Percy Grainger was both a free spirit and a mass of paradoxes. He was a vegetarian who hated vegetables (he lived mostly on nuts, cheese, cake, bread, rice and ice cream), and a pacifist who was thrilled by violence. As a composer he was a visionary whose music was untrammelled by convention, and he wrote well 'avant' the avant-garde. He stretched from popular pieces to atonal experimentation, and yet he left no concerto or sonata (he shunned such ubiquitous structures, calling them 'German impositions') or any of the other musical forms that one might expect such a major instrumentalist to have created.

He was obsessed by his supposed Nordic ancestry, to the point of formulating what he called 'blue-eyes English' (akin to Anglish), which avoided words with Latin and Greek roots. Thus many of his scores use words such as 'louden' and 'soften' instead of crescendo or diminuendo. He also voiced views on racial purity which were embarrassingly prophetic of those of the Nazis, yet he was fascinated by the cultures of indigenous peoples everywhere and despite his racial thinking, with its overtones of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was friends with both Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.

As for the piano, Grainger was one of the finest pianists of his day and one of the first to establish his self on the international concert circuit. Yet he loathed the instrument, considering it 'an affront to destroy a melodiously conceived idea by trying to fit it into the limitations of two hands and a box full of hammers and strings'. The public face of Percy Grainger was contradictory enough then, but psychologically he was even more complex. Raised almost single-handedly by his mother, he remained under her thrall until she threw herself from a skyscraper, distressed by rumours that they had an incestuous relationship.

In fact, Rose avoided the slightest physical contact with her son: she suffered from syphilis for most of her life, having contracted it from her husband, and feared that the disease might be transmitted to Percy. His memories of his mother's childhood whippings (usually triggered by his bedwetting, well out of infancy) were transformed in adolescence into what he called 'whiplust', a thirst for flagellation which he indulged with exultant and unapologetic glee. 'I feel', he wrote in 1956, 'that flagellantism, like boxing and other sports, is a means of turning the destructive elements in man into harmless channels.'

Although her suicide freed Grainger from his mother's physical domination, her memory became the most powerful element in his emotional life. However, he was still able to enjoy a loving, if unorthodox, marriage to the Swedish artist and poet Ella Viola Ström, with whom he had fallen in love at first sight. They married in 1928, on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. An orchestra of more than one hundred musicians and an a cappella choir performed his newest composition, To a Nordic Princess, in front of an audience of twenty thousand people. Percy Grainger was, to say the least, no ordinary man.

Early Promise

He was born in Melbourne on July 8th 1882, and began playing the piano under his mother's tutelage. He showed such rapid progress that he was taken to Louis Pabst, one of only a handful of private pupils of the formidable Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein. Grainger later wrote: 'Pabst was the first to reveal to me the glories of Bach, opening the doors to the only music that I have ever deeply loved'. He became obsessed with Bach's music, and when Pabst suggested he might work on some Chopin pieces Grainger declared them maudlin. He accused his teacher of having no taste, tough talking for a ten-year-old!

By the age of fifteen Grainger had outgrown his surroundings and, with fifty pounds raised by a benefit concert in his pocket, he and his mother moved to Europe. He studied at the Hoch Conservatory. His piano teacher was the redoubtable James Kwast, and he attended composition classes with Ivan Knorr. He didn't get on with either of them, and later observed: "When in Frankfurt, I learned practically nothing." However, he did become good friends with four English students there, Balfour Gardiner, Norman O'Neill, Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott. Together, they became known as the 'Frankfurt Group'.

In 1901, Grainger and his mother moved to London. He was lionised as a society pianist, and began to receive invitations to play at the fashionable salons of the rich and aristocratic. He also gained royal patronage, with commands to play at Buckingham Palace. Grainger had an intimate understanding of the capabilities of the piano, and how best to write for it. His control of dynamics and rhythm and his highly personalised phrasing, his fearless attack and huge fortissimos, even his wrong notes were as much the marks of a Grainger performance as the bowler hat and walking cane of Chaplin.

In the next few years he studied with Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin, and befriended Edvard Grieg in London. Grieg's Piano Concerto became one of his concert warhorses, but Grainger also wrote many of his own piano pieces in this period. Some of them presaged the forthcoming popularisation of the tone cluster by Leo Ornstein and Henry Cowell, and In a Nutshell was the first piece by a Western classical composer to require direct, non-keyed sounding of the strings (in this case, with a mallet). I particularly like the second movement, Grainger's depiction of turn-of-the-century London music halls.

Doubtless his fame would have spread even further afield but for the intervention of fate, and in September 1914 he and his mother moved to America to escape the growing pressure on him to enlist in the military. The move was certainly a profitable one. Grainger had taken private pupils throughout his career, but by the 1920s he was earning as much two hundred dollars an hour from lessons (over one thousand pounds in today's money). He often made his students practice wildly different pieces on different pianos at the same time, while he himself recited poetry. He claimed this would improve their concentration!

Something for Everyone

Grainger loathed performing, and was never able to free himself completely from the 'rack of the concert platform'. Standing in the wings, he would often contemplate the crude choice of either committing suicide or preparing a speech for his audience as an apology for the drivel that they were about to hear. But despite hating the life of the travelling virtuoso, his concert schedule continued unabated until the late 1950s and he remained physically fit until well into his sixties. His unquenchable energy only began to desert him in his final years when, riddled with abdominal cancer, he was in almost constant pain.

Even then though, he was still travelling as far as Melbourne to supervise the construction of the Grainger Museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne. When he died on February 20th 1961, he not only left the Museum many unusual personal belongings (including photographs of composers' eyes and his collection of whips) but another, somewhat less readily predictable bequest: his skeleton! It is, I believe, kept in the basement. Many of his instruments and scores are located at the Grainger house in White Plains, New York (now the headquarters of the International Percy Grainger Society).

He was a miniaturist by temperament and his only work of any scale, the polyrhythmic ballet The Warriors, is just sixteen minutes long. He described it as 'an orgy of war-like dances, processions and merry-making, with amorous interludes'. He would often prepare his pieces in a number of different versions, a style of arrangement that he called 'elastic scorings'. It allowed for varying numbers of performers, a concept that he outlined in his succinctly-titled essay To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies.

The music world only began to realise how many of the major developments of modern composition were foreshadowed in Grainger's works in the final years of the twentieth century, and it will probably be some time yet before we really have the measure of him. At fifteen he was writing music that used the whole tone scale, years before Debussy turned to it. And his high-spirited Random Round, first conceived in 1912 after hearing the group improvisations of South Sea Islanders, introduced aleatoric elements a year before the birth of the best-known exponent of the device, Witold Lutoslawski.

Of Grainger's ninety pieces for solo piano, a number are familiar from elsewhere in his output and around a third are transcriptions of pieces by other composers. Some of the piano works are as experimental as anything he attempted, while others, such as Molly on the Shore and Country Gardens (which he came to detest, just as Rachmaninov did his Prelude in C sharp minor), are long-established favourites. My own favourite Grainger composition is Handel in the Strand, which pays homage to his love of Baroque music with its jaunty theme, rapid staccato chords and boisterous conclusion.

For all of the contradictions in his personality, Grainger remains one of the most invigorating characters in twentieth century music. I say this both because of his refreshingly original views on the subject, and his uniquely inspiring music (which, despite its unexpected turns, has a warm, human glow at its centre). As a child he declared that the weeds in his garden were as interesting as the flowers, and that independent outlook is reflected in his writing. He is often dismissed as a musical lightweight, on account of his best-known works being immediately attractive, but Percy Grainger was a serious artist.