Untangling the “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon”: Racialism in Percy Grainger’s Engagement with Non-Western Music

In this talk, John Gabriel will explore Grainger’s idiosyncratic and often baffling racialist categories. Focusing on how he recombined ideas from multiple sources, Gabriel will reveal how he blended speculative discourse over the origins of music with to other major concerns at the time, particularly over such modern ills as urban crowding and overpopulation, labour exploitation, industrial pollution, and authoritarianism. Gabriel argues that attending to Grainger’s racialist categories of world music broadens our understanding of both how racialist thinking impacted musical thought beyond well-worn models like Wagner and how racialism’s adaptability on the individual level facilitated its pervasion of mainstream white western culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During this event, the Grainger Museum will be open from 5:30pm and the talk itself will start at 6pm.

Bookings encouraged, drop-ins welcome.

Image credit: Percy Grainger with 3LO microphone and score, 1926. Grainger Museum Collection, University of Melbourne.