Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Hey, Yo, how you doing. I hope it's
Speaker 1: all good out there in the world. For well, we
Speaker 1: can hope in your world, in your personal world, personal world.
Speaker 1: Everything's been great, very excited. Today we're going to be
Speaker 1: back in the Kink world. Yes, crazy episode about an
Speaker 1: Australian composer. And I think it's about time. You know,
Speaker 1: we've been all over the world on this show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we have not really degraded the Australians with our
Speaker 1: accents yet, and I think it's time we give them
Speaker 1: a taste of our own medicine, our shitty medicine. What's
Speaker 1: the opposite of medicine poison? I guess, Yeah, in Australia.
Speaker 1: Here comes the poison. Australia high on my list to visit,
Speaker 1: am I own? I mean, dream trip if I really
Speaker 1: had all the time in the world, Yeah, go to
Speaker 1: Japan and then Australia. Sure, vice versa, because you're much
Speaker 1: closer to one from the other, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I've long said that, I might have even said this
Speaker 1: on this show. But if and when I can never
Speaker 1: get seriously into philanthropy, my goal would be getting people travel,
Speaker 1: you know, helping people who don't have the means because
Speaker 1: travel is very expensive, even if you do it cheaply,
Speaker 1: to just travel freely, and I just think that's such
Speaker 1: an important part of living, of the human experience, and
Speaker 1: I think it makes everybody better people. So that's to me,
Speaker 1: that's how I would contribute to the world. I think
Speaker 1: that's a great idea. Everybody should travel. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: what I'm jealous about with in terms of Australians is
Speaker 1: that they get so much time off to travel from
Speaker 1: their work. I remember when I worked at the Highland Bakery,
Speaker 1: we would often get people in there from Australia who
Speaker 1: are like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm on my three
Speaker 1: months paid vacation from work, right, so I'm traveling, you know,
Speaker 1: all of America. You know there would be going to
Speaker 1: so many amazing places in a few months. How can
Speaker 1: you tell me again what they said? Oh, they said,
Speaker 1: oh you know I'm on for Manchester. Is that what
Speaker 1: I'm doing? Well, it's definitely not what I was doing
Speaker 1: just then. I don't know what what's it down? Like,
Speaker 1: Let's see, they'd say, crikey, I'm on me from London.
Speaker 1: I really poor doing this, poor la. Neither of us
Speaker 1: are nailing. It's okay, give me a I don't know,
Speaker 1: I need, I need a phrase to get me into crikey.
Speaker 1: That's a big spider, a big spider. Time for me
Speaker 1: to eat some vegemite. The vegemite scares the spider off.
Speaker 1: That scares the spider. You're too soft. Yeah, I get
Speaker 1: a little graph kangaroo chasing you down with a big knife.
Speaker 1: And you turn around and you say, oh, that's not
Speaker 1: a knife. That's oh god, that is a knife. Who
Speaker 1: gave this kangaroo such a big note? You know, Australia
Speaker 1: in the air back? How's that? On the amback? What?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I feel like you're circling Australia. Find Yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of like in a boat off the shore somewhere
Speaker 1: quite ever landing there. Now you're stuck at sea, crack,
Speaker 1: can't land. Well, let's land it on our subject. And
Speaker 1: so we've now that we've changed. You know, Australia is
Speaker 1: like number three or four in our countries that listen
Speaker 1: to us. So no, I'm sorry, we just scared off
Speaker 1: at least a quarter of our audience. So sorry for
Speaker 1: those of you still with us. Apologies. This subject was
Speaker 1: suggested by Sarah at Huzza Underscore Sarah on Instagram. Thank
Speaker 1: you Sarah, this is good huzza. And yeah, like you said,
Speaker 1: we haven't done like a kinky one in a while,
Speaker 1: so I was excited to get into this um. The
Speaker 1: Australian musician Percy Aldridge Granger. This guy was an internationally
Speaker 1: known composer and conductor. He was super eccentric. He invented
Speaker 1: like weird instruments and he made his own clothes. He
Speaker 1: was pretty problematic in that he felt Nordic white people
Speaker 1: were far superior to Jewish people in every way. Jeez boom,
Speaker 1: why are we talking about this guy? Well, because what
Speaker 1: he's most remembered for is a parcel marked private matters
Speaker 1: that he instructed should be opened ten years after his death.
Speaker 1: But inside were some of Percy's conductor's batons, but they
Speaker 1: were not being used for conducting. Oh so let's tell
Speaker 1: you all about this kinky composer and his love for
Speaker 1: what he called cruel joy and what we call bdsm.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, let's go. Hey their French come listen. Well,
Speaker 1: Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no
Speaker 1: matchmaking a romantic tips. It's just about pridiculous Relationships. A
Speaker 1: lover might be any type of person at all, and
Speaker 1: abstract cons ada concrete. But if there's a story. The
Speaker 1: second Clinch Ridiculous Roles, a production of iHeartRadio. Percy Aldridge
Speaker 1: Granger was born near Melbourne in Australia. His dad, John
Speaker 1: was an architect. He's known mostly for bridges, including the
Speaker 1: Prince's Bridge in Melbourne, but he was also a heavy
Speaker 1: drinker and womanizer, and after he married Percy's mother, Rose,
Speaker 1: she found out that he had another child in England
Speaker 1: that she didn't know nothing about who. Even worse, after
Speaker 1: Percy was born in eighteen eighty two, she discovered that
Speaker 1: she had contracted syphilis from her promiscuous husband. That is infuriating.
Speaker 1: I feel like I would have a murderous rage right
Speaker 1: especially because there's no treatment at this time, so that's
Speaker 1: just a death sentence like he gave. But even though
Speaker 1: she found out all this crazy shit about him, they
Speaker 1: still stayed together until eighteen ninety. But after they split up,
Speaker 1: Rose was Percy's main parent. She handled pretty much everything
Speaker 1: to do with his life. She's kind of a helicopter mom.
Speaker 1: She even did his schooling. She educated him at home.
Speaker 1: She taught him like music and literature, and then she
Speaker 1: had tutors handling languages, art and drama. He started playing
Speaker 1: piano at the age of ten, and by the time
Speaker 1: he was twelve he was playing concerts where reviewers called
Speaker 1: him quote the flextenhad phenomenon, who plays like a mesta.
Speaker 1: How is that? I think it's a little keywee. But
Speaker 1: it was nice. Well, all right, maybe my Australians are
Speaker 1: originally from New Zealand. They've moved just a little laid back.
Speaker 1: They just led back. Yeah, so Percy is doing great.
Speaker 1: People are like, oh my god, kids amazing. So Rose
Speaker 1: Granger his mother decided Percy is good enough to be
Speaker 1: studying in Europe, so they moved to Frankfurt, Germany in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety five. Now, when Frankfurt, Percy continued to study piano,
Speaker 1: and he also started showing an interest in preserving folk music.
Speaker 1: It kind of reminds me of Robert Burns or some
Speaker 1: of these other poets who would take you old folk
Speaker 1: tunes or folk poems or whatever and set them to music. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he started doing this. He would set poetry to music,
Speaker 1: including poems by Rodyard Kipling and our old friend friend
Speaker 1: of the show Walt Whitman. Yes, Percy was playing concerts
Speaker 1: and teaching and everyone was calling him a prodigy. So
Speaker 1: by nineteen oh one he and his mother Rose decided
Speaker 1: to move to England. Now Percy was a damn good pianist,
Speaker 1: nobody could deny that. But it did not hurt that
Speaker 1: he was also pretty handsome and very charming, so with
Speaker 1: the elite of London immediately took a fancy to him,
Speaker 1: and he was soon playing concerts in private homes. Oh darling,
Speaker 1: won't you come to my musical suare tomorrow night? I
Speaker 1: have Percy Grainger all the way from Australia, Percy Grangel,
Speaker 1: the Thunder from down Under, the original Thunder from down
Speaker 1: Under Percy Granges. He was even introduced to Queen Alexandra
Speaker 1: by a socialite named Lilith Lowry, and Lilith also has
Speaker 1: the distinction of being the first woman that Percy had
Speaker 1: sex with. She was twenty years older than him, and
Speaker 1: she apparently frequently traded her patronage for sex. Percy called
Speaker 1: it quote a love serve job, and he recalled his
Speaker 1: first sexual experience like this quote. I thought I was
Speaker 1: about to die if I remember, correctly, I only experienced
Speaker 1: fear of death. I don't think that joy entered into it.
Speaker 1: My god, what a description, What a way to be
Speaker 1: introduced to sex. He's like some lady's sex slave so
Speaker 1: that she will introduce him to wealthy patrons. I mean,
Speaker 1: and he's like, I'm not even having fun. So how
Speaker 1: was it when you got with that older woman last night? Well,
Speaker 1: I only thought of my own imminent demise. I saw
Speaker 1: an open gray before mate, and it was twenty magical
Speaker 1: minutes of staring into the face of the grim specter
Speaker 1: of death. I looked into the abyss, and Lilith looked back. Wow. Well,
Speaker 1: you know your first time is never the best, right,
Speaker 1: I guess that. I mean, it would be terrible if
Speaker 1: it was all downhill from there. That's true. It should.
Speaker 1: It should ramp up and enjoyment and stuff as you
Speaker 1: get better. Right, I didn't get to know yourself. The
Speaker 1: only time he thought that he was gonna die during
Speaker 1: sex was the first time. A side note crossover alert.
Speaker 1: It's very likely that Percy Granger saw Williams and Walker's
Speaker 1: musical in Dahomey in London in nineteen o three, because
Speaker 1: he published his own version in nineteen o nine. And
Speaker 1: if you remember the Williams and Walker episode that they
Speaker 1: were such cool people. Yeah, so cool. They were like
Speaker 1: these amazing vaudeville performers, and they were black vaudeville performers,
Speaker 1: so they had to deal with a bunch of stupid racism.
Speaker 1: But they were so good that their plays were some
Speaker 1: of the first black musicals to be performed overseas, some
Speaker 1: of the first scores to be ever published. Stuff like that.
Speaker 1: They were just amazing. Please listen, I love all three
Speaker 1: of them. It's Bert Williams, George Walker, and his wife
Speaker 1: Aida Walker. Amazing. But back to Percy Grainger. So he
Speaker 1: continued performing music all over the world for the next
Speaker 1: few years. He became more and more famous. He was
Speaker 1: rubbing shoulders with some of the great names in music
Speaker 1: like Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy and Percy's favorite, the
Speaker 1: Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. And he also collected and transcribed
Speaker 1: more than three hundred pieces of folk music from all
Speaker 1: over England. He even started incorporating Mayori and Polynesian songs
Speaker 1: into his tours. Okay, I know, I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's appropriative or if it's like cool that he was
Speaker 1: trying to highlight their culture in a more interesting way.
Speaker 1: What we'll get into about his noble racism. I kind
Speaker 1: of feel like it's probably he was just like this
Speaker 1: is mine now, I know, right, I could totally see it.
Speaker 1: But finally, in nineteen eleven, Percy felt confident enough to
Speaker 1: start publishing his own music, and his series of concerts
Speaker 1: playing only his own compositions were huge successes, which wasn't
Speaker 1: always the case. You know, some people were like, get
Speaker 1: back to back, you know what I mean. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: his compositions could be kind of crazy. For example, one
Speaker 1: of his pieces from nineteen thirteens called the Warriors, and
Speaker 1: it was played with thirty quote exceptionally strong and vigorous
Speaker 1: pianists on nineteen pianos. I've heard Australians have exceptionally strong
Speaker 1: and vigorous pianists. That's what they say. The pianists down
Speaker 1: there amazing. He was also still teaching, and Percy began
Speaker 1: dating one of his students named Karen Holton. I know
Speaker 1: he did remain close with her her whole life. If
Speaker 1: they have a bunch of letters that they exchanged throughout
Speaker 1: their the next many years okay. And then another student
Speaker 1: turned romantic interest was Margot Harrison, who Percy got engaged
Speaker 1: to in nineteen thirteen. But according to John Bird's biography
Speaker 1: Percy Grainger, the relationship fell apart partly due to Percy's mother,
Speaker 1: Rose's over possessiveness. M Okay, so so far, We've got
Speaker 1: a guy who is appropriating minority culturist music, including Mayorian
Speaker 1: Polynesian songs and Williams Walkers into homie. Okay, and also
Speaker 1: he's dating his students. So far, so good, A plus great,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna do it so good now. His mother,
Speaker 1: Rose's over possessiveness might be part of the reason why
Speaker 1: rumors persisted that the two of them had an inappropriately
Speaker 1: close relationship. In fact, a lot of people at the
Speaker 1: time were whispering that it was incestuous. James J. Conway
Speaker 1: writes in his article A Percy Granger Glossary that there
Speaker 1: are also some pieces of writing by Percy that show
Speaker 1: how quote mother fixated he is, including pieces with titles
Speaker 1: like arguments with beloved Mother, mother's worship of bodily beauty,
Speaker 1: mother's willfulness, recklessness, fearlessness, bossiness, violence, if opposed tendency to
Speaker 1: burn food when cooking. Vehemence. What an incredible title. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's descriptive. He really was, like, I'm just going to
Speaker 1: write all her faults down, say about mother today, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to put it into my music. And by music,
Speaker 1: I mean the title of my music. Conway writes that
Speaker 1: these quote speak of an obsession of Norman Bates proportions. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not clear how much Percy or Rose were privy
Speaker 1: to these rumors and whisperings, since they were particularly rude
Speaker 1: and scandalous. You know, it's not likely that anyone went
Speaker 1: up and told them about it in the middle of
Speaker 1: a party, right, very weird thing, knew. But most scholars
Speaker 1: agree that there is no evidence to support these claims.
Speaker 1: But you kind of can start to get where people
Speaker 1: are coming from. According to Stephanie S. Lake's article fifty
Speaker 1: Shades of Percy Granger on Kill Your Darlings dot Com,
Speaker 1: Percy himself described their relationship as quote an intense, spirtual
Speaker 1: love and devotion and quote the only truly passionate love
Speaker 1: affair of his life. Cut Common Magazine says that they
Speaker 1: even shared a bed until he was thirty six years old.
Speaker 1: That's too long. I'm trying to imagine his thirty seventh
Speaker 1: birthday and he's like, mother, I think it's time for
Speaker 1: me to get me own bed. This year for my birthday,
Speaker 1: I locked my own room. I don't know why he's British,
Speaker 1: but he he lived in London for a while. She's like, well, boy,
Speaker 1: he's all grown up, all right, Percy of course, of course,
Speaker 1: Well that's the first bed of boy gets after he
Speaker 1: stopped sleeping with his parents. A little race car incentive
Speaker 1: to sleep by himself will add that. Classic FM says
Speaker 1: that Rose never sexually touched Percy because she had syphilis, right,
Speaker 1: Like she didn't want to pass it on the which
Speaker 1: is a great reason, but also like not the best reason.
Speaker 1: Like I feel like there's other reasons that you don't
Speaker 1: sexually encounter your son. I feel like the syphilis is irrelevant.
Speaker 1: He's your son. Yeah, that's like the number one reason
Speaker 1: not to fuck him. That that speculation station. We don't
Speaker 1: know that that is the main reason, but no, obviously
Speaker 1: I think that's everyone's speculation station, right because obviously neither
Speaker 1: of them ever sat and wrote it out whether they
Speaker 1: did or not. Right, Well, anyway, in September of nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: Percy and Rose left England for America. Percy told folks
Speaker 1: it was quote to give mother a change because she
Speaker 1: had been ill for years. But his timing was pretty
Speaker 1: sussed because he left right after the outbreak of World
Speaker 1: War One. Oh what a coincidence. Oh you do with
Speaker 1: timing's weed? I was just about to leave. Oh I'm
Speaker 1: gonna miss it. Sorry, you are going to miss the wall. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Brits did not care for what they saw as
Speaker 1: his cowardice, right, and they weren't really that far off.
Speaker 1: John Bird's biography says Percy told friends that quote he
Speaker 1: wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and
Speaker 1: to have laid himself open to the possibility of being
Speaker 1: killed would have rendered his goal unattainable. Sorry, folks, kept
Speaker 1: dying the wall. I got shit to do? How many
Speaker 1: how many soldiers were like, I mean I had some
Speaker 1: goals too, bro, But here I am well anyway. So
Speaker 1: they were like, sorry, Percy, if you come back, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be real shit to you, you know, And he
Speaker 1: is like, well, right, But in America Percy did well
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. Again, He's internationally renowned. So he's immediately playing
Speaker 1: concerts in giant music halls. He's befriending Duke Ellington at
Speaker 1: George Gershwin. He even gave a command performance for President
Speaker 1: Woodrow Wilson before, of course, the war came to America
Speaker 1: as well in nineteen seventeen. Sorry, Percy, it's a world war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't escape it, can I just say? I want
Speaker 1: to interject real quick and tease myself a little bit
Speaker 1: after going after the Australians this whole time, I was literally,
Speaker 1: you're reading this about him coming to America and them
Speaker 1: welcoming him and him doing well, and I was trying
Speaker 1: to come up with a bit about what the Americans
Speaker 1: would say, And I kid you not. In my head
Speaker 1: I literally had the thought, wait, what's an American accent?
Speaker 1: How would I do an American voice? Do I know
Speaker 1: that one? Well, it's early, we don't usually record this early.
Speaker 1: You're trying to bring your excellent A game, right, transtant topics,
Speaker 1: that's right, trying to bring the people what they want.
Speaker 1: Mockery of worldwide accents. I guess you should do like
Speaker 1: how a brit would do an American accent? Really hit
Speaker 1: those rs. Oh, thanks Percy for coming over to America's
Speaker 1: super happy to have you here, and you'll do very
Speaker 1: well with your fancy music from England. Kind of sounded
Speaker 1: like a male Joane Q Sack. I don't know why,
Speaker 1: so yeah, the war, you know, they're like sorry, the
Speaker 1: wars here, and he's like, damn it, I gotta do
Speaker 1: something anyway. So Percy enlisted as a bandsman and he
Speaker 1: played the saxophone and the oboe in the Army band.
Speaker 1: But as an encore to his band concerts, he would
Speaker 1: play a piano setting to the folk tune Country Gardens,
Speaker 1: and this quickly became his most famous composition. It still
Speaker 1: is apparently the piece of music that he's most associated
Speaker 1: with today. After the war, Percy became an American citizen
Speaker 1: and he reached the peak of his career, playing around
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty concerts a year. He also started
Speaker 1: developing elastic scoring, where a piece of music can be
Speaker 1: adapted for various numbers of performers and instruments. So usually
Speaker 1: you write a piece of music and you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: there's you know, I need two cellos and whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: you have your very specific tone that you're trying to reach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he's like, well, what if you only have four people,
Speaker 1: I still want you to be able to play my songs.
Speaker 1: So he would figure out a way to score four
Speaker 1: various numbers of instruments, types of instruments, numbers of performers,
Speaker 1: that's everything. It's pretty interesting. And there's still only two
Speaker 1: composers that use it today, so it must be quite difficult.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. But tragedy struck their family in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: Percy and his mother had moved to White Plains, New
Speaker 1: York in nineteen twenty one, and her health took a
Speaker 1: sharp downturn. Rose had been sick for years, but now
Speaker 1: she started having more hallucinations and delusions, and she became
Speaker 1: paranoid that her illness would ruined her son's career. Then
Speaker 1: Percy went on to tour the West Coast, leaving Rose
Speaker 1: alone in New York, where she was finally directly confronted
Speaker 1: by a friend about the rumors of an incestuous relationship
Speaker 1: between her and her son. Now, this accusation just really
Speaker 1: pushed her over the edge. It really unbalanced her, and
Speaker 1: on April thirtieth of nineteen twenty two, she jumped from
Speaker 1: the eighteenth floor of the Aeolian Building in Manhattan, and
Speaker 1: she died instantly. She left her son a note beginning
Speaker 1: with quote I am out of my mind and cannot
Speaker 1: think properly, and it ended quote your poor insane mother.
Speaker 1: This is obviously a crushing blow for Percy. His very
Speaker 1: first composition from eighteen ninety three had been a birthday
Speaker 1: gift to his mother, and she had arranged and was
Speaker 1: involved in every aspect of his life, from his career
Speaker 1: all the way to his sexual relationships, for his entire life.
Speaker 1: But now he was alone. His grief and his depression
Speaker 1: was intense, and he lost himself in his work. But
Speaker 1: he would soon meet a new love to occupy his heart,
Speaker 1: and we will hear more about that right after this
Speaker 1: Welcome Back everybody. So after Rose died, Percy immediately plunged
Speaker 1: himself into work, trying to distract himself. He spent a
Speaker 1: year in Europe collecting Danish folk songs and doing this
Speaker 1: very intense concert tour, and then he came back to
Speaker 1: New York in nineteen twenty three continued to perform to
Speaker 1: great acclaim and popularity, and part of what kept him
Speaker 1: so much in the headlines was this sort of eccentric
Speaker 1: character that he created for himself. He knew, you know,
Speaker 1: you got to be good copy. It's not enough to
Speaker 1: just be a talented musician. You gotta wear a meat dress,
Speaker 1: you know, to the Grammys. I think of Alexander Hermann
Speaker 1: from her last episode where he talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: playing the part is as important as your skill as
Speaker 1: a magician, Like, you've got to have this character that
Speaker 1: people are interested in. It's part of the entertainment. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So at Percy's concerts, he apparently would run into the
Speaker 1: auditorium dressed in gym clothes and then leap over his
Speaker 1: piano as his grined and wow. Percy also made his
Speaker 1: own clothes out of multicolored terry toweling material that he
Speaker 1: all stitched together. He looks like nothing so much as
Speaker 1: like a harlequin at a Renaissance fair if you look
Speaker 1: it up. Um. He also liked to sleep naked under
Speaker 1: his piano. Later in life, he became a vegetarian, but
Speaker 1: he hated vegetables, so he ate mostly bread, pastries, fruit,
Speaker 1: and nuts. Excuse me, highly relatable. I don't hate vegetables,
Speaker 1: but I as a vegetarian mostly eat bread, fruit, pastry,
Speaker 1: and nuts. Quite literally, think of the staple diet. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel like you must. He should probably have incorporated
Speaker 1: some beans or something. Yeah, I love a salad. But
Speaker 1: man also in instead of the usual like Italian terms,
Speaker 1: he would write weird instructions in his scores. According to
Speaker 1: the Big Smoke dot Com, so instead of terms like
Speaker 1: crescendo and arpeggio, he would instruct his musicians to play
Speaker 1: quote more flowingly but very wayward, or go ahead impulsively
Speaker 1: and slow off hugely. Oh okay, which I think is
Speaker 1: kind of fun. There's such wrote terms that you typically
Speaker 1: use and they have a very specific meaning. But if
Speaker 1: he's trying to be evocative and be like you, do
Speaker 1: you get the gist of these words, like do kind
Speaker 1: of your interpretation of what I'm saying here might give
Speaker 1: you something a little more creative. Well, his music so wild.
Speaker 1: I really do think people should listen to it because
Speaker 1: it's very interesting. It's very wild and raucous, kind of
Speaker 1: sort of very energetic is a good word, I guess, yeah.
Speaker 1: But also like there were times when schools and stuff
Speaker 1: would be like, come on over and share our music.
Speaker 1: Department in or you know, some kind of educational interesting part.
Speaker 1: And he would say, well, the reason my music is
Speaker 1: so unique is because I didn't have that kind of education.
Speaker 1: I'm not bound by yeah, you know, your regular music education,
Speaker 1: So I don't think it would make sense for me
Speaker 1: to be in charge of that sort of thing. Well,
Speaker 1: you can decide if you want to listen to his
Speaker 1: music or not, but at least he is not personally
Speaker 1: profiting off of it anymore. Because another eccentricity this guy
Speaker 1: had less charming was that he was extremely preoccupied with
Speaker 1: Nordic culture, dating back to his childhood. But the older
Speaker 1: he got, the more convinced he became that Scandinavians had
Speaker 1: gotten everything right. So he developed his own way of speaking,
Speaker 1: which was inspired by Nordic word forms that he called
Speaker 1: quote blue eyed English. Like instead of orchestra, he said
Speaker 1: blend band, and instead of lecturer, he listened to a
Speaker 1: fourth speaker. Instead of an article, he'd read a writ piece.
Speaker 1: In a word, he was a big fat racist, I
Speaker 1: mean basically, he was just like, and where have I
Speaker 1: heard this before? Boy? You know, these tall blonde people
Speaker 1: sure are the best people in the world, aren't they?
Speaker 1: You know? Not a viewpoint that was good then, nor
Speaker 1: has aged well since. Not really. Music historian David Pear
Speaker 1: calls him, quote at root, a racial bigot of no
Speaker 1: small order, and he was apparently especially anti Semitic, saying
Speaker 1: that Jewish people weren't capable of making music as good
Speaker 1: as Scandinavians. And boy do I have some counterpoints for that, sir,
Speaker 1: by the names of I don't know, Neil Diamonds, Leonard Cohen,
Speaker 1: he's got I've got no use for Lennard Cohen, Gershwin,
Speaker 1: I mean he's friends with Gershwin. Right, it's crazy. He's
Speaker 1: an ass whole clearly a racist asshole. Stephen Sondheim. Okay, look,
Speaker 1: he's not a smart man in this particular. No, no,
Speaker 1: this is terrible behavior, and it makes him a bad
Speaker 1: person as a whole. Um. But in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: also he wrote a little essay called the Things I Dislike.
Speaker 1: We should all write an essay, Yeah, I'd I dislike
Speaker 1: number one Percy Granger, anti Semitism. This essay began quote
Speaker 1: almost everything. First of all foreigners, which means all Europeans
Speaker 1: except the British, the Scandinavians, and the Dutch. Wow, what
Speaker 1: a dick. I'm saying, good god, man, I mean, this
Speaker 1: guy started out possibly being a motherfucker and now he's
Speaker 1: just a motherfucker. You know, there's many ways to be
Speaker 1: a motherfucker, and this guy found both of them. Geez.
Speaker 1: He even veers into eugenesis territory. Of course he does, yea.
Speaker 1: He wrote at one point quote, let us set our
Speaker 1: house in order to kill off the sick, the nasty,
Speaker 1: the ugly, the lazy. Jesus Boo Percy. This guy is
Speaker 1: the worst. This guy's really bad. Kill off the sick.
Speaker 1: I mean, oh my god. Look, something's even in that
Speaker 1: moronic mindset of Well, if we just kind of can
Speaker 1: sort of reign in genetics a little bit, we'll have
Speaker 1: perfect people. There's so many problems with that idea to
Speaker 1: begin with. Also, it doesn't work like that, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the things he's talking about are not genetic. Like, sorry,
Speaker 1: but I know some beautiful people with some ugly ass children,
Speaker 1: you know, and vice versa. You don't know how it's
Speaker 1: gonna come out. Also, you know, a baby could be
Speaker 1: very beautiful and then grow up to not be that beautiful.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a plain normal looking person, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: So you don't know, I know a whole duckling with
Speaker 1: that story. There's the duckling and he says he wants
Speaker 1: to kill off the nasty well. Percy, why don't you
Speaker 1: start with yourself? Right, you nasty well. Knowing all that
Speaker 1: about him, it's maybe not surprising that when he met
Speaker 1: the Swedish poet and painter Ela Strome in nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 1: he was immediately stricken with her blonde, blue eyed beauty. Wow.
Speaker 1: Ella Strom sounds a little too close to Eva Brauns
Speaker 1: for me. Yikes. They met on a steamship they were
Speaker 1: coming back to America in nineteen twenty six, and they
Speaker 1: became friends on the voyage, and then they met again
Speaker 1: in England the following year, and in October of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven, they decided to get married. And there's not
Speaker 1: much written about Ella herself, so we can't really get
Speaker 1: a good picture of her. So let's turn to the
Speaker 1: New York Times, because they ran an engagement announcement with
Speaker 1: a quote from Percy saying, quote, miss Strome is a
Speaker 1: very prototype of radiant Nordic, as lovely as the morning
Speaker 1: to look upon, and a regular Amazon to walk run
Speaker 1: swim and dance and play games at the same time.
Speaker 1: She is one of the most deeply and many sidedly
Speaker 1: gifted artists I have ever met, and it is hard
Speaker 1: to say what charms I most saw in her bewitching
Speaker 1: beauty or the philosophical and emotional depths of her nature
Speaker 1: as shown forth in her art and thoughts. It is
Speaker 1: an unspeakable boon to me to have this soul satisfying
Speaker 1: comrade to commune with. Wow. So she's tall, she's blonde,
Speaker 1: that's good enough for me, twite, She's an artist. She
Speaker 1: gets me. He also wrote a song for her, called
Speaker 1: to a Nordic Princess, and they married on August ninth,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty eight, at the Hollywood Bowl, following one of
Speaker 1: Percy's concerts, in front of twenty two thousand people. I
Speaker 1: bet they didn't serve a meal to twenty two thousand people.
Speaker 1: Oh true, Yeah, I was gonna say. We had one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty and it was nuts. Well. After marrying Ella,
Speaker 1: Percy's creativity seemed to ramp back up. He started experimenting
Speaker 1: with electronic music as early as nineteen thirty seven, and
Speaker 1: he also started working on what he called free music
Speaker 1: and see there's sounds in nature that occur together but
Speaker 1: without harmony, but they're still not jarring to the ear.
Speaker 1: It's not like just hitting two random notes on a
Speaker 1: on a piano that sound weird together. That's two kind
Speaker 1: of discordant noises that work. Yeah, like birds singing together
Speaker 1: or something. He was just like, there's all these sounds
Speaker 1: that aren't planned, but they sound beautiful together. Right, Sometimes
Speaker 1: I hear like, you know that the sound of an
Speaker 1: eagle screeching while while a jackhammer is breaking the pavement
Speaker 1: in the construction site behind our backyards, there's something beautiful
Speaker 1: about it. Well, he wanted to try and recreate that
Speaker 1: sort of natural sound music without the boring constrictions of
Speaker 1: tone and meter. His positions included parts for these solivox
Speaker 1: and for theremins, but he felt that in order to
Speaker 1: have truly free music, human players would have to be
Speaker 1: eliminated entirely, leaving the performance to the machines. So I
Speaker 1: guess you'd be a big proponent of AI today. His
Speaker 1: eugenicism goes all the way to like what if we
Speaker 1: just kill off all the people at all, you know,
Speaker 1: the worst kind of people people. I mean, for real,
Speaker 1: this guy's crazy. Now. To this end, he, alongside a
Speaker 1: young physics teacher named Burnett Cross, invented several very weird instruments,
Speaker 1: including the st read tone tool, which is basically this
Speaker 1: bizarre giant harmonica, the Butterfly Piano, which was this like
Speaker 1: smaller piano that was tuned to one sixth notes instead
Speaker 1: of the usual twelve, so an octave was broken down
Speaker 1: into six notes instead of twelve, and the Kangaroo pouch
Speaker 1: free music machine in nineteen fifty two, which, according to
Speaker 1: Atlas Obscura, was quote designed to sound like a malfunctioning
Speaker 1: air raid siren. Okay, that was two things. First of all,
Speaker 1: great name, kangaroo pouch free music machine, I'm in, and also,
Speaker 1: second of all, designed to sound I feel like you
Speaker 1: could just get an air raid siren and break it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what it's supposed to sound like. But another thing
Speaker 1: that was occupying his mind a lot was his overwhelming
Speaker 1: desire for a Percy Granger museum. He told Ella, quote,
Speaker 1: I am hungry for fame after death, and he was
Speaker 1: very obsessed with his own legacy, partly because he felt
Speaker 1: he's a truly amazing musician. He had no peers in
Speaker 1: his own time and nobody understands me. And partly because
Speaker 1: he felt he was kind of the only remaining legacy
Speaker 1: of his deceased parents, particularly of course his darling mother,
Speaker 1: and to preserve his own life was in a way
Speaker 1: preserving their greatest contribution to the world as well. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: So the guy just did not have a self esteem problem,
Speaker 1: is what I'm learning. Yeah, the shock of shocks. This
Speaker 1: guy wanted a whole museum dedicated to himself. Oh my god, obsessive.
Speaker 1: But Linda Nimick wrote a really in depth paper for
Speaker 1: the National Museum of Australia that says that pretty much
Speaker 1: as soon as his mother died, he got real fixated
Speaker 1: on this idea. She feels that he was so closely
Speaker 1: like he just felt so closely identified with his mother
Speaker 1: that after she died, he felt naturally he must, you know,
Speaker 1: he's going to die soon too, kind of so he
Speaker 1: became very preoccupied with his legacy, even though he's only forty.
Speaker 1: When she passed away, like before he even arranged her funeral,
Speaker 1: he was writing letters about bequeathing this museum, the Percy
Speaker 1: Grainger Museum, and he started gathering together like a truly
Speaker 1: overwhelming amount of stuff for it. He was a very
Speaker 1: avid collector. He kept everything and he gave He had
Speaker 1: like some forty thousand piece is of correspondence, music, manuscripts, photos, furniture,
Speaker 1: objects like the instruments of his own design or like
Speaker 1: a pucket watch that a famous composer gave him, and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and creepily also the contents of Rosa's
Speaker 1: purse the day she died and a lock of her hair. Weird,
Speaker 1: and they're all displayed in a case with like it's
Speaker 1: all spread out so you can see her two pairs
Speaker 1: of spectacles and her pair of gloves and stuff is bizarre,
Speaker 1: very strange. And he is the gym shorts I wore
Speaker 1: a red rocks Yeah, I mean yeah, he probably wouldn't weird.
Speaker 1: He probably does have that well. He contacted the University
Speaker 1: of Melbourne about giving him some land to build his
Speaker 1: museum on because he felt that it should be at
Speaker 1: his birthplace sure, even though he did not live there. Right.
Speaker 1: The university at the time was broke, so they were
Speaker 1: totally all about this idea of having a museum for
Speaker 1: a famous composer on their campus. This would attract visitors
Speaker 1: to come in it would be at no cost to themselves.
Speaker 1: So they agreed, and the Purse Granger Museum opened in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, although not to the general public at first.
Speaker 1: It was only open to scholars, and Percy was fine
Speaker 1: with that. I mean, I'm sure he thought scholars were
Speaker 1: better than regular people. Anyway, they should be studying me. Yes,
Speaker 1: he said, he didn't care if it didn't open to
Speaker 1: the public for a hundred years. He was feeling like
Speaker 1: a failure despite all his success, and he wrote to
Speaker 1: a friend that quote, all my compositional life, I have
Speaker 1: been a leader without follow us, which is also something
Speaker 1: that megalomaniacal racists tend to say. Well, you're a very
Speaker 1: weird guy. How many people could follow up the kangaroo
Speaker 1: pouch free music machine. I'm a natural leader. I'm better
Speaker 1: than everybody else. Why aren't people lining up to listen
Speaker 1: to everything I say? In October of nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: Percy was operated on for abdominal cancer and this would
Speaker 1: eventually kill him, so, knowing his time was short, he
Speaker 1: made out a will stating that he wanted his flesh
Speaker 1: removed from his skeleton and cremated to be buried next
Speaker 1: to his mother's ashes, and that his skeleton would then
Speaker 1: be displayed at the Percy Green Drum Museum. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Now this wish was not carried out. Oh, either because
Speaker 1: no one could figure out how to burn his flesh
Speaker 1: off while also preserving a skeleton. Or maybe it's just
Speaker 1: because it's kind of an icky thing to ask. So
Speaker 1: it's easy. You just gotta get one big potato peela,
Speaker 1: don't He's like, flay the meat from my bone. I mean,
Speaker 1: like Jesus, everyone's doing that. Everyone at the mortuary busts
Speaker 1: out that will and it's like, uh, can we just
Speaker 1: pretend we didn't read that part. Yeah, we're just gonna
Speaker 1: burn it. And this is smudgeoi smudge, I can't read
Speaker 1: what it says. He. I guess it's if someone writes
Speaker 1: a really weird thing in their will, you don't have
Speaker 1: to do it. Maybe you don't have to do it.
Speaker 1: I guess you don't have to do any of it. Right. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's given me ideas to write some crazy shit. Oh fuck,
Speaker 1: I gotta deal with it. Excuse me? What makes you think?
Speaker 1: And I won't be dealing with yours. I do think that.
Speaker 1: But you know, if anyone's dealing with yours probably gonna
Speaker 1: be me. You're so you're saying you're gonna outlive me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think we should both plan to outlive
Speaker 1: the others. I think we need to make any plans,
Speaker 1: because we're gonna die hand in hand. At one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen years old, happily watching the one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifth season of The Lost reboot, right after the series finale,
Speaker 1: which I directed. Oh wow, good job, that's the that's
Speaker 1: the end. I look forward to that, huh in our
Speaker 1: enormous Parisian mansion right obviously, because they won't let us
Speaker 1: into Australia anymore. Your accents somewhere France is like, oh no,
Speaker 1: you're not coming here. We've also heard yours. You're covered
Speaker 1: in barnacles. No matter which country Scotland will take us,
Speaker 1: will they? Well, all right, So anyway, again, is really
Speaker 1: worried about his death, so he makes out this creepy will,
Speaker 1: and then in nineteen fifty six, he deposited a package
Speaker 1: at a bank marked quote private matters do not open
Speaker 1: until ten years after my death, tantalizing. On February twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one, Percy Grainger died in White Plains at
Speaker 1: the age of seventy eight. Ella outlived him by eighteen years,
Speaker 1: going on to marry a much younger man when she
Speaker 1: was eighty three and dying in nineteen seventy nine. But
Speaker 1: the story of Percy Grainger is barely even told yet
Speaker 1: because there's still that little private matters package to deal with.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy one, the trustees of the Percy
Speaker 1: Granger Museum, scholars and archivists all gathered around to see
Speaker 1: what this incredibly talented and incredibly weird musician had left
Speaker 1: as his final calling card. What could be inside, maybe
Speaker 1: never before seeing compositions of folk songs that he'd collected,
Speaker 1: or poetry that he'd set to music. Maybe letters to
Speaker 1: and from some of the incredible musicians and composers that
Speaker 1: he'd been friends with in life. You know, maybe some
Speaker 1: sort of manifesto about the best way to breed humanity
Speaker 1: into a bright, tall, blond future. Who knows either way.
Speaker 1: We like to imagine a real sense of excitement in
Speaker 1: anticipation as they cut through the tape and carefully removed
Speaker 1: the lid of the box to find an extensive collection
Speaker 1: of pornography, some bloodstained clothing and around eighty three whips,
Speaker 1: some of them fashioned from conductor's batons. Oh, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna dig a little deeper into that box and explain
Speaker 1: everything we promise right after this break. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: Percy's sex box, everybody. I mean, what a time capsule,
Speaker 1: you know. So, Yeah, Percy's Private Matters Box had been
Speaker 1: even more private than the trustees could have ever expected,
Speaker 1: because yeah, it was all about his sex life. They're
Speaker 1: probably like, jeez, I WI should have been the manifesto,
Speaker 1: I know, right, of all things I want to read now,
Speaker 1: Percy had been heavily into bondage and whipping during sex,
Speaker 1: which is you know what we'd now call BDSM, which
Speaker 1: stands for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
Speaker 1: So we kind of have the b's and d's and
Speaker 1: s's doing this an overlap. YEAHSM, but that's two. That's
Speaker 1: not very sexy, not really. I feel a nice short
Speaker 1: B DSM boom. Are you into b D D D
Speaker 1: SCSM like a fell asleep halfway through? I don't know
Speaker 1: acronym now. At the time, Siegmund Freud had only recently
Speaker 1: coined the term sado masochism to describe this this sexual urge,
Speaker 1: and the Percy himself referred to it as his quote
Speaker 1: cruel joy and quote evil sex feeling. Oh. Now, he
Speaker 1: apparently had been experimenting with flagellation and other like bondage
Speaker 1: practices by the time he was sixteen. And then he
Speaker 1: visited Amsterdam when he was eighteen, and he was introduced
Speaker 1: to the underworld of BDSM through seeing some books of
Speaker 1: photos of women being lashed. So maybe realize, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: not the only one you know out here that likes
Speaker 1: this kind of thing, right, And according to Stephanie Slake's
Speaker 1: article Fifty Shades of Percy Grainger, he also read violent
Speaker 1: literature that caused him to quote shake with delight. Now
Speaker 1: he clearly struggled with himself. Stephanie Slake writes that he
Speaker 1: punished himself for what he saw as his evil desires
Speaker 1: by standing naked in the snow, carrying heavy weights on
Speaker 1: his back and burning himself on the stove. But because
Speaker 1: you know, it's hard to physically punish someone who gets
Speaker 1: off on physical punishment, he also loved it. He wrote,
Speaker 1: quote did my cruel joy, which shows itself both in
Speaker 1: wishing to give pain and take it arise from the
Speaker 1: whippings my mother gave me from the earliest childhood up
Speaker 1: to fourteen or fifteen. Maybe it did, And if this
Speaker 1: is the case, I must feel doubly thankful to her
Speaker 1: for having given me my life's greatest boon thing. Not
Speaker 1: only was mother the most important person in my life
Speaker 1: and I owe everything to her, but I'm so glad
Speaker 1: she gave me this kink. I mean, right, I mean sure,
Speaker 1: I guess you could be grateful for wherever you got
Speaker 1: your kink, but just a weird relationship. It's a really
Speaker 1: interesting quote though, because of course Sigmund Freud very much
Speaker 1: about oh, we all have incestuous desires for our parents
Speaker 1: opposite sex parents, so he must have read some of
Speaker 1: that and was like, you know, trying to understand himself
Speaker 1: in the psychological context of the day, right right, which,
Speaker 1: of course, we don't really go for it anymore, especially
Speaker 1: when it comes to BDSM. Most people are like, it's fine, Actually,
Speaker 1: you can really enjoy it and it's no problem. Was
Speaker 1: a trusting, loving thing to do, Yeah, I have. This
Speaker 1: show has brought me into lurking on the BDSM subreddit
Speaker 1: in places like that, you really learn a lot. And
Speaker 1: it's amazing how many conversations that people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was spanked and hit with switches and stuff when
Speaker 1: I grew up, and now I love it, and other
Speaker 1: people are like, no one ever did anything like that
Speaker 1: to me, and I love it too, So you know,
Speaker 1: I can't really say it's either way. I remember hearing
Speaker 1: a story about someone getting really into nice play, which yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not for me, but you know, they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: I got tied up and then they run a knife
Speaker 1: on your back and it, you know, sometimes draw a
Speaker 1: little blood. And she was like, I had never done
Speaker 1: anything like this before, but it made her cry with
Speaker 1: happiness because she just felt so safe. Like she's like,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I'm letting someone do this and I'm
Speaker 1: not worried. Yeah, So it was like just that release
Speaker 1: of like feeling so comfortable with somebody. It must be
Speaker 1: is like partly what makes it so exciting and sexy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it must be similar to like a feeling you get
Speaker 1: like bungee jumping or something where you like, I'm on
Speaker 1: the I'm standing right here in front of something dangerous,
Speaker 1: knowing that I'm going to be fine. Yeah, I know
Speaker 1: that's pretty that's pretty exciting. I guess what makes sense
Speaker 1: why I wouldn't like it. I don't even like a
Speaker 1: roller coaster. No, I don't trust none, y'all nous, And
Speaker 1: in that category, I only like roller coasters because for
Speaker 1: some reason, I'm like, I feel safe or strapped to
Speaker 1: seven thousand pounds of steel. But I do jump it
Speaker 1: out of an airplane. Sorry, I neither for me. I'll
Speaker 1: stay on the ground and watch and wave now John Bird,
Speaker 1: Granger's main biographer. He says that Ella did not know
Speaker 1: anything about this kink of Percy's before they got married,
Speaker 1: but there's a letter dated four months before their wedding
Speaker 1: where Percy wrote to Ella quote, as far as my
Speaker 1: taste goes, blows are most thrilling on breasts, bottom in
Speaker 1: a thighs sex pots. I shall thoroughly, thoroughly understand if
Speaker 1: you cannot in any way see your way to follow
Speaker 1: up this hot wish of mine. Wow. Actually that's a
Speaker 1: very good way to approach it. It is, you know,
Speaker 1: to say this is something I'm into. But of course
Speaker 1: I understand if you can't get into it right, which
Speaker 1: is I mean, the only way to do b DSM
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, I have to say, if you're not
Speaker 1: into it, then it's not fun for me either. You
Speaker 1: can't force a kink on someone, nor can you really
Speaker 1: force them to give it up, right any I mean,
Speaker 1: like we were just saying, it's it's about the safety
Speaker 1: and trust. You can't force a feeling of safety. Not possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but how funny that you have to like write like
Speaker 1: he's like, well, we're not together, but I want you
Speaker 1: to know what you're in for, So what do you like?
Speaker 1: What do I like? I don't know. That's just funny
Speaker 1: to me. I haven't trying to write like, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is what I'm into in bed you know before you
Speaker 1: get here. But this the contents of the Private Matters package,
Speaker 1: which again it included pieces of bloody clothing his many
Speaker 1: many whips. It also included nude photos of both Ella
Speaker 1: and Percy tied up in various positions with visible whit
Speaker 1: marks on their back, and he even included some confessions
Speaker 1: and a letter marked quote read this, if Ella Granger
Speaker 1: or Percy Granger are found dead covered with whit marks,
Speaker 1: I love it. I don't want anyone to misunderstand what
Speaker 1: happened here. Yeah, He's like, if we're found dead, don't
Speaker 1: read this. But if we're covered in whit marks and
Speaker 1: found dead, that's when you read this. What does it say?
Speaker 1: He wrote, quote, I am a sadist and a flagelent.
Speaker 1: My highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman's
Speaker 1: body to a lesser degree. I enjoy being whipped myself,
Speaker 1: and before marriage, used to whip myself every few weeks. Wow,
Speaker 1: he's a switch. Yeah, he's a switch totally. And so
Speaker 1: she must have Ella must have seen her way to
Speaker 1: follow up his hot wish after all, because she's definitely
Speaker 1: in these photos. I mean she's probably like, holy shit,
Speaker 1: I've been living in the stuff, yes, society in the world.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize I could cut loose like this. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean she's like, I'll give it a whirl, and
Speaker 1: then she got into it. Yeah. Now, my only complaint
Speaker 1: right here is that he's like, opened this package of
Speaker 1: nudy photos of me and my wife ten years after
Speaker 1: my death. Ella's still alive, by the way, and people
Speaker 1: are looking at these nudy photos of her in this museum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she didn't have a say on that, So I find
Speaker 1: that a little weird. But I guess she never complained,
Speaker 1: so maybe he asked her I had a time, like
Speaker 1: you careful put these pitches in, and she's like, not
Speaker 1: that one. I don't know, that's my bad side. She's like,
Speaker 1: I see that weird thing that my butt's doing in
Speaker 1: this one. Can't we do? Let me pick a few
Speaker 1: out for you, few out that are like I can
Speaker 1: stand beside. Now. Obviously this kind of thing is not
Speaker 1: this shocking right now. Just whether you get the letter
Speaker 1: that I tell you open ten years after my death. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a post fifty shades of gray world. We all
Speaker 1: know what whippings are and things like that. It's such
Speaker 1: a nothing thing now, right. But at the time this
Speaker 1: was considered like a serious sexual perversion. They thought of
Speaker 1: it as a sign of a violent and sick individual.
Speaker 1: So that's also how Percy himself learned to contextualize it.
Speaker 1: He thought of these urges as childlike. He wrote, quote
Speaker 1: the core of me, my inner self, My senses have
Speaker 1: stayed like those of a child. A child at nausey
Speaker 1: is naughty and looks to be punished for it. But
Speaker 1: he also thought the world would eventually catch up to him,
Speaker 1: just like he thought that it would catch up to
Speaker 1: his kind of music that was sort of ahead of
Speaker 1: its time. Part of his reasoning for waiting ten years
Speaker 1: just to reveal all this sexual stuff about himself was
Speaker 1: that he hoped by then people would be more accepting.
Speaker 1: M probably should have waited a little ten years, right,
Speaker 1: more than ten years in the year twenty fifty seven. Openness,
Speaker 1: open this up and see what you think. Let's say
Speaker 1: twenty eight five, just in case, you know what, a
Speaker 1: hundred years from now, three hundred let's say three hundred
Speaker 1: years from now, you can find out that all I
Speaker 1: like to ship meself? Oh wow, whatever, he has a
Speaker 1: whole other box. Yeah, easier into this over the centuries.
Speaker 1: What you thought was that you knew everything, but you don't.
Speaker 1: Why did you think I'm made my clothes out of towels?
Speaker 1: So that's all well and good. He thought the world
Speaker 1: would be cool in nineteen seventy one or whatever. But
Speaker 1: why include it at all in a museum that's austin
Speaker 1: sensibly dedicated to music and like Australian composition, Like, what
Speaker 1: does that have to do with anything? And it's because
Speaker 1: Percy felt that his sex life and his music were
Speaker 1: intrinsically linked, like his sexual urges and his creativity came
Speaker 1: from the same place. He wrote in nineteen forty eight quote,
Speaker 1: I cannot give a true picture of my tone art
Speaker 1: and of my art life if I do not tell
Speaker 1: of the cruel joy that is one of the mainstairs
Speaker 1: of my being. Fierceness is in the keynote to my music.
Speaker 1: The object of my music is not to entertain, but
Speaker 1: to agonize. Oh it's supposed to sound like exactly. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a malfunctioning air raised Byron So. I guess that's true.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in his mind, the museum about himself would
Speaker 1: be both useless and false if he did not include
Speaker 1: this key piece of information about Okay, okay, So my
Speaker 1: music is like whipping you. Yeah, I love it, and
Speaker 1: you might like it. I don't I want to leave
Speaker 1: some marks on my audience, right, yeah, right, yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess so. And he really was very concerned about this.
Speaker 1: He wrote to a friend and fellow composer, Cyril Scott
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six that quote, one of the greatest
Speaker 1: and most continual worries is that I might die without
Speaker 1: the full evilness of my sex feelings being known. To
Speaker 1: the world or recorded, which says to me that he
Speaker 1: was also a little bit of an exhibitionist. Right like death,
Speaker 1: he was getting off on people on knowing that people
Speaker 1: were going to know about this one day. I think
Speaker 1: he might be right about that makes sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: even though he wasn't alive to enjoy it. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: it was enough. Maybe he was a little scared of
Speaker 1: actually having to deal with people finding out about it,
Speaker 1: but he still was kind of, you know, titillated by
Speaker 1: the idea that oh, it's in the envelope now, oh,
Speaker 1: any day someone might just open that They're going to
Speaker 1: look at my naked body enjoy, you know. Stephanie yes
Speaker 1: Lake says that the inclusion of what's called the Lust
Speaker 1: branch of the museum has helped it totally surpass its
Speaker 1: original intention, Like it was supposed to be a physical
Speaker 1: homage to Percy Granger and shed light on composition in Australia.
Speaker 1: But in twenty seventeen, the University of Melbourne incorporated his
Speaker 1: stuff into a case study for a history of sexualities.
Speaker 1: Another time, fine arts students visited to create original sketches,
Speaker 1: and postgrad students in bioethics and public health use the
Speaker 1: contents of the lust branch of the museum to analyze
Speaker 1: the concepts of stigma and autonomy. Really a lot more
Speaker 1: to study here than just music and whips. That is
Speaker 1: very interesting and smart, I feel, if you try to
Speaker 1: put it to different uses. Yeah. Yeah, Percy Aldridge Granger
Speaker 1: was a complicated man. No, okay, he's a freak in
Speaker 1: the street. Yeah, he's a big fat racist. It's a
Speaker 1: folk music enthusiasts, he's a mama's boy. He's a virtuoso musician,
Speaker 1: an avant garde thinker, and a wild composer, and he
Speaker 1: never quite achieved his aims. His greatest contribution to music
Speaker 1: was not his wild, weird thirty pianos compositions, but rather
Speaker 1: kickstarting a renewed interest in folk music scholarship, okay, and
Speaker 1: of course preserving the folk music of several cultures. And
Speaker 1: his museum turned into a shrine to sexuality rather than
Speaker 1: to his musical genius, and more to his eccentricity also
Speaker 1: than to his musical genius. So I mean, maybe, in
Speaker 1: being so sure that he needed to preserve his legacy
Speaker 1: for the future, he was very narcissistic and self satisfied,
Speaker 1: and he definitely was, obviously, but there is something to
Speaker 1: be said about being open with your sex life in
Speaker 1: a way that frees others. As Percy himself wrote in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty quote, when we successfully follow and realize our lusts,
Speaker 1: we are lords. Indeed, lords with mummies, lords with mummies, mummies, bombies.
Speaker 1: We were talking about this earlier because we watched a
Speaker 1: trailer for that movie with Toni Collette and Monica Bellucci,
Speaker 1: and I was like, Mama, Mafia, Mafia, Mama, Mafia mom.
Speaker 1: And I was like, m yeah, Tony Collette, Monica Bellucci,
Speaker 1: those are my And I was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: Padre Pascal and Oscar Isaac, these are the Hollywood daddies.
Speaker 1: Yeah they are. But women, Yeah, but women don't really
Speaker 1: get what's the equivalent there. I mean, there's like cougar
Speaker 1: and stuff, but like what is Kate Blanchett and cougar
Speaker 1: is a different vibe. That's what it feels like. You're
Speaker 1: on the prowl, you're looking for. Daddies are not on
Speaker 1: the prowl. They're just like they're here to look hot
Speaker 1: and be in and you know when they say sit,
Speaker 1: you sit. Yeah. So and Monica Bellucci and Toni Collette,
Speaker 1: I would I would immediately sit for if they told
Speaker 1: me too. So, what is mommy? Sounds like, I guess,
Speaker 1: not sexy? Yeah, well, I mean, but that's the old trick, right.
Speaker 1: It's like daddy to some sound sexy and to others
Speaker 1: sounds like my father, you know, and that's not people
Speaker 1: want to get into. I don't know, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: find us the mom mommy equivalent of zaddy or daddy.
Speaker 1: What do I say besides Tony Collett and Monica Bellucci
Speaker 1: are my mommy's because that even saying it, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's not what I mean. That's not what you mean.
Speaker 1: I hear the words and it's not what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to say. And I mentioned mother because there's, like I guess, specifically,
Speaker 1: a lot of gay men I hear say, oh, she's
Speaker 1: so mother, yeah, like Lady Gaga or something mother monster, right,
Speaker 1: Florence Pugh out too as well, she's so mother. But
Speaker 1: I don't think that's what they mean either. It's not
Speaker 1: a sexy thing. It's like, oh, that's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like a safe person, and she's giving me life like
Speaker 1: a mother. And if you make it sexual, it's weird,
Speaker 1: like Percy grangernds like mother told me I need it
Speaker 1: to bend over and pick out my toys. You know
Speaker 1: you're like, who that's not comfortable? All right, Well, come through, listeners.
Speaker 1: We need to know what the word is here. Tell
Speaker 1: us what it is. I'm going to figure out if
Speaker 1: there might not be one, in which case give us
Speaker 1: jump jump on a speculation station here and trying to
Speaker 1: come up with something. Make up. Let's make one up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: think think Kate Blanchett, Thank, Tony Collette, think Monica Blucci,
Speaker 1: think think Halle Berry. I always am um even uh
Speaker 1: oh Michelle Yos stepped up into that roomy, Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: up there. All women who if they if this is
Speaker 1: this is the only context I have? They if they
Speaker 1: said sit down, I happily would I would do it
Speaker 1: right away. Well hey, thanks again to Sarah has Asara
Speaker 1: on Instagram. That's a great suggestion. It was really fun
Speaker 1: to learn about Percy and his weirdness. And here was
Speaker 1: his music is. I've enjoyed listening to it, even though
Speaker 1: he sucks in a lot of ways, but it was
Speaker 1: really cool to be able to explore b DSM in
Speaker 1: this episode. Yeah, I don't think we really have since
Speaker 1: we talked about Wonder Woman. God, yeah, I guess not.
Speaker 1: I don't think we really have gotten there said, it's
Speaker 1: just not that ridiculous these days. I know, it's just like,
Speaker 1: oh ho hum, you'd like to be tied up? Okay, No,
Speaker 1: we hope that you guys also enjoyed this episode. Um,
Speaker 1: you know we love to hear from you, so please
Speaker 1: reach out. Our email address is ridic Romance at gmail
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Speaker 1: and Instagram. I'm at Oh great, it's Eli. I'm at
Speaker 1: Dynamite Boom and the show is at ridic Romance. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: you can keep up with us. Right, We love you,
Speaker 1: by bye bye, So long friends, it's time to go.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to our show. Tell your friend's names,
Speaker 1: uncle's and this to listen to a show, Ridiculous Romance