Percy Granger Marxism and USA Communist Party

Between 1957 and 1961 Grainger and the young Scottish pianist and composer Ronald Stevenson enjoyed a correspondence which grew to include 32 letters.14 They covered a wide range of topics from Bach to folk music to the latest musical innovations. What follows are some of Stevenson's thoughts on Grainger, including a little-known aspect, culled from an interview given at his home in West Linton, Scotland, on 25 March 2009. Teresa Balough My correspondence with Grainger began in the wrong way because I was researching Busoni and contacting everybody I could who had known Busoni. Percy Grainger had been a Busoni student. That's how it began, on the wrong foot: it should have begun about Percy, not about Busoni; but it soon got round to Percy. There was certainly the theme of Marxism in the correspondence. (I was very interested in Shostakovich, so that linked up.) Percy's physician and close friend K. K. Nygaard told me that he knew that Percy had been a member of the American Communist Party for two years and Percy came out of it, decided to stop attending meetings, because he felt that it was a narrow view of Marxism that they had. Percy's friendship with the American composer Henry Cowell, I think, may have been part of this because, as is well known, Henry Cowell was certainly a member of the American Communist Party. I think possibly that Percy knew Cowell through Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pete Seeger's stepmother. In America I met Pete Seeger who remembered that his father, the musicologist Charles Seeger, knew Percy and spoke very often of him. In our correspondence I questioned Percy about electronic music, Free Music,