“Heritage” Program note
Percy Grainger is renowned as one of the most gifted — and simultaneously eccentric and controversial — composers of Australian musical history. Grainger was born in Melbourne on 8 July 1882. He had a troubled childhood, however was prodigiously gifted at the piano from a young age, and his mother, Rose, took him overseas to study in Frankfurt in 1885, when Grainger was only 13. In 1901 they moved to London, and Grainger developed a profile as a concert performer, individualistic composer and collector of folk melodies. Colonial Song was written in 1911, as a “yule-tide” gift for his mother, for two voices, harp and orchestra, and the piano trio version was re-scored by Grainger in 1912. The melody is based on one he originally used in the wordless vocal Up-country tune and its sumptuous, rich textures were loved by some and thought overdone by others (Sir Thomas Beecham pronounced it ‘the worst piece of modern times’).
‘LONG PROGRAM NOTE: No traditional tunes of any kind are made use of in this piece, in which I have wished to express feelings aroused by thoughts of the scenery and people of my native land, (Australia), and also to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general.
Perhaps it is not unnatural that people living more or less lonelily in vast virgin countries and struggling against natural and climatic hardships (rather than against the more actively and dramaticly [sic] exciting counter wills of their fellow men, as in more thickly populated lands) should run largely to that patiently yearning, inactive sentimental wistfulness that we find so touchingly expressed in much American art; for instance in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and in Stephen C. Foster’s adorable songs My Old Kentucky Home, Old Folks at Home, etc.
I have also noticed curious, almost Italian-like, musical tendencies in brass band performances and ways of singing in Australia (such as a preference for richness and intensity of tone and soulful breadth of phrasing over more subtly and sensitively varied delicacies of expression), which are also reflected here.’ Percy Grainger
