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Percy Grainger: “Experiments to Provide Instruments for Free Music” (c. 1952)

From the album The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art, and Design (1996)

Best known for his copious folk-song arrangements and rather conventional works for wind band, Australian composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) also moonlighted as one of the 20th century’s most fearlessly harebrained musical experimenters.  

In 1912, he created “Random Round,” a remarkable composition that anticipated musical indeterminacy a half-century before Umberto Eco’s The Open Work. In the early 1920s Grainger produced highly elaborate and sometimes unplayable arrangements of folksongs for the Aeolian player piano company in London. Later in the decade he developed a practice of “elastic scoring,” a flexible way of notating orchestral music to make it more easily adaptable to ensembles of various size and instrumental makeup. 

Inspired by his childhood experience of the sound of the ocean and by the prophetic ideas espoused in Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 Sketch of a New Aesthetics of Music, Grainger had long imagined a “gliding music” free of the discrete pitch levels that characterized Western melody. (Grainger had studied with Busoni for a brief time in 1903.) This he realized for the first time in a 1935 sketch called “Free Music,” first for string quartet and later arranged for four Theremins. Of the idea of free music, Grainger wrote,  ”My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave-movements in the sea…It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age.”

Grainger’s 1951 sketch showing a sewing machine driving a hand drill controlling a Morse code oscillator.

From 1945 until his death in 1961, while living in White Plains, New York, Grainger developed a series of elaborate experimental instruments designed for the realization of free music. He was assisted by his wife Ella and the American physics teacher Burnett Cross. These became known as the “Cross-Grainger free music machines.” They included the Reed-Box Tone-Tool (1950-51), an automated instrument using harmonium reeds tuned in eighth-tones, the “Electric-Eye Tone Tool,” begun in 1953 and unfinished, which used transistors to create tones from graphical inscriptions via photoelectric cells, and the “Kangaroo Pouch” machine, a massive Rube Goldberg contraption which I will not attempt to explain here. (The reader is referred to Rainer Linz’s survey of Grainger’s free music instruments.)

The remarkable audio you are hearing is taken from the CD companion to volume 6 of Leonardo Music Journal, curated by Douglas Kahn. The track titles are “Butterfly Piano,” “Reed-Box Tone-Tool,” “AM Oscillator Test,” “Hiles-and-Dales Oscillator,” and “Oscillator Test Pattern.”

October 14, 2011, 10:13pm