Hill-Song Nr. 1, Op. 91, No. 2 (1901-2/2019)

Program Notes:

Percy Grainger (1882-1961), one of the early composers who embraced the wind band medium, may be best known for his folksong settings. At 13, he left Australia to study at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and, in 1901, moved to London where he became a celebrated pianist. Grainger was chosen by Edvard Grieg to perform the Norwegian composer’s piano concerto at the 1907 Leeds Festival. Grieg’s love of nationalistic music inspired Grainger to begin collecting English folk music. He traveled throughout the United Kingdom, recording folksongs on a wax cylinder phonograph. Many of the over 500 folksongs he collected and transcribed would become source material for his compositions. In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he would serve as an army bandsman from 1917-1919. He became an American citizen in 1918. An assiduous composer, he composed, set, arranged, and edited some 400 works. Counting his numerous resettings of these pieces, his body of work exceeds 1,000.

Hill-Song Nr. 1 is Percy Grainger’s first work for wind ensemble, written in 1901-1902 for an ensemble of 2 piccolos, 6 oboes, 6 English horns, 6 bassoons, and contrabassoon. When I began my Master’s at UI in fall 2017, I was vaguely aware of the piece. When I became aware that we had a facsimile of the manuscript score in our archives, I knew I simply had to program it. The first thing Dr. Peterson said to me was, “Joe, you know there’s a reason no one programs this piece,” but let me go ahead regardless – and we performed the original scoring last April.

In the course of preparing the piece last year, a number of issues became apparent. For one, Grainger never produced a set of parts for the original scoring, and there were significant differences between the original scoring and subsequent settings (for two pianos/four hands and chamber orchestra). For another, there were several legitimate orchestration issues in the original scoring (issues of range and balance in particular), never mind the prohibitive instrumentation. I decided to use the piece as my master’s project, producing a critical edition of the original double-reed scoring, providing an analysis of the piece, and transcribing a new edition for full band, in the hopes that this gem of a piece might become more accessible and more often performed.

Grainger left only the following note in the original manuscript: “This merely an exploration of musically-hilly ways, a gathering of types for future Hill-songs, a catalogue.” Later, much more extensive program notes revealed a number of compositional inspirations and goals:

- Wide-toned scales: Avoiding chromatic motion in order to “make my music as island-like (British, Irish, Icelandic, Scandinavian) as possible, & as unlike the music of the European continent as I could.” This resulted in pentatonic and whole tone influences.

- Irregular rhythms: It is more common for two subsequent bars to be of different meters in the piece than of the same – a particular challenge in the preparation of this work for both players and conductor. Grainger claims that his use of irregular rhythm ended up influencing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring!

- Democratic polyphony: Inspired by the music of J. S. Bach (featuring independent musical lines interacting rather than a single melody with harmonic accompaniment) and his native Australia (featuring… democracy?), Grainger set out to write a polyphonic work in which all parts are equally important.

- Semi-discordant triads: Grainger began treating sonorities other than triads as consonances (particularly seventh chords), anticipating a lot of 20th-century music (Debussy, jazz, etc.).

- Triads in conjunct motion: Rather than using traditional harmonic progressions, Grainger often moves all voices in the same direction by the same interval, resulting in novel harmonic progressions.

- Non-repetition of themes: “I view the repetition of themes as a redundancy – as if a speaker should continually repeat himself. I also consider the repetition of themes undemocratic – as if the themes were singled out for special consideration & the rest of the musical material deemed ‘unfit for quotation’.”

- Non-architectural form-procedures: Grainger aimed to let the form of the piece naturally develop, rather than trying to force it into sections. “In other words I want the music, from first to last, to be all theme and never thematic treatment.”

- Large chamber-music: Inspired once more by Bach, Grainger’s original conception for the piece was a large group of one-on-a-part players, as opposed to the large orchestra with massive string sections.

This transcription was premiered on April 10, 2019 by the Illinois Wind Symphony, Joe Clark, conductor.