Browse Items (337 total)

Audiences were fascinated and amused and sometimes bemused by the novelty and adventurous nature of Grainger’s orchestration in performances of his radical compositions. The Brisbane Courier-Mail observed, after a concert in October 1934, how…

Ten players were required to perform the percussion parts for ‘Norse Dirge’, across the variety of instruments, including some of the musical glasses (seen in the display case). Unlike in Tribute to Foster, where the choir played the musical glasses…

In a Nutshell Suite was first performed at the Norfolk Festival of Music, Connecticut, USA, on 9 June 1916. This suite contains some of Grainger’s best scoring for ‘tuneful percussion’. Grainger was unusually prescriptive about the type of mallets…

Grainger first saw Indonesian instruments, including a Balinese gong, at the home of a wealthy collector in England. In 1912, while on tour in Europe, he was captivated by the Indonesian percussion instruments he saw in the National Museum of…

This heavily annotated cover of the singers’ parts for Tribute to Foster demonstrate the complexity of the performance arrangements, which included three conductors harnessing three sets of musicians, often playing to a different beat.

Photograph of Free Music experiments with Grainger's Duo Art player piano, and types notes by Grainger describing the experiment