Grainger Studies

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    Introduction
    Pear, David ; Nemec, Belinda (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Introduction to new journal: Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
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    Brief biography and the 'all-round man'
    Piggott, Michael (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Encapsulating an entire life and career in a short essay or outline, such as those published in biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, is not a straightforward exercise. This article canvasses some of the broader issues and then as a case study examines the writing of the entry for Percy Grainger for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The author in question, Dr Kay Dreyfus, faced particular challenges such as an overabundance of primary source material, some controversial aspects of the subject's private life, and differences of opinion between author and commissioning editor.
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    Grainger, early music, democracy and freedom,
    Gillies, Malcolm (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Percy Grainger was known to shock his musical peers with his dismissal of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as writers of 'jazz classics'. He himself, he claimed, wished to promote quite different values, believing that the value of art music depended on the extent to which it was 'intrinsically many-voiced or democratic'. Identifying a fundamental divide in musical history with Joseph Haydn, Grainger claimed that the so-called Classical and Romantic eras of music were creative dark ages and the natural enemy of democratic musical values. Furthermore, that instrument which accrued such influence during Mozart's and Haydn's lifetimes, the piano, was a subsidiary devil because of its harmonic and homophonic bias and rapid decay in tone. This article considers how Grainger believed music could be more democratic, and in particular, how early music, revealed to him through Arnold Dolmetsch and his Haslemere Festivals, could encapsulate so many of the freedoms he found lacking in the more formalised music of later eras.
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    Racial stereotypes as comedic mechanism: Luscombe Searelle and Walter Parke
    Pinner, Mark (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    This article examines the use of racial stereotypes and disparagement as a humour mechanism by the composer William Luscombe Searelle, in the two operatic works that he produced in collaboration with the English wordsmith Walter Parke, Estrella and Bodabil. Through a discussion of the concepts of race and racism, and using selected examples from their works, this paper argues that while Searelle and Parke's depictions do go some way toward preserving the 'bulwark of bigotry'(1) inherent in the English depiction of the 'other', the real intent is comedy.
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    Some similarities between the feng-shui of Chinese joss houses in Australia and postmodern architecture
    Groves,Derham (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    This article postulates that the principles of feng-shui or Chinese geomancy used in building Chinese joss houses or Taoist temples in 19th- and early 20th-century Australia are akin to those of the postmodern architectural school.
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    'A souvenir of my deep interest in your future achievements': The 'Melba Gift' and issues of performing pitch in early 20th-century Melbourne
    Purtell, Simon (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    The international standardisation of performing pitch at a1=440 Hz was not completed until well into the 20th century. This article examines steps taken by Nellie Melba and some prominent figures in the Melbourne music scene to encourage Australian orchestras to adopt 'normal pitch' (a1=435 Hz), also known as 'French diapason normal' or 'French pitch', in the 1910s.
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    'Nostalgia is not what it used to be': Exploring the kitsch in Grainger's music
    Tregear, Peter (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    A swag of books and recordings over the past two decades has refocused both scholarly and popular attention on the works of one of 20th-century music's most colourful characters and original thinkers. This new attention, however, is not universally well received; Grainger's music is commonly perceived to be infused with a kind of mawkishness or kitsch sentimentality, a characterisation which sits uncomfortably with our common ideas of what good music should be, let alone what good 20thcentury music should be. In his Percy Grainger, however, Wilfrid Mellers suggests that Grainger's music is not only sublimated kitsch, but this is a 'commodity essential to our survival in a commodity-dealing community.'This paper explores aspects of some of the central aesthetic issues his claim raises, such as kitsch itself, and concludes by suggesting possible affinities between aspects of Grainger reception with debates surrounding the music of contemporary composers like Gavin Bryars and Alfred Schnittke, as well as aspects of pop- and postmodern art movements more generally.
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    Dress, moral reform and masculinity in Australia
    Peoples, Sharon (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Uniforms are an extremely effective indicator of the codification of appropriate rules of conduct. This essay argues that the influence of uniforms continues to be pervasive in Australian male dress, extending to everyday life and culture, and is formative in the development of taste in Australian male dress. To argue this case I use the non-normative dress practices of the convict 'magpie suit' and the dress promoted by Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP), 1929-1940, as a counterpoint to military uniforms, to gain a deeper understanding of male fashions worn in Australia. As there does not appear to be a full and substantial account of Percy Grainger's dress practices,(1) what is available, nonetheless, provides an inspiration for inclusion as non-normative dress practices. / One of the mandates of military dress is to re-form the body. In early colonial Australia the magpie suit was designed to bring about moral reform, while later, in the early 20th century, the MDRP sought to bring about health reform through diversification of male fashions. Like Grainger's towelling clothes, these were exceptions within the wardrobe of hegemonic masculine dress, rather than the norm. In discussing this reforming of bodies, this essay draws on the approach of the work of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss. His theory is highly applicable to bodies wearing military uniforms, using his 'triple viewpoint' whereby the sociological, biological and psychological attributes combine to produce the social body.(2)
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    Book review: The new Percy Grainger companion
    Tan, Eleanor A.L. (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Review by Eleanor A.L. Tan of the following publication: Penelope Thwaites (ed.), The New Percy Grainger Companion (UK: Boydell, 2010).
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    Guidelines for contributors
    Pear, David ; Nemec, Belinda (University of Melbourne Library, 2011)
    Journal Article
    Guidelines for contributors. Please note that Grainger Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, is no longer published. Two issues were produced: no. 1 (2011) and no. 2 (2012).