Marketing Grainger in Wartime: Musical Courier Advertisement, February 1944

By Caitlin O’Neill
(Master of Art Curatorship)

This simple text-only advertisement is one of a multitude of promotional materials saved by Percy Grainger for the Museum. Grainger’s manager Antonia Morse was responsible for organising its initial publication on 20 February 1944, in the American music magazine Musical Courier, as well as making arrangements for the concert bookings that followed. Print advertising was an important publicity tool for Grainger throughout his extensive performing career and allowed him (with the crucial organisational skills of his managers) to maintain a full touring schedule for most of his life—including over two world wars and for many years longer than he’d envisaged his performing career to have continued.

There is a level of immediacy in intentionally ephemeral documents such as advertisements, that make them invaluable as records of the culture that produced them. As a throwaway document from mid-1940s wartime America, there is a simplicity and austerity in the design of this ad that seems to promise a concert experience that is equally honest and reassuring. This was not graphic design that suggested a gaudy or shockingly new experience—solid, bold capital letters, equally spaced, with an absence of photographs or flashy decorative borders. The quotes taken from reviewers further illustrate this: Grainger ‘remains what he has always been’, a ‘perennial favourite’. With everyday life characterised by a sense of instability, there was a value in offering a sense of comforting continuity. For an entertainer whose career spanned such a broad sweep of cultural and technological changes as his, Grainger was well-placed to provide this. While the conditions created by the war saw an inevitable drop in income from his concert bookings, the 1944–45 season was still tightly booked across many cities in the United States.

Grainger was aware of the good fortune of his position, writing to Morse in 1943 that: ‘It is marvellous to think that we are in the middle of the world’s largest war [...] yet we are still earning by such gentle jobs as photography, concerts, and managing!’ Antonia’s husband Frederick Morse accounts for this reference to photography and had taken several publicity photos of Grainger over the years. The lack of a portrait in this ad sets it apart from much of the other printed publicity material found in the Grainger archive. Though possibly intended to convey a sense of wartime austerity, this broke with a clearly dependable strategy that had been used from an early stage in Grainger’s career. His image, dressed for recital and intensely staring into the camera, is ubiquitous across all manner of print advertising in the collection. No doubt helped by his somewhat eccentric stage manner and striking physical appearance, Grainger’s image was instantly recognisable and a marketable commodity within a culture dominated by print media.

The complex negotiations involved in managing Grainger’s performing career was a role almost solely filled by two women throughout his life. Antonia Morse been in the role for roughly 20 years when this advert was published, having taken over Antonia Sawyer—her aunt—when she retired in the mid-1920s. Before Sawyer, Rose Grainger had more or less ‘managed’ the early career of her son. Morse, however, was by far the longest serving in this position. Besides placing these ads and fielding the subsequent responses to them, she also negotiated Grainger’s artist fees and managed his travel between venues. Morse and Grainger’s professional relationship was underpinned by a close, though by no means perfect, friendship. Antonia and her husband Frederick were best man and maid of honour at Ella and Percy’s Hollywood Bowl wedding, and the two couples lived next door to each other in White Plains, New York for many years. He was the only performer she managed. For Grainger, ‘Tonie’—as he called her—was responsible for keeping him ‘before the public as a virtuoso’ while simultaneously allowing him to continue what he saw as his more important work as a composer.

The balancing act required of their professional and personal relationship took its toll for Morse by the early 1940s, particularly with the added difficulty of organising concerts during a war. Grainger was conscious that these years had severely strained the friendship between himself and Antonia and Frederick. The crucial role she played in his career is revealed by his distress when she wrote in July of 1943 with her intention to resign from managing him at the close of the following season. In response to the news, he wrote a lengthy letter back imploring her to reconsider. Reminding her of the peak of his popularity in the late 1920s, he suggested the mutually beneficial financial position they might expect if she were to stay on until the ‘great boom’ he anticipated at the end of the war. He also coupled this with a more personal appeal to continue the work begun by his mother in nurturing what he describes as the ‘spark of genius that she considered worthy of her devotion and efforts’. As he goes on: ‘I have always understood that you attached some special significance to my mother’s efforts on my behalf and to your and Fred’s promises to her’. Grainger seemed to take her resignation as not only the end of her own management career, but as an act that would bring about the premature end of his performing career with it.

Whether due to Grainger’s strongly worded appeal, a restored business-as-usual approach afforded by the end of World War II, or for her own personal reasons, Antonia Morse did not resign at the close of the 1945 season. By 1946, Grainger himself was ready to withdraw from the concert business; instructing Morse to consider it ‘machinery running down’. He’d hoped that the fame of his compositions alone would be enough to support the experimental projects that preoccupied him in these post-war years, but his own celebrity, with the management provided by Morse ensured this public-facing aspect of his life continued for many years to come.