Percy Grainger: A Modern Leonardo?

Percy Grainger was a man of many seasons — not only a composer and pianist but a musical folklorist, wind band arranger, polyglot, watercolorist, early music expert, clothing designer, prodigious letter writer, essayist, and philosophical thinker. His popular works like “Country Gardens” and “Molly on the Shore” were best-sellers of the early twentieth-century music world, while his experiments in avant-garde music anticipated many artistic developments in the later twentieth century and beyond. Today his music is performed even more widely than during his lifetime.

This lecture, the first of three given on consecutive Sunday afternoons, is presented by Mark N. Grant, Vice-President of the International Percy Grainger Society and a Board member since 1981, is a composer, author, and music commentator. He won a special Friedheim Award in 2006 for his hour-long dramatic cantata The Rose of Tralee premiered by the Amor Artis Chorus and Orchestra. He has composed opera and music theater, chamber music, and song cycles, frequently setting his own texts to music. Mr. Grant is the author of two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award-winning books, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (2004) and Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America (1998). His music is recorded by Albany Records. A contributor to the Revised New Grove’s Dictionary of Music, New Music Connoisseur, and other periodicals, he was commissioned by the Kurt Weill Foundation to write new program notes for Weill’s American stage works. He has guest lectured at Eastman School of Music, Hartt School of Music, Rutgers University, and the Westport Country Playhouse, and appeared on WNYC’s radio program Sound Check.