Interested in learning more about Percy Grainger and his concept of Free Music?  For those unable to have attended our exhibition or the related tours and events, many resources have been archived and are available through the Percy Grainger Society website.

This past March, Teresa Balough’s engaging and in-depth presentation explored the concepts and wider implications of Grainger's Free Music. Speaking from the first floor of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio and expanding on the (now closed) Free Music exhibition, Balough discussed the origin and Grainger’s concept of Free Music, his compositional work, his collaboration with his wife Ella and the scientist Burnett Cross, and how he used the house in White Plains to work on his Free Music machines.  

As a young man Grainger gained the courage to risk his reputation as a pianist and popular composer to write daring harmonies with complex irregular rhythms. In middle age he took up the cause of lesser-known composers and encouraged the appreciation of music from other cultures and eras. And as the years advanced, he devoted himself more and more to the development of his ‘Free Music’ ideals and their implementation in the physical world through the development of the Cross-Grainger Free Music Machines.

Teresa' Balough's presentation, The Wider Implications of Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’,  was recorded and is now available through this link.

Grainger scholar Teresa Balough has been studying the life and work of Percy Grainger for many years. She is the author of The Life and Work of Percy Aldridge Grainger: Till Life Become Fire (2023), co-editor of Distant Dreams: the Free Music Correspondence of Burnett Cross and Percy Grainger 1944–1960 (2020) and has published other books, essays, articles and monographs on Grainger.