Percy Grainger
“Lincolnshire Posy”

Percy Grainger, born in 1882 in Melbourne, Australia, came to Europe in 1895 to study in Frankfurt am Main. He later settled in Britain and made a name for himself as a pianist, performing in the elegant salons of London. Around the same time that Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók were collecting folk songs in Hungary, Grainger began to take an interest in the vernacular musical traditions of his adopted English homeland. In 1905 and 1906 he set out to find people still familiar with this repertoire – travelling from village to village, at first with pencil and notebook, later equipped with a phonograph. The collection that emerged from these encounters became a treasure chest of musical ideas and provided the foundation for one of his most popular works: Lincolnshire Posy.

Grainger meticulously recorded from whom and under what circumstances he had heard each song. Of the first movement of Lincolnshire Posy, for instance, he wrote about a certain Mr Deane: “I found him in the hospital ward of the workhouse, with a great gash in his head – he having fallen down stairs. He was very proud of his wound, and insisted that he was far too weak to sing. ‘All right, Mr Deane,’ I said to him, ‘you needn’t sing yourself; but I would like you to hear some records made by other singers in these parts.’ He had not heard half the record through before he said, impulsively: ‘I’ll sing for you, yoong mahn.’ So the phonograph was propped up on his bed, and in between the second and third verse he spoke these words into the record: ‘It’s pleasein’ muh.’ Which shows how very much folksinging is part of the folksinger’s natural life.”

In 1914, Grainger emigrated to the United States. When he was commissioned in 1937 to compose a work for the upcoming American Bandmasters Convention, he turned to six of these folk songs. In doing so, he strove to preserve the singers’ original diction and expressive nuances: “Each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody – a musical portrait of the singer’s personality no less than of his habits of song – his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesqued delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone.”

The melodies in Lincolnshire Posy – with the exception of the final song – sound less “folksy” than one might expect, for Grainger enriched them with lush and often daring harmonies. For him, the old folk singers were nothing less than “kings and queens of song”: “No concert singer I ever heard approached these rural warblers in variety of tone-quality, range of dynamics, rhythmic resourcefulness and individuality of style.”