Essential Grainger

In 1896, when sixteen, the Australian/American pianist/composer Percy Grainger came into contact with the works of Rudyard Kipling and in so doing found his own creative voice. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would create 46 settings of Kipling texts in which he captured the sense of underlying purpose and deeper meanings in a manner unique among musical settings of Kipling's verse. In particular, his twelve settings from the Kipling "Jungle Book" Cycle convey a symbolical message of universalism, brotherhood, and the individuation of the human psyche. In this study, Grainger's Kipling settings are taken as a microcosm of his compositional works as a whole, reflecting the roots of his art and mirroring his essential stylistic traits. Further than that, it is an attempt to spur a revaluation of both men's art in the light of their professed humanitarian ideals.

Teresa Balough, who is an adjunct professor of music history at Eastern Connecticut State University, USA, has been studying the life and work of Percy Grainger for many years, since the publication of her Complete Catalogue of the Works of Percy Grainger in 1975. She has appeared in the CBC Grainger documentary The Noble Savage, delivered the annual Grainger Lecture at the University of Melbourne, Australia, given a plenary address on Grainger and World Music to the International Society for Music Education world conference, and published five books and numerous essays, articles and monographs on Grainger. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Western Australia. Her most recent publications are Comrades in Art: The Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, Distant Dreams: The Free Music Correspondence of Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross 1946-60 co-edited by Kay Dreyfus, and The Life and Work of Percy Aldridge Grainger: Till Life Become Fire.