Comrades in art
Subtitle: the correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, 1957-61, with interviews, essays and other writings on Grainger
By: by Ronald Stevenson ; edited by Teresa Balough
Contributors: Balough, Teresa; Grainger, Percy, 1882-1961
Series: Musicians on music -- no. 8; Musicians in letters -- no. 2
Publisher: Toccata
Published: 2009
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780907689676
Description: In 1957 the Australian-American composer percy Grainger, then 75 and in failing health, receivedaletter from another pianist-composer, the young Ronald Stevenson, writing form his home in West Linton, below Edinburgh. That first contact-requesting Grainger's reminiscences of Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he had studied-led to an exchange of 32 letters over the four years before Grainger's death in February 1961.

The two men soon found that, despite their half-century difference in age, they had many affinities. Both were pianists of staggering abilities and composers who combined a love for folk-music and working-class art with an aesthetic that proposed a ̀world music' to include the farthest reaches of humanity. Both made an art of piano trascription of a wide variety of works and were champions of little-known music and composers. And both revered the work of Walt Whitman, that great poet of inclusivity, the pioneering spirit and the open road.

This book presents both the complete Grainger-Stevenson Correspondence and Ronald Stevenson's many articles and lectures on Grainger and his music, edited by Teresa Balough, whose two interviews with Stevenson open and close the volume-which includes a CD of a lecture-recital on Grainger that Stevenson presented in Grainger's home in White Plains, New York, in 1976. --Book Jacket.