Embracing Grainger

What can it be, this squat semicircular structure nestled inconspicuous yet peculiar amid the faculties and offices along the leafy university stretch of Royal Parade, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia? Looks like a bus station without passengers, a public lavatory without users; perhaps still more (being windowless save for a high band of opaque glass bricks) a wartime bunker or bomb shelter. There’s a front door, tightly sealed; the bell yields no answer; the inscription gives nothing away — except to those who already know what they seek. For this singular building houses the inheritance of the most plural composer who ever lived: Percy Grainger, Melbourne’s greatest son and the 20th century’s most maverick musician.

Mention the name to his compatriots above a certain age and they look affronted. The irrepressible author of Country Gardens, Mock Morris, Molly on the Shore, Handel in the Strand and Blithe Bells (his comparable take on Bach’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’) is merely a dubious smell, regrettable, embarrassing, to be Airwicked out while looking askance. In England, then the United States, Grainger’s reputation as a phenomenon of the first order has steadily grown since Benjamin Britten’s late recordings and the excellent biography by John Bird (1976). On his native continent the prophet’s honour has been slower to advance; the museum he founded and funded has long been closed, apparently an incubus to its host, to be dispossessed and disposed of as quietly as possible. But things are changing and the liability is increasingly seen as an asset. What he would have most abhorred is coming to pass — the embrace of the Establishment, academic canonisation, the quirky quicksilver set in iconic concrete. Support has been raised to surmount some serious structural problems — rising and falling damp, the curator tells me, and correcting the founder’s aversion to electricity for fear of fires; and, most of all, the long indifference if not positive aversion.