Name: COLONIAL SONG (All State Band)
Duration: 5 min 27 s
Channel: Percy Grainger - 1913
Description: PERCY GRAINGER ORIGINALLY WROTE THIS FOR PIANO AS A BIRTHDAY GIFT TO HIS MOTHER. IN 1913 HE ARRANGED IT FOR WIND BAND. THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL, EMOTIONAL SONG, BUT WAS CRITICIZED FOR BEING TOO SENTIMENTAL. PERFORMED BY THE TEXAS ALL STATE SYMPHONIC BAND.

COLONIAL SONG (All State Band)

Symphonic Band Performances

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PERCY GRAINGER ORIGINALLY WROTE THIS FOR PIANO AS A BIRTHDAY GIFT TO HIS MOTHER. IN 1913 HE ARRANGED IT FOR WIND BAND. THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL, EMOTIONAL SONG, BUT WAS CRITICIZED FOR BEING TOO SENTIMENTAL. PERFORMED BY THE TEXAS ALL STATE SYMPHONIC BAND.

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Symphonic Band Performances

Contemporary band compositions, classical music arrangements, marches, jazz, symphonies, overtures. A collection from bands that I have played in throughout hi

Hello and welcome! "Symphonic Band Performances" is a compilation of recordings from several high school and college bands that I played in including the TMEA (Texas) All State Band, the TMEA Region X All Region Band, the Interlochen Arts Academy National Music Camp, the Cal Poly Tech Band, San Luis Obispo, the USAF Golden West Band, and recordings from my h.s. band, Beaumont H.S. and a few band recordings that were passed down to me. Also included are various All State groups and college and university bands. I participated and played in the large majority of these recordings. There are no professional recordings here and every recording is Public Domain. Most are available for free download. Each song has been converted from the original analog or digital source and edited with Audacity or Dak software. In the majority of these recordings, I play the tenor sax or alto sax, b flat or e flat clarinet, or directing. I was drum major for 2 years in high school, I have a BA from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where I studied music ed, composition and theory. I had about 500 more recordings I was planning to digitize and upload, but this past Nov. 20th, my home was completely destroyed by fire, and all the contents, including all my music and instruments. So, this is it. Please feel free to post a comment here or on my member page. If you like, please become a fan by clicking "I'm a fan" below.

Song Info

Genre

Classical • Symphonic

Charts

Peak #76

Peak in subgenre #6

Author

Percy Grainger - 1913

Rights

public domain

Uploaded

October 25, 2009

Track Files

MP3

MP3 7.5 MB • 192 kbps • 5:27

Story behind the song

This is performed by the 1990 TMEA (Texas) All State Symphonic Band. The conductor was Larry Rachleff.

 Colonial Song was intended by the composer to be the first composition in a series of works labeled, “Sentimentals.” Ultimately Grainger abandoned the idea of such a series, but clearly Colonial Song remained intimately dear; the dedication inscribed on the score in the composer’s hand reads, “This military band dish-up as Loving Yule-Gift to Mumsie, Yule, 1918.”

Grainger wrote of "Colonial Song" “...I have wished to express feelings aroused by my 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 native-born 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 hardships (rather than against the more actively and dramatically exciting counter wills of the fellow men, as in more thickly populated lands) should run 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,’ etc.

“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 expressions), which are also reflected here.”

The innovative and eccentric Australian-American composer Percy Aldridge Grainger is well known among band musicians, but in mainstream classical music circles, his notoriety is more that of an oddity, or fringe composer (or perhaps, only known for his charming ditty, “Country Gardens”). But his catalog of band works arguably contributed more to the quality and creativity of band music than that of any other single composer in the first half of the 20th century. An avid collector of folk music (as were Bartók and Lomax), an innovator of irregular rhythm and meter (as were Stravinsky and Varèse), and an imaginative inventor of musical instruments and experimental musical machines (as were Cage and Moog), Percy Grainger truly was a pioneer in classical music equal to the most acclaimed of our most innovative 20th-century musicians.