Colonial Song

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 40, 17 April 1931, Page 6

Colonial Song

An Australian Number FROM 2YA on Monday, April 20, will be broadcast Perey Grainger’s "Colonial Song." Of the numbers to be broadcast Mr. Grainger writes-No traditional tunes of any kind are made use of in this piece, in which I have wished to express feelings aroused by thoughts of the scenery and people of my native land (Australia): and also to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not ‘untypical of nativeborn colonials in general. Perhaps it is not unnatural that people living more or less lonelily in vast virgin countries, and struggling against natural and climatic hardship (rather than against the more actively and . dramatically exciting counterwills of their fellow-men, as in more thickly populated lands) should rua largely to that patiently yearning, inactive, sentimental wistfulness that we find so touchingly expressed in much American art; for instance, in Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn," and in Stephen C. Foster’s adorable songs, "My Old Kentucky Home," "Old Folks At Home," ete. I have also noticed curious, almost Italian-like, musical tendencies in brass band performances and ways of singing in Australia (such as a preference for richness and intensity of tone and soulful breadth of phrasing over more subtly and sensitively-varied delicacies of expression) which are also reflected here.