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Percy Grainger And The Early Collecting Of Polynesian Music, Graham Barwell

Graham Barwell

My interest in the Australian musician and composer, Percy Grainger, and his connections with the early collecting of Polynesian music, began when I visited the Australian National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. I saw there a portrait of Grainger painted in oils in 1941 by Ella Ström, Grainger’s wife. The three-quarter length portrait shows Grainger dressed in a short bolero-style jacket of towel-like material with elbow-length sleeves over a blue shirt, and what appears to be a skirt of khaki fabric at the waist and towel material below in a pattern of brown and white reminiscent of Maori design. Grainger faces …