Percy Grainger: The Free Music Machine Drawings

Hardcover | 22.5 x 30 cm | 72 pp

Coracle | 2014 | 9780906630501

Edition of 300 numbered copies

22 drawings by Australian composer Percy Grainger from 1951 and 1952, for the potential Free Music Machines worked on by himself and musician and singer Burnett Cross at that time.

Grainger, a virtuoso Pianist and pupil of Bussoni, had been developing his idea of “free music” since 1900: based on eighth tones and complete rhythmic freedom and unconventionally notated on graph paper. He had experimented using collections of Theremins and changing speeds of recorded sounds on phonograph disks and eventually developed his own instruments.

Graingers experiments with random music composition pre-dated those of John Cage by 30 years with “Random Round” written in the 1920’s. Graingers first experiments used a Pianola “player piano” controlling three Solovoxes by means of strings attached to the Pianola’s keys, this combination was abandoned as it was not possible to create a continuous glissando effect from the Pianola. Grainger started work on a more elaborate but eccentric machine in collaboration with Burnett Cross and his wife, Ella Grainger. The Free Music Machine was a machine that controlled the pitch, volume and timbre of eight oscillators. Two large rollers fed four sets of paper rolls over a set of mechanical arms that rolled over the cut contours of the paper and controlled the various aspects of the oscillators.

The book contains an introductory essay by composer, musicologist and critic Wilfrid Mellers, an erratum bookmark of a poem by the composer Howard Skempton explaining the numerous mis-spellings of Wilfrid Mellers name, and the postscript At Last by the editor of the book, Simon Cutts detailing the precarious history of this project, and its final accomplishment.