AUSTRALASIAN
MUSIC
RESEARCH

Introduction

If Grainger had not had the foresight in the 1930s to establish his own Museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne, it is unlikely that his legacy would have become as strong or as varied as it is today. Indeed, by now that legacy might have faded away almost entirely. Instead, by placing a pile of bricks before the shutting door of History, Grainger held up posterity's premature attribution of obscurity until minds were sufficiently enquiring to look seriously at what he had been shipping to Melbourne in a seemingly endless succession of crates over the last three decades of his life.

The Museum was, in one way, a very bad influence upon Grainger. From 1917, when he joined the United States Army and thought he might be sent to the frontline in France, he was forced to give some serious thought to his artistic legacy. Thereafter, and especially after his mother's death in 1922, he took an increasingly archival approach to life and its exchanges. His wife, Ella, on several occasions accused him of writing 'Museum letters'–more to record ideas and events for posterity's sake than for her more immediate edification or amusement–and his instructions to corresponding friends on how to keep carbon copies, and even to code their letters to him using his Museum's catalogue numbers, induced anxiety if not silence among them. But without Grainger's visionary collecting, storing and rudimentary cataloguing, our present-day rich and comprehensive recorded collections of his music and, likewise, the detailed studies of his life and world of ideas, would not have been possible.

Into his 'past hoard-house' Grainger poured the documentary evidence not just of his greatest creations and triumphs but also of his day-to-day life and that of his artistic circle. Everything from letters to lingerie, and pubic hairs to publications, found a place somewhere amid his accumulation. The problem has been, and to some degree remains, what to make of this breath-taking attempt to capture all aspects of a past life. The very extent of the collection is a measure of the extent of the problem of assigning significance and meaning to artefacts deliberately collected athematically over a long and fruitful life. The decades of languishing–not just of his Grainger Museum, but also of that other half which was originally a Music Museum dedicated to general musical interests, and particularly of Australia–lasted until the 1970s, when the building's riches started to interest the first substantial generation of Australian musicologists and composers, leading to the first serious attempts at exposition of its contents by the Museum's curator from 1974, Kay Dreyfus. Biographical writings by John Bird and Eileen Dorum over the following decade enriched understanding of Grainger as musician and man, as did the celebratory events around the world in 1982, the centenary of his birth. But he still remained a 'bit player' in the judgement of History, still 'weighted in the balance, and found wanting.' In some quarters that still remains the case: the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 2001, accorded to Grainger just four pages (against, for instance, a random example of thirty-one for Béla Bartók), with barely enough space in the work-list even to record the four-hundred-odd composition titles and their crucial dates. In other international quarters, notably Oxford University Press, Grainger has been found much less wanting. The publisher's delegates have, during the 1990s, supported no less than four Grainger-dedicated volumes.

The seemingly bottomless well of the Grainger Museum led me in 1989 to conceive of a bold plan–still unrealized–of writing a comprehensive life-and-works, or rather works-amid-the-life study of Grainger, hopefully to allay forever the musical folklore based upon very partial knowledge of his repertory and an even more filtered smattering of knowledge about his life. Before undertaking that comprehensive study, however, it seemed to me that at least five preliminary studies were needed, of which this present volume of essays is the fourth to reach completion. First was a further selection of Grainger's letters, but drawn from his American years, 1914—61, to complement Kay Dreyfus's brilliant collection, The Farthest North of Humanness, which focussed on the London years, 1901—14. With considerable assistance from the Australian Research Council, that volume appeared in 1994 under the title The All-Round Man, co-edited by David Pear. Next, and also with Australian Research Council and Danish Humanities Research Council support, was a selection of Grainger's most important musical essays, Grainger on Music, which appeared in 1999, co-edited by Bruce Clunies Ross. Third, was a study of what others thought of Grainger, Portrait of Percy Grainger, which David Pear and I compiled in the early 1990s, and is to appear this year in a co-publication of the University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer (UK). These first three volumes are guided tours around the more significant corners of Grainger's documentary legacy, as will be a further study, of Grainger's voluminous yet unpublished autobiographical writings, which is now in progress.

What also was lacking in Grainger scholarship, and in need of careful investigation before embarking upon a comprehensive biography-cum-musical-commentary, was concerted reference to the musical and contextual methodologies associated with the so-called 'new musicologies.' These Grainger Studies, supported by Australian Research Council funding, would help to locate Grainger more perceptively and accurately within the most appropriate racial, national, sexual, physical and artistic milieux. These methodologically aware studies were particularly necessary in Grainger's case, both because of the sensationalist tittle-tattle which still occasionally breaks out about his darker side, and because of an early-discovered characteristic of his abundant written legacy–his apparent potential for contradictory or contrary statement. Other studies in this ARC project involved the remedying of current information shortfalls, most prominently of Grainger's concert activities which, using programme, review and financial sources, have now been mapped virtually continuously for his entire life. The Grainger Studies project involved contributions

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