Colonial Song
Percy Aldridge GRAINGER (1882-1961)

The first version for winds of Colonial Song was written in 1913 and premiered under Edwin Franko Goldman’s baton on June 6th 1919. Originally it was written for piano as a birthday gift to his mother Rose in 1911, and in 1912 Grainger made a version for 2 voices, harp and symphony orchestra.

Grainger’s thoughts on how to use crescendo and decrescendo in this piece: ‘To ensure a wide range of tone-strength differentiation I applied to large chamber music what I would like to call Wagner’s ‘organ registration type of scoring’. That is to say: where waxing and waning tone-strengths are desired in one and the same tone-strand (voice or part) they are attained not merely by changing dynamics in the instruments playing the total tone-strand, but also by adding extra instruments to the tone-strand where the loudening of the tone is desired & by withdrawing the extra instruments where a softening of the tone is intended’.

In a letter to Frederick Fennell, Grainger explains that his Colonial Song was ‘an attempt to write a melody as typical of the Australian countryside as Stephen Foster’s exquisite songs are typical of rural America’. Grainger’s Australian Up-Country Song uses the same melody, just as the last part of the suite In A Nutshell, The ‘Gum-Suckers’ March.

The well-known conductor Sir Thomas Beecham wasn’t that charmed by his friend’s sentimental work. After hearing the version for two piano’s he said: ‘My dear Grainger, you have achieved the almost impossible! You have written the worst piece of modern times!’

“No tradition tunes of any kind are made use of in this piece, in which I have wished to express feelings aroused by thoughts of the scenery and people of my native land, (Australia), and also to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general.

Perhaps it is not unnatural that people living more or less lonely in vast virgin countries and struggling against natural and climatic hardships (rather than against the more actively and dramatically exciting counter wills of their fellow men, as in more thickly populated lands) should run largely to that patiently yearning, inactive sentimental wistfulness that we find so touchingly expressed in much American art; for instance in Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” and in Stephen C. Foster’s adorable songs “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home,” etc.

I have also noticed curious, almost Italian-like, musical tendencies in brass band performances and ways of singing in Australia (such as a preference for richness and intensity of tone and soulful breadth of phrasing over more subtly and sensitively varied delicacies of expression), which are also reflected here.”

Percy Aldridge Grainger

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