Music Research Forum: Phyllis Weliver - Percy Grainger and Interlochen’s National Music Camp

Join us for the second music research talk for Semester 2 2024, presented in partnership with the Musicological Society of Australia! The Museum will be open from 5:30pm, with the talk starting at 6pm. No bookings required.

Percy Grainger and Interlochen's National Music Camp

We know that Percy Grainger guest conducted at the National Music Camp (USA) in 1930, and was on summer faculty in 1937 and 1942–1944. However, the extent of Grainger’s contributions to Interlochen are both surprising and forgotten. As Interlochen’s president put it, “We have never had visitors who contributed more than you and Mrs. Grainger” – a remarkable statement given Interlochen’s close association with numerous luminaries beginning with its foundation in 1928 as the first residential music camp in the USA. Recovering this lost history reclaims NMC’s pioneering role in US music history (neglected by musicologists), while also correcting existing scholarship on Grainger which claims that unhappiness with Interlochen faculty and students led him to quit the camp. In fact, he was unable to return for reasons beyond his control. Interlochen archives reveal a mutually beneficial relationship between Grainger and NMC from 1930 to 1950, including during the years when he was not in residence. Grainger grew a notable piano department at Interlochen, conducted multiple groups, premiered several works, developed the tonal balance of concert bands, devised most of the programming of the “Music in Wartime” camp season (1943), and served on the advisory board. Behind the scenes, Grainger offered various services pro bono, promoted the camp internationally, donated music and money, and more. To Grainger, Interlochen was quite simply “a perfect ideal (perfectly in harmony with the nature of music itself, perfectly adapted to the national life of America today) perfectly carried out.” Rare footage of Grainger will be shown.

Phyllis Weliver—Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University (USA) and Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales—is a 2024 Macgeorge Fellow at University of Melbourne, hosted by the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Twice-funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (USA), she has given the Annual Gladstone Lecture at Gladstone’s Library and spoken by invitation at the British Academy and Royal Academy of Music in London, among others. In addition to her most recent book, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, she is the author of Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home and The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation. This talk combines Professor Weliver’s interest in music and intellectual history with her background at Interlochen, where she grew up.