ABSTRACT
In January 1934 Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper reported several notable statements made by Percy Grainger following his arrival in Melbourne from Adelaide. No doubt particularly striking to a Queensland audience, whose own government-sponsored radio station – 4QG – had been inaugurated in 1926, was Grainger’s claim that he had ‘never listened to a wireless set’. 2 But equally remarkable was Grainger’s bold assertion that ‘our musicians do not know any serious music; at best they know only the compositions of the 18th and 19th century Germans, who wrote entertaining music little above the level of that provided in restaurants to facilitate digestion – people like Beethoven and Mozart’. In Grainger’s opinion the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries counted among the ‘best periods of English music’, while ‘The present was also one of the greatest periods of production of good music, though the public did not know it.’ As representative of the finest modern composers, he singled out ‘the Australian’ Constant Lambert (1905–51). 3
