Conducting Homework #2

Broderick Lemke

10/3/16

Lincolnshire Posy Movement III, Rufford Park Poachers

Percy Grainger is one of the most eccentric composers in his personal behaviors, if not also in his
music. He was born in Australia in 1882 and died in New York in 1961. He was a talented pianist and
composer and his most famous piece is his arrangement of Country Gardens. His career as a musician
led him many different places that created his eccentric styles and personality.

As a young boy Grainger was homeschooled for most of his life, aside from a 3 month period in
which he was badly bullied. He had tutors in music and art, and he was extremely talented at art. His
tutors initially thought that he would have pursued a career in art rather than music. This was changed
as he worked through his piano studies and performed in public venues and was highly admired by the
Melbourne community and press.

After his childhood he moved to Europe and continued his work as a concert pianist there. He
also began composing around this time, and felt more confident in his work. He spent a lot of time
traveling in Europe and eventually ended up moving to America in the mid 1910s. Once he arrived in
America he served in an army band playing the saxophone, although he did note that he could also play
the oboe. This love of the single-reed instrument showed in his later works for wind band and
throughout his personal writings.

Throughout his entire life Grainger was known to be quite an odd fellow. He would walk or run
to his concerts he was conducting or playing piano in and upon arriving immediately begin playing or
conducting. He also said that when traveling by sea he liked to spend his free time shoveling coal in the
furnace. He claimed that he enjoyed the feeling of playing while exhausted, and this helped him to
achieve that feeling. He was also known to be interested in Sado-Masochistic relationships, and upon
creating his own museum donated many items related to this field into the collection. He claimed that
music was the Art of agony and that it is all derived from screaming, which explains his obsession with
these darker elements.

Graingers music itself is highly experimental. Throughout pieces he uses changing time
signatures, even having some pieces with no time signature at all. On top of his experiments in meter he
abandoned all Italian and German words for tempo and dynamics. His pieces are marked with terms
such as Slow off instead of ritardando, or Louden instead of crescendo. This culminated by the end
of his career when he wrote Free Music that was meant to reach beyond the limitations of
instruments. He created various machines that could play these pieces and in modern times people have
recreated these pieces on technology that is now able to create the sounds he was envisioning.

The piece Lincolnshire Posy was written in 1937 and consists of six movements. Each movement
is a different folk song that he recorded on a phonograph. They were all gathered on a trip to
Lincolnshire, England in 1905-1906. In his recording of these materials and transferring them to the
medium of wind band he tried to keep them as honest to the recording as possible. This means that any
imperfections in the actual folk song that were produced, whether notes, meter or anything else of that
matter would be kept in the transcriptions.

The movement Ruffor Park Poachers in the third movement in this piece. It is written through
various shifting meters and is seen as one of the most difficult pieces in the wind band repertoire to be
played as an ensemble and to conduct. Grainger himself refused to take his eyes off his color-coded
condensed score when conducting this piece. Because of this difficulty, in the original premier of the
work this movement was skipped.

The excerpt in the book in from the end of the movement. The beginning starts with a cannon
very similar to this sections, but with a different orchestration. It then moves into either a Flugelhorn or
Soprano saxophone solo depending upon which version of the piece you are playing. Then whichever
version you play it comes into a tutti section that is very loud before softening while still remaining tutti.
This is a reprise of the canon, each voice offset by a quarter note.

The voices are presented over a drone of D flat and A flat, which sets the tonality of the section
in D flat major, although the melody on top does not strictly follow that tonality. Instead the music
seems to be constructed horizontally. The melody in voices 1 and 2 are separated by a fifth, and so are
voices three and four. If you were to look at the first note they all start with you see a B flat, two Fs, and
a C. This organization suggests a sort of quartal harmony as the main distinction throughout the piece,
although it rarely lines up cleanly to hear this.

The excerpt we are given is four phrases long, but as the voices are in a cannon it can be difficult
for the ensemble to maintain shaping within their own line and while listening to the group. As such it is
very important they follow the marked dynamics. This reduction of the score is also missing a crucial
brass phrase towards the end which is a short reprise of the middle forte section. It would be out of
place in this excerpt though as we have not heard it before, which explains its absence.