No Speed Bumps

Percy Grainger: ‘Read This If Ella Grainger or Percy Grainger Are Found Dead Covered with Whip Marks’

Quite an arresting opening gambit, don’t you think.

I’ve always been more than a bit intrigued by Percy Grainger (1882-1961) – I think it’s the faint remembrance of reading about him being both wildly eccentric and wildly talented musically.

Let’s deal with the musical stuff first.

The cover of Grainger's first extant composition, Klavierstück

Percy Grainger began his career as a pianist in 1902, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra. Later that year, he toured Britain in a concert party with Adelina Patti, who predicted a stellar future for him. He went on to become an internationally known concert pianist, and to give some sense of his success, he was earning $5000 a week in the mid-1920s, around $60,000 today.

He was also a composer of small-scale keyboard works, played at times on instruments of his own devising …

Percy Grainger Kangaroo-Pouch Tone-Tool

… and had a avid research interest in folk songs, particularly those of Britain and Scandinavia.

He pioneered electronic music, and experimented with ‘chance music’ in 1912, 40 years before John Cage.

He spoke 11 foreign languages fluently, including Icelandic and Russian.

And was quite a decent amateur watercolour painter …

Barstow, California, Looking North from Casa del Desierto Hotel Watercolour 1920

Eccentricity seemed to come more than easily to Grainger.

He would jog between the towns in which he was giving concerts.

He wore self-designed terry-towelling clothing …

Distrusting anything Mediterranean, he purged his writing of Greco-Latin elements, substituting these with words having Nordic roots. So ‘family’ became ‘breed-group, ‘literature’ became ‘book art’ and ‘attractive’ became ‘on-draw-some’. I suspect I won’t be using the last on my next pick-up!

But what interests me is his unashamed enjoyment of sadism and flagellation, writing, in the letter titled ‘Read This If Ella Grainger or Percy Grainger Are Found Dead Covered with Whip Marks’ …

‘I am a sadist & a flagellant – my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body … . To a lesser degree I enjoy being whipped myself (& before marriage used to whip myself every few weeks)’.

I would have thought it would have been more than a little difficult nearly one hundred years ago to have such sexual interests, and to talk about them reasonably openly. Grainger liked to record and show the results of such sexual activity …

As early as the 1930s, he endowed a museum in Melbourne dedicated to himself and to which he donated manuscripts, scores, instruments, 73 whips and blood-stained shirts.

A courageous fellow of a different path – something to be admired!