The Free Music Machine Drawings of Percy Grainger, ed. Simon Cutts, with an introduction by Wilfrid Mellers. Coracle, 2014
*
At a dinner party once, amid William Morris-ish surroundings, I remember a guest remarking that somebody, or some thing, was “as English as Percy Grainger”. And that is how Grainger is so often mistaken, his Country Gardens being somehow the aural equivalent of a chip supper, or Downton Abbey. The truth is far more interesting: Australian, a piano prodigy, trained in Germany, Nordic by persuasion, he was for the greater part of his life resident in the USA. His private life was no less adventurous, his mix of naivety, impetuosity and carefreeness guiding him on a course of accomplished eccentricity.
Percy Grainger’s Free Music Machines were intended to be the pragmatic resolution of an ideological position. He believed in a prelapsarian idyll, where our belonging in nature, and our connection to our primitive origins, was untarnished, and that this could be best expressed as a continuum, an “acoustic perfection whereby every infinitesimal gradation of pitch and rhythm would be precisely chartable”. A music, then, based on natural principles “free of law and conventions that were ‘purely’ musical”. He saw his Free Music as the culmination of all musical progress, featuring “increasing discordance, growing informality… irregular rhythms making towards ‘beatless music’… to tally the irregularity, subtlety and complexity of life and nature”.
Grainger seems to have designed and made the machines that would deliver this music from around 1946, although the drawings included here all date from 1951 or ’52. The constructions are “cobbled together from junk such as milk-bottles, sewing machines, hair-dryers, brake-drums, and what else”; the ‘Hills and Dales’ Air-Blown-Reeds Tone-Tool No.3, for example, featuring a toothbrush-case, toy balloon air ducts, a vacuum cleaner, “big nails”, and some skate-wheels. The playing mechanism follows to some extent the principle of the pianola, being controlled by rotating brown-paper rolls with the top edge cut in a wavy profile that acts as a cam, raising and lowering a roller (cotton reel, or similar) working a lever to vary the pitch.
Grainger worked with physicist Burnett Cross, who found that “the machines we made showed to my surprise, that they could be adjusted to play more, with more precision, than any human performer could”. Despite this capability, the evolution of the machines to concert or studio standard never happened, and only a few fragments of recorded music remain. We can – as Wilfrid Mellers does in his excellent introduction – conjecture that this might be because the next logical step would have been electrophonics. This had been gaining traction since the introduction of the Theremin around 1930; Grainger attended a lecture by Stockhausen, while John Cage would make his first tape works in 1952-53. But it is easy to see why Grainger might have resisted. Electronics is not an aesthetic adventure, may not, as Grainger insisted, “inspire delight”, in the way of his garden-shed cobblings-together, those icons of his idealized down-to-earth democracy.
The drawings are now deposited at the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, where Simon Cutts, editor of The Free Music Machine Drawings of Percy Grainger, first saw them in 1980. Captivated by their brilliance, he acquired transparencies with a resolve to making a printed edition. The book was itself 35 years in gestation: copyright problems struck; John Cage declined to write an introduction in 1984; Wilfrid Mellers complied in 1999, only to die in 2008. It was not until Cutts met Stewart Manville at the Percy Grainger House in White Plains, NY, in 2013, that the project was given the go-ahead. So it is perhaps not inappropriate to be reviewing the bookfive years after its publication.
The album-size book, a classical design by Colin Sackett in Stuart Settle’s pristine casebinding, features 22 full-page drawings that are, at the very least, more-or-less working plans, either for complete machines or methods and processes. The centerpiece of most is a finely-executed watercolour sketch, the muted tones of the coloured inks made vibrant here by the softness of the paper. Any free space is crammed with Grainger’s expository notes and sketches in pen or pencil. As with the drawings of William Heath Robinson, we follow amazed the watertight logic of the mechanical workings, and scour the evidence of the free recycling of old gadgets and utensils for ingenious new ends. But while Grainger had one eye on the potential for entertainment and showmanship, his purpose was serious, his drawings a delight worthy in their own right of our attention. As Simon Cutts writes in his postscript ‘At Last’: “Their interest resides in the possibility and potentiality of drawings to form a narration. It is true of Leonardo, it is true of Paul Etienne Lincoln, and it is true of Percy Grainger: whether the described implements would fully work or not is immaterial”. Or as Wilfrid Mellers has it: “We may see them as radiant visions of a future that hasn’t happened but one day might”.
*