraints upon music today are not so much

matters of harmonic convention or instrumental limitations, but rather social and legal strictures.

Grainger was a pioneer in that struggle for electronic music to break free from normative

conventions into a more ‘democratic’ and global position.

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