Exploring Percy Grainger's Free Music: Third Sundays

Come view our new exhibit! Meet the curators! Discover how the Percy Grainger Home and Studio functioned as a creative workshop!

The exhibition, Tone, Rhythm, Pitch: Exploring Percy Grainger’s Free Music, introduces Grainger’s work in Free Music and demonstrates, through objects, images and text, how the White Plains home was an active creative work space.

After a short overview, visitors will be free to view the exhibition at their own pace and tour the first floor of the historic home. The curators, Anne Ocone and Stewart Lee,  will be available to answer questions and elaborate on how the exhibit developed.

The event is free and open to the public. Due to space limitations, registration is encouraged.

For Percy Grainger, Free Music drew its inspiration from nature and was music free from the constraints of conventional rhythm and individual pitch. From an early age, he imagined music that would glide continuously across the pitch spectrum, without the need for metrical rhythms and, ultimately, without the need for a performer; the composers’ ideas would be translated directly into sound. Elements of Free Music can be found in much of Grainger’s instrumental and vocal compositions, where the use of sliding notes and irregular rhythms often feature.

Percy Grainger occupied the house at 7 Cromwell Place from 1921 until his death in 1961, using it as his home base for his world tours, practice studio and laboratory for his avant-garde musical compositions and experimental music machines. After Percy Grainger’s death in 1961, his widow Ella continued to live in the house until her passing in 1979. This historic house, built in 1893, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April of 1993.