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Humble inspirations : a survey of stylistic innovation in the folk-influenced music of Percy Grainger

University of British Columbia

This thesis is an examination of the use of folk music in some art music of the early twentieth century, especially in the musical oeuvre of Percy Grainger, and what, precisely, it means for a composer to incorporate folk music into his own compositional style. Chapter 1 compares Grainger with Béla Bartók and, using the two composers’ own writings on the matter, discusses their motivations for using folk material as well as their philosophical perspectives on folk music, using a short composition by each composer to observe his ideas in practice. Chapters 2 and 3 are analytical essays; Chapter 2 focuses on the construction of a complex formal structure out of simple, repetitive material in Molly on the Shore, while Chapter 3 looks at a particularly innovative modal harmonic language in “Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter.” Finally, Chapter 4 confronts the basic notion of “seriousness” in music, which seemingly threatens the artistic validity of Grainger’s compositional output, by examining Grainger’s own writings on “frivolous” versus “sublime” music and then presenting an especially challenging case in the “Jutish Medley” from Grainger’s Danish Folk-Music Suite, which defies easy description along the lines of “seriousness” or “frivolity.” To deal with the individualized nature of Grainger’s modal harmonic style, a new system of functions is presented which classifies harmonies as prolongational, cadential, or tonic—labeled PRO, CAD, and T, respectively—based on what functional roles a given piece assigns them. The overarching theme of this thesis is Grainger’s attempts to integrate two musics—high art music and folk music—that are, on some levels, incompatible, to examine the sources of that incompatibility, the way Grainger viewed that incompatibility and how and why he sought to overcome it, and the ways in which his attempts at doing so inspired a unique body of musical works.

Text

2013-08-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44840

Music - Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/