Grainger arrived in the United States in September 1914, having been forced because of the war to cancel tours to Norway, Denmark, Finland and Russia, and a winter season of concerts in Britain. On arrival he was recognized primarily as a composer and folklorist. One of the earliest profiles of Grainger, in the New York Herald on 20 December 1914, reported him as an admirer of the futurists, especially ‘the futurist Schoenberg’.6 While declaring ‘I like modernism’, Grainger explained his own innovations in rhythm, believing that ‘As there is rhythm in a city street scene, although it is not a regular rhythm, so music without bars could be made rhythmic.’ Subsequent profiles published around the date of his New York debut describe Grainger as a champion of primitive and oriental music, of negro music, of ragtime and of the works of ‘the futurists’. While extolling the modernism of Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy and Strauss, Grainger added, ‘Let me confess, incidentally, that I myself have for years been engaged on works of a like degree of modernity and harmonic complexity, though I travel in quite different directions.’7 In most interviews he named himself as a ‘universalist’ fascinated with the improvised polyphonic choral singing of Rarotonga and determined to make ‘all the world’s music known to all the world’.8 It was ‘primitive’ music, rather than the advances made by Schoenberg, that he acknowledged stimulated

5 Walter Anthony, ‘A Bas Tradition, Says Composer Who Spurns Dame Harmony’, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December 1916, scrapbook ‘California Crits, 1916’, Acc. no. 02.0604, GM.