Percy Grainger's aleatoric adventures: The Rarotongan part-songs

Percy Grainger's aleatoric adventures: The Rarotongan part-songs, 

Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, no. 2 (2012), pp. 1-32.

Abstract

This article draws together a range of source material relating to the recording and notation of the Rarotongan part-songs encountered by Percy Grainger during his 1909 concert tour of Australasia, and presents his transcriptions and notes for the first time within a critical framework. The various extant recordings, initially made in 1907 during the New Zealand International Exhibition by Alfred J. Knocks and later copied by Grainger, together with Grainger's attempts at transcription, are evaluated in both the context of his activities as a collector of folk music and within the framework of his developing ideas of the notion of democracy in music. Grainger cited the music of Rarotonga as 'a treat no less than the best Wagner's(1) and he maintained its importance throughout his life. Whilst his transcriptions of the songs, and his planned settings of the music, were never completed, echoes of the Rarotongan music can be found in much of Grainger's experimental output. In particular, he was to mine this material for the production of Random round, the genesis and development of which will be examined in part two of this article (to be published in number 3 of Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal).

Grainger Studies [17]