Return to composition list: By Genre / By Opus
For Double Wind Quintet
Duration: 15'
Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961), while perhaps not everyone’s favorite Australian composer, certainly comes close. I was first introduced to Grainger through his works for wind band, and it is these works that are once more featured in this “Percy Grainger Suite No. 3”.
Normally, I am leery of transcriptions. As a frequent composer myself, I full well recognize that a number of pieces’ true genius and spirit lies in their instrumentation. For this reason, I am often hesitant to take another’s work and try to transcribe it into a new medium. However, this fear has no place with the works of Percy Grainger. Among his other eccentricities (including composing in the nude, insisting on the use of English in his scores, and mailing original compositions to the Australian government asking that they be made official Australian folk music), Grainger was a large proponent of flexible instrumentation - or what he calls "elastic scoring". As he says:
"As long as a really satisfactory balance of tone is preserved (so that the voices that make up the musical texture are clearly heard, one against the other, in the intended proportions) I do not care whether one of my 'elastically scored' pieces is played by 4 or 40 or 400 players, or any number in between; whether trumpet parts are played on trumpets or soprano saxophones, French horn parts played on French horns or E flat altos or alto saxophones, trombone parts played on trombones or tenor saxophones [...] I do not even care whether the players are skilful or unskilful, as long as they play well enough to sound the right intervals and keep the afore-said tonal balance--and as long as they play badly enough to still enjoy playing ('Where no pleasure is, there is no profit taken'--Shakespeare)."
Cues abound in his scores and he always encouraged the performance of his works even if complete instrumentation was not available. In this vein, I am proud to present a suite for double wind quintet.
Grainger writes: "This bunch of 'musical wildflowers' (hence the title 'Lincolnshire Posy') is based on folksongs collected in Lincolnshire, England (one noted by Miss Lucy E. Broadwood; the other five noted by me, mainly in the years 1905-1906, and with the help of the phonograph), and the work is dedicated to the old folksingers who sang so sweetly to me. Indeed, each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody--a musical portrait of the singer's personality no less than of his habits of song--his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesqued delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone."