From 'The One Cheerful Composer Living' to the 'Tortured Artist'

Join us for a lecture by Dr Sarah Kirby, From ‘The One Cheerful Composer Living’ to the Tortured Artist: Constructing Percy Grainger’s Biography 1915–1975.

In 1913, British music critic John F. Runciman described Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger (1882–1961) as ‘the one cheerful composer living’. This was a characterisation that would follow Grainger throughout his life: he was seen, in his compositions, playing, and even his personality, as vitally youthful and happy, if a bit superficial. Yet, in little more than a decade after his death, the public narrative of Grainger’s life had shifted dramatically, and he now described a ‘near-mad genius’ consumed with ‘violence and bigotry’ and fueled by ‘a rarely perceived level of tragedy and self-torture’. This paper considers the evolution of this narrative, asking how we got from Grainger the ‘musical Puck’ to the ‘tortured artist’, through an historiography of biographical representations created between 1915 and the mid-1970s. In examining a range of sources, from press reports and films to academic studies, and in particular, the seminal biographical text, Percy Grainger, by John Bird (1975), it draws attention to the historical context of these works, suggesting that they collectively tells us not only about Grainger himself, but about broader currents and values in the societies that created them. Ultimately, this paper aims to untangle the complex web of references that have contributed to the creation of a composite representation of Grainger, as both historical individual and Australian cultural icon, today.

CREDITS

Dr Sarah Kirby - speaker

Image Credit: 'Multigraph photograph of Percy Grainger ‘In the Round’, 1933. Grainger Museum Collection, 99.0600.1

PARKING

The City of Melbourne has recently changed the parking restrictions around the Southbank Campus. Parking control hours are now expanded to 7am–10pm, seven days per week, and are capped at three hours. A $2-per-hour fee after 7pm is also now in place. There is no change to the $4-per-hour peak rate between 7am–7pm. Parking inspectors are regularly in the area fining drivers who overstay their meter, so we encourage everyone to be aware and avoid an expensive fine.

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