ABSTRACT
Percy Grainger’s folk music collections from England and Denmark are justifiably well known among Grainger scholars, and are recognized for their descriptive notations of incredible complexity, attention to the details of the lives of the performers, and, in the case of the English collection, the infamous criticism afforded them by the folk music establishment. However, beyond Grainger scholarship, little attention is paid to these visionary and iconoclastic collections. Discussions of early folk music collecting in the ethnomusicological literature rarely mention Grainger or attempt to measure any impact he might have had on the subsequent development of ethnographic methods. This is an unfortunate oversight, for Grainger’s philosophy of folk music was nothing short of astonishing for its far-reaching implications and anticipation of many ideas that are now considered commonplace.
