Music Research Forum | Paul Jackson - Reconstructing Grainger the Educator: A Commonsense View of All Music

Join us for the next talk in our music research series, with President of the Percy Grainger Society, Paul Jackson. The Museum will be open from 5:30pm with the talk starting at 6:00pm. Bookings encouraged, drop ins welcome.

Percy Grainger spent a significant part of his professional life teaching and educating, an aspect of his multi-faceted make-up that has received relatively little critical attention to date. Aside from the lecture recitals that ran through much of his performing career, he enjoyed a highly lucrative period of engagement as piano teacher with the Chicago Music School between 1919 and 1931, and as teacher, performer and conductor at the Interlochen Music Camps, Michigan, between 1937 and 1944. But it is in his public lecture series “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music,” delivered at New York University between 1932 and 1933, and “Music: A Commonsense View of all Types”, delivered for the Australian Broadcasting Commission between 1934 and 1935, that Grainger came closest to formalising his world-view of music in a manner intended to provide a framework for broader understanding and engagement, and, ultimately, enlightenment.

In these lecture series, Grainger pursued a form of comparative musical analysis that sought to reveal “the threads of unity” that ran through music from different genres, traditions and periods. Grainger selected a very wide range of apparently disparate music to illustrate his points, drawing on sources that included newly-available recordings from the ethnographic collections of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, as well as a host of invited performers. Such musical examples served as a means of demonstrating that disparate cultural phenomena shared correspondences of technical means of realisation, and of aesthetic and emotional values. Grainger’s analyses are, by turns, precise and scientific, and meandering and misguided, but are centred around the notion that “the highest flights of music are a spiritualizing influence inducing contemplation and rapture and leading mankind toward a more peaceful, harmonious and angelic life (on earth)".

In this talk, I provide a framework for better understanding the core ideas expounded in Grainger’s lecture series, placing them within the context of the then-emerging field of ethnomusicology and of parallel attempts of formalised music education that sought to make the world’s music available to the wider public. A key method of illustrating Grainger’s central ideas is the reconstruction of the musical content of selected lectures—drawn from a range of archival sources—which naturally serves to illustrate his central beliefs more vividly and tellingly than by a consideration of his written words alone.

Paul Jackson is a performer, musicologist, and educator based in Cambridge, UK. Following posts at the Royal College of Music, and the University of Hertfordshire, he was Head of Music and Performing Arts and Director of Music and Performance at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge from 1998 to 2018. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, with a PhD in Musicology, he has taught widely across performance, composition, technology, and musicology. Active as both pianist and conductor, he performs as a soloist, and as a chamber musician, and as musical director for a number of orchestras and choirs. He is President of the Percy Grainger Society and Editor of The Grainger Journal, and has published in The New Percy Grainger Companion (Boydell & Brewer), Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (University of Melbourne) and, most recently, in Music, New Media and the Archive (Palgrave Macmillan).