Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music

From the vantage-point of today’s era of hardware hacking ¹ and circuit-bending, ² of infra-instruments ³ and ‘dirty’ electronics, ⁴ the case for Percy Grainger as a pioneer of electronic music is relatively easy to make. He foresaw that bricolage, often using fairly cheap and readily available technologies, would become central to what he called a ‘democratic’ approach to music-making. The revolution that the personal computer has wrought in contemporary musical culture has been to place supposedly ‘high end’ performance and production tools in the hands of everyone. No longer are synthesizers or sequencers the preserve of a few university music departments or specialist electronic music centres. Instead, they are the standard media of a host of digital musicians whose creativity blurs the distinctions between performance, composition and listening in ways of which Grainger would have approved. This revolution has affected all aspects of musical culture, from creation to consumption.