PERCY GRAINGER AND THE REVIVAL OF EARLY ENGLISH POLYPHONY: THE ANSELM HUGHES CORRESPONDENCE

Abstract

WHILE THE exuberant and multi-faceted genius of Percy Grainger has been acknowledged increasingly since his death in 1961, his significant contribution to the early music revival has yet to receive the recognition it deserves.' From the early 1930s he worked for three decades with missionary if sporadic zeal-as teacher, editor and performer-to promote what he considered to be the 'positively overwhelming' corpus of 'early European music of the first rank'.2 In a number of instances, his own interest was awakened by the pioneering work of others, notably Arnold Dolmetsch in the field of viol consort music3 and Dom Anselm Hughes in that of early English polyphony. With the latter he embarked on the task of editing for practical use a collection of sacred and secular pieces dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries; although only seven items were eventually published, English Gothic Music (henceforth EGM), as the series was named, represents an important early attempt to bring this reportory to the attention of a wider public. For much of the period of their collaboration, Hughes and Grainger were separated by the Atlantic, conducting their discussions by post. The resulting wealth of correspondence-spanning some 23 years-constitutes an important source for our understanding both of Grainger's pioneering if idiosyncratic contribution to the early music revival and of the particular significance of the rediscovery of pre-Renaissance repertories to his own construction of music history and his democratic ambitions for the universal dissemination and appreciation of all types of music. Grainger first became acquainted with Hughes's work in 1932, soon after being appointed head of the music department at New York University College of Fine Arts. In the course of a lecture tour of the USA earlier in the year, Hughes had been heard by Gustave Reese, then working alongside Grainger as a part-time instructor in medieval music.4 Reese introduced Grainger to Hughes's recently published