It may seem hubristic for one man to have recorded every detail of his life and to have established a commemorative museum. It is all there at the Grainger Museum, in Melbourne, from variously perceptive, shocking, hilarious letters, to hair clippings, clothes, and his own autopsy report. This personal expansiveness can be exhausting. One moment you convince yourself that you have formed a catholic understanding of this bizarre individual, only to discover a further dimension to his character or abilities. It is the intellectual equivalent of herding cats.

The response to this plethora of sources tends to be caution and conservatism. Rarely does Grainger’s full spectrum of musical disciplines overlap in any one current practitioner, no doubt to the posthumous chagrin of one of history’s most strident ‘all-rounders’. But few of us can negotiate all the streams of Grainger’s self-consciousness. Penelope Thwaites’s reference book reflects this. ‘Uppermost in our mind,’ she notes, ‘has been the encouragement of readers to experience Grainger’s music’; to ‘awaken a desire for closer acquaintance with the music that inspired such enthusiasm’. In other words, she attempts a kind of Grainger dégustation. With some reservations, I think the editor does a fine job.

The book is a departure from the traditional work of The Boydell Press. In the past, Boydell has produced such scholarly works as Valerie Langfield’s study of one of Grainger’s closest friends, in Roger Quilter: His Life and Music(2002). Thwaites’s book is more accessible than Langfield’s work, but musicologists will no longer be able to assume that a Boydell publication will necessarily represent a certain je sais quoi.

The main text is divided into two parts, each with nine chapters. They are titled ‘The Music’ and ‘Grainger in Context’. In the first part, the contributions range from discussions of his writing for wind bands, problems associated with publishing Grainger, and a consideration of Grainger’s music for  choirs (Paul Jackson) and symphony orchestras (Thwaites, Geoffrey Simon, James Judd). The second part, transcending the music itself, provides an introduction to Grainger’s philosophy and biography. It addresses everything from the ‘spiritualising’ influence of music (Teresa Balough) to Grainger’s confronting racial views (Bruce Clunies Ross). These two parts are supplemented by a further hundred pages of appendices, catalogues, and an index. The quality of writing is varied, though this does not necessarily reflect the total value of the chapter. Tighter editorial control would have been beneficial. Thwaites warns us in the introduction that ‘the tone of our professional performer–writers is more conversational than formal’, and this is reflected in occasional repetitions. Of course, not everyone will read the book from cover to cover. They may not even use the contents pages, but will flick to the index, in search of hidden treasures, surprises, answers. Indexing a book is a dying art (fuelled by the digitisation of books, wherein a ‘search’ mechanism seduces many into believing that an index is now redundant). But this is an excellent tool through which to access the volume. It is clear, concise, and thorough, providing a true representation of the book’s contents, not the interests of the indexer.

Reviews of books such as this, with numerous chapters written by individual authors, cannot note every contributor, but some of them clearly stand out in the Companion. Stephen Varcoe’s chapter, ‘Singing Grainger Solo’, is an exquisitely articulated tour de force,with much illuminating material. What Varcoe does particularly well is to convince us how wrong any performer is to treat Grainger’s vocal writing as twee Edwardian parlour songs. Just as his ‘Country Gardens’ was for Grainger about the cabbages and brussels sprouts of a working kitchen garden rather than the hollyhocks of the well-heeled, so Varcoe notes that any denial of the working-class origins of Grainger’s solo songs, complete with authentic accents, would betray much of what the composer–arranger believed he was entrusted to convey.

Other writers are new to me in this section, including Murray McLachlan, whose ‘Grainger’s Pianism on Disc’ was not something I expected to find particularly interesting (a reflection of my own limitations, not his). I was deeply impressed by both the quality of the content and by the writer’s ability to demonstrate very lucidly how such recordings can tell us so much about the man. This chapter sums up everything the book should be in toto: scholarly, clearly written, well researched, and innovative. If you had to choose one chapter from the entire book that told you the most about Percy Grainger, for me, this would be it.

In the second section, Thwaites’s fascinating chapter ‘Grainger in Context’ introduces some challenging new material regarding the composer’s paternal heritage. Thwaites writes: ‘As for Percy’s mother, Rose: although the facts of her background are clearer, development in attitudes to women over the last hundred years suggest that the time is long overdue for a complete re-evaluation of her life.’ I heartily concur, but it is an absolute relief to find John Grainger being subjected to closer scrutiny, not merely dismissed as the drunken sot who infected his wife with syphilis. Cad though he certainly was, his is a fascinating story. Hats off to Thwaites for writing the first chapter of a true assessment of John Harry Grainger.

Roger Covell, in ‘An Australian Composer?’, addresses the question that so many of us who laud Grainger have asked for so long: Was he really an Australian? For Covell he clearly is, and it is Grainger’s love of the Australian bush, the unforgiving landscape, the ‘stringybark, greenhide, and fencing-wire’, that define him as Australian. For a country that cultivates its population in such distinct series of urban clusters, it is ironic that a common, defining characteristic is its love of the ‘outback’, whether in folklore, literature, music, or art. 

The volume might have been better divided into three or four sections, such as ‘The Works’, ‘The Grainger Programme’, ‘The Man’, ‘The Philosophy’, with an editor’s introduction and explanation to each. Given the nature of the volume, some of the background material could have been omitted in favour of more musical exposition. For example, what about ‘Teaching Grainger’, an important facet of this man’s career. Such a feature would have been helpful to professional music educators. Given the increasing inclusion of Grainger in music examination lists, this would have been a wise move. As always with Grainger, there is a risk of being washed away on the tsunami of Grainger quotations. Thwaites wisely avoids this. But where is the criticism of the man? A major volume such as this needs to be critical as well as commendatory.

The ‘Select Bibliography’ is just that – select. A number of theses and publications are omitted. Where, for instance, is Eleanor Tan’s PhD thesis on Grainger as a virtuoso? And while it is listed, Belinda Nemec’s ground-breaking doctoral thesis on the design of the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, suggesting links with Walter Burley Griffin’s designs of Canberra, is not mentioned. For this reason, combined with the generally ‘older’ profile of many contributors, the volume is more a companion to the Grainger of yesteryear rather than of tomorrow.

The book would have benefited from much more musical exposition. A ‘masterclass’ on an iconic work would have been invaluable, a technique that Varcoe approaches. None of the musicians writing under ‘The Music’ takes one work and demonstrates ‘this is how it should be played’. Some of the earlier chapters run through a list of Grainger’s works with breakneck speed and insufficient content. Thwaites’s own chapter ‘At the Piano with Grainger’, which does discuss the breaking of chords (‘harping’ or ‘arpeggiating’), and which hints at the importance of Grainger’s use of the middle, or ‘sostenuto’, pedal (originally peculiar to American grands), tells us that ‘Pianists should therefore acquaint themselves with its possibilities’, but fails to tell us what some of those possibilities might be.

The volume cries out for an accompanying CD or webpage with music downloads. Given the editor’s relationship with Chandos, and given the latter’s fine Grainger productions, this would have been an obvious inclusion.

Despite these criticisms, the book still works well. It is a bit like fruit salad: lots of juicy ingredients forming a unique flavour and texture. Some of these components needed more careful preparation, and the overall balance might have been different had Thwaites set out to provide a volume that was more helpful to performers of Grainger’s music. To paraphrase Thwaites’s speech in February this year during the Festival at Kings Place, London, that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Grainger’s death: it is time to pass on the Grainger baton to a new community of musicians and scholars. Thwaites is relaying a very impressive baton through her recordings and this volume, but there is still quite a distance left to run.