Hearing the Free Music

Percy Grainger, Australian Visionary of the Soundscape, Creator of Electro-Acoustic Free Music and Sound Machines

Abstract

In the Free Music Statement of 1938, Percy Grainger clearly articulated his philosophy of music as coming from an intimate relationship he had to the environment and his attentiveness to the sonic world around him. From this he imagined a new free music, following contours of the physical and acoustic landscape to create a microtonal graphic and sounding world of polyphonic complexity like the world of nature. So too the introduction of machines such as trains and planes was a metaphor for the kind of sound pattern and automatic machines he was to develop. This article identifies these relationships, showing how Grainger passionately interpreted the soundscape into a new sonic world of free music heralding the new age of electronic music. Grainger himself said the Free Music was his only important contribution to music and that the theremin was the most perfect of all instruments. The world premiere of the Free Music for multiple theremins did not occur for another sixty years in 1998 when I curated it for the Beaming the Theremin event for the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts at the Grainger museum. This article articulates these events and asks why Grainger’s pioneering contribution to the soundscape and electro-acoustic free music has been so largely ignored.