Percy Grainger: Colonial Song (1911)

Abstract

Composed by Percy Grainger (1882-1961) in 1911, Colonial Song is one of his best known works, and exists in various versions, some incorporating voices. Carrying the annotation 'Composed as a yule-tide gift for mother, 1911', the score is marked 'Rich, Broad and Vibrating, with Ample Swells'. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Colonial Song is written in a rather sentimental vein, and echoes Grainger's love of a certain species of folksong from the British Isles. The composer's treatment of the melody and harmony is quite closely akin to his settings of some folksongs from that part of the world. Grainger himself supplied the following note: No traditional 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 lonelily [sic] in vast virgin countries and struggling against natural and climatic hardships (rather than against the more actively and dramaticly [sic] 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. Show more