Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger

Edited by Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll

Oxford University Press 2006

ISBN13 978-0-19-530537-1

Reviewed by Elizabeth Silsbury

Tone-art-fact-search-y (Percy might have made the word up for musicological but didn’t, so Malcolm Gillies did it for him) authors are not widely known for their general public readability. In Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger anyone interested in family histories, in delving into the innermost thoughts and feelings of Australia’s best known musician of all time about himself and just about everyone he knew, will be well entertained by this neatly organized collection of what Grainger called ‘Sketches’ and deposited in the Melbourne Museum dedicated to his collection of writings and artefacts.

And probably titillated by the alarmingly frank descriptions of his weird, but to him wonderful, sex life.  In his best fantasies, it took five to tango. Whipping was practically a family sport. His grandfather whipped his own sons; his mother, Rose, whipped her syphilitic, alcoholic husband out of the bedroom to prevent him  impregnating her with a handicapped child. She also routinely whipped Percy as a child and was still slapping his face when he was nearly forty.  Reading all this, pity for the abused little and big boy is mixed with amazement that he managed to earn world wide admiration as pianist, composer, documenter of folksongs, and inventor of radical compositional approaches and ways of recording them. As well as notoriety for sado-masochistic ‘dream-sights’ and actualities – some readers will find some passages utterly revolting and depraved – but they are all part of the story. In his own words, ‘Each person must have some subject that fires him to madness. Whatever it is, to put up with less seems crazy.’

Self-Portrait is laid out for maximum enlightenment. Part I, The Man, covers five chapters – Forebears, Father, Mother (at nearly fifty pages the longest and arguably most appealing and appalling), Friends, Wife and Self.  Part II, headed The Musician, is divided into Composer, Performer and Commentator. The sketches are not in chronological order, but Gillies and Pear have provided a detailed chronology of Percy’s life, and the former’s essay of Introduction fills in the narrative between and behind the Sketches.

Threads weave through this self-portrait, every entry adding yet another strand to the tapestry. One of the most endearing, and obviously a source of delight to the editors, is the writer’s quirky word-making-upping. Examples are sprinkled throughout, and Gillies prepares the reader well for them in his Introduction. Most of their meanings can be guessed – German musician Julius Röntgen was a ‘noble and generous soul but clod-hoppery art-man’; his first lover, the snobby Mrs Lowrey, was ‘pomp-world-tainted’ and the more abstruse ones are translated.

English composers were among his close associates. Some were friends, others not.  Stanford, Vaughan Wiiliams, Delius, Balfour Gardiner, Quilter, Cyril Scott and of course Grieg and many lesser names are allowed to speak for themselves and are freely and sometimes bluntly spoken about. He is even more outspoken about himself. ‘Growing Nasty-Spoken as I Near My Sixties’ looks forward to a grumpy old man, still, nonetheless, charming.

A swag of photographs, including an unspeakably sad image of Percy himself wearing only a Borat style harness, and another of his selection of whips – every bit as personal as the famous picture of Beethoven’s ear trumpets – and a comprehensive (for once) index complete this elegant and informative book. The huge list of Sources and the Selected Grainger Bibliography are proof (as if it was needed) of the widespread interest Percy’s sad-happy story has inspired in many writers.

Self-Portrait was launched in Adelaide at a very merry soirée last November, hosted by the Dean of Humanities of the University of Adelaide and the Cornell Chapter of the Alumni Association. In the Grainger Studio, the Grainger Quartet played Grainger, Grainger played both the solo part  and the orchestral reduction on a pianola roll on the DuoArte piano and Mark Carroll’s introduction promised plenty of ‘juicy bits’. In fact, there’s hardly a ‘bit’ that is not ‘juicy’ in one way or another.

Any review of such a huge and meticulously detailed book can only give pointer-peeks. The price is high, but buys many hours of picking-up and putting-down bedside browsing.

Music Forum Vol 13 No 3