Browse Items (337 total)

Tribute to foster chorus closeup.jpg
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.

Eastern intermezzo metal marimba.jpg
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…

Pastoral Staff Bells part.jpg
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…

Norse Dirge musical glasses.jpg
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…

Tribute to Foster ms p4 web.jpg
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…

Lecture 11 tuneful percussion.jpg
Grainger took his role as educator about music in the general community very seriously, and exploited the opportunities afforded by radio broadcasting. While in Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, he delivered a series of lectures for the ABC,…

01.0002.tif
Masonite, wire, string, tape

This invention was Grainger's first attempt at constructing an instrument which could glide smoothly from one tone to the next and which was controlled by a 'musical score' rather than a player. The sound was produced…
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