Trivia

One of his pupils was Bernard Herrmann

Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.

On 9 June 1917, after America's entry into the war, he enlisted as a bandsman in the US Army with the military band of the 15th Coast Artillery in Fort Hamilton. He had joined as a saxophonist, though he records learning the oboe: "I long for the time when I can blow my oboe well enough to play in the band". In his 18 months' service, Grainger made frequent appearances as a pianist at Red Cross and Liberty bond concerts.

In 1956, the suggestion by the composer Keith Humble that Grainger be invited to write music for the opening of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne was rejected by the organisers of the Games.

In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century.

After the Second World War, ill health reduced his levels of activity. He considered his career a failure.

Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune "Country Gardens".

Since Grainger's death, recordings of his works have been undertaken by many artists and issued under many different labels. In 1995, Chandos Records began to compile a complete recorded edition of Grainger's original compositions and folk settings. Of 25 anticipated volumes, 19 had been completed as of 2010; these were issued as a CD boxed set in 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer's death.

Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer, and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racialist or anti-Semitic terms.

After his mother's suicide in 1922, he became increasingly involved in educational work. He also experimented with music machines, which he hoped would supersede human interpretation.

He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.

In 1914 Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely in Europe and Australia. He served briefly as a bandsman in the United States Army during the First World War through 1917-18, and took American citizenship in 1918.

In the 1930s he set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works, and as a future research archive.

Percy Grainger was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who moved to the United States in 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918.

At the age of 10 he began studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German-born graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, Melbourne's leading piano teacher. Grainger's first known composition, "A Birthday Gift to Mother", is dated 1893. Pabst arranged Grainger's first public concert appearances, at Melbourne's Masonic Hall in July and September 1894. The boy played works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Scarlatti, and was warmly complimented in the Melbourne press.