Klarinet Archive - Posting 001149.txt from 1998/01

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: Grainger's band music
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 12:30:04 -0500

> From: MX%"klarinet@-----.77
> Subj: Re: Grainger's band music

> Dan Leeson wrote:
> >The Irish
> >Tune, Molly on the Shore, Shepherd's Hey, and many more of his
> >folk song works have so many arrangements that it is not known
> >which one came first. It could have been the band version but it
> >is not likely that all of them were.
>
> Roger Garrett wrote:
> >In the case of
> >Irish Tune, Shepherd's Hey, etc.... Grainger wrote the works for band.
> >That he also arranged them for other genre does not change the fact that
> >they are also written by the composer for band.
>
> According to The Percy Grainger Companion, by Lewis Foreman, 1980:
>
> Irish Tune - chorus 1902, wind band 1918
> Molly on the Shore - 4 strings or string orch. 1907, wind band 1921
> Shepherd's Hey - "room-music" (!) 1908/9, wind band 1918?
> Country Gardens - "whistlers & instr." 1908, wind band 1953
> Gumsucker's March - piano 1916, piano and wind band 1942
>
> These are publication or MS dates. According to the Foreman book, only
> the two Hill Songs (an unconventional choice of winds as originally
> composed 1901-7), Over the Hills (with piano, 1919) and most of
> Lincolnshire Posy were scored for wind band in the first place. Only
> the first movement, Lisbon (Dublin Bay), was set for chorus in 1906.
> The wind band version is from 1937. Of course, the tunes for the other
> movements were sketched much earlier.
>
> Jarle Brosveet

I thank Jarle for giving us this information which is absolutely
consistent with what it was I said about Percy's music, namely
that, of his many works for band (and which he scored personally),
it is probably not the case that the first form in which they
appeared was a band version. He carefully notes the exceptions
to this for those works scored for wind band in the first place.

Jarle's list cannot be complete because I have played Irish Tune for
orchestra and that is not in his list. And it may even be that he did
not do the orchestral transcription. But a number of his works were
scored by him for six and even more different instrumentations.

I add that Percy was always concerned with his royalties, as any
person whose livelyhood is dependent on that should be. So when
he did an arrangement for band, it was because he felt that there
was a marketplace for it. In the 30's and 40's (though less so),
he was doing a lot of work with bands and may have sensed a
business opportunity. By the 50's he felt that everyone had
forgotten him, and when I met him in 1958, he told me that he was
very glad if anyone played any of his works. His cancer was
already on him at that time and therefore, his attitude may have
been affected by a feeling of mortality.

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

   
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