Shortly before his death, Percy Grainger (1882-1961) lodged over twenty unpublished sketches in his Australian Museum. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger draws exclusively from these sketches, revealing for the first time an illuminating portrait of the composer's life. With such titles as "The Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga," "Thunks," "Ere-I-Forget," "The Love-Life of Helen and Paris," and "Anecdotes," these manuscripts were intended as precursors to Grainger's autobiography, My Wretched Tone-Life, which he only commenced in his final years. Expertly shaping these sketches, the...

Percy Grainger was one of the most colourful of this century's cultural figures. The All-Round Man depicts that scrambling diversity through seventy-six challenging letters from Grainger's "American" years, 1914-61. These letters are fascination to read: they are cultivated "rambles" (as Grainger actually called several of his compositions), not dissimilar to today's telephone conversations. Often written in Grainger's crunchy "Blue-eyed English," they explore uninhibitedly every corner of his public and private life. They reflect the magnificent attempts of a great but flawed mind to...

Prolific as a composer, performer, and recording artist, Percy Grainger was an indefatigable writer. This selection of forty-six essays about the production, promotion, and propagation of music is drawn from his over 150 public writings. Their topics range over his own and his friends' compositional plans, piano technique, Free Music', instrumental usage, and his ideas on artistic development in the United States, Australian, and his beloved Nordic lands.