The Wider Implications of Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’

Come view our new exhibit through a special tour led by Teresa Balough, a music scholar with extensive knowledge on Grainger’s work in Free Music. Discover how the Percy Grainger Home and Studio functioned as a creative workshop. The exhibition, Tone, Rhythm, Pitch: Exploring Percy Grainger’s Free Music, continues to showcase Grainger’s work in Free Music and demonstrates, through objects, images and text, how the White Plains home was an active creative work space.

Percy Grainger was one of the few creative voices of the 20th Century to stress the importance of the future of music, placing it even above the present. He saw the future as ideally being one of freedom and flexibility. He equated this freedom in music with the pursuit of a type of spiritual freedom in which all of humanity would at last be able to express itself in a peace-loving, democratic, harmonious-with-nature way.

As a young man Grainger gained the courage to risk his reputation as a pianist and popular composer of light-hearted pleasant works to write daring harmonies with complex irregular rhythms. In middle age he took up the cause of lesser-known composers and encouraged the appreciation of music from all cultures and all times. And as the years advanced, he devoted himself more and more to the development of his ‘Free Music’ ideals and their implementation in the physical world through the development of the Cross-Grainger Free Music Machines.

The event is free and open to the public and includes a tour of the historic home. Please join us! Due to space limitations, registration is encouraged.