David S. Josephson papers on Percy Grainger (Ms.2017.019)

Biographical/Historical Note

David S. Josephson was born in 1942. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in music from Columbia, where he also directed the Concert Band for three years and helped edit the journal Current Musicology. He taught at Brown from 1972 until his retirement in 2016. He founded and directed the Brown Early Music Group in 1972-1979, chaired the Music Department in 1979-1985, was instrumental in the creation of the Orwig Music Library, initiated an artists-in-residence program around a campus-based string quartet, supported creation of a jazz program, and brought Brown its first professional music theorist. He is author of Torn Between Cultures: A Life of Kathi Meyer-Baer (2012), Conversations with Ella Grainger (1993), John Taverner: Tudor Composer (1979), and numerous articles and review-essays on the musical emigration from Nazi and Fascist Europe, the composer/pianist Percy Grainger, and Taverner. He is also recipient of the Festschrift, On the Third Hand (2016). He taught courses on Baroque and Classic music, Mozart, Beethoven, conductors and conducting, the culture of death in nineteenth-century Europe, liturgical and religious music, the sociology of twentieth-century music, and the European musical emigration of the 1930s. (Taken from Researchers@Brown https://vivo.brown.edu/display/djosephs)

Percy Grainger was born in 1882 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and died in 1961 in White Plains, New York. He was a composer, pianist, and conductor who was heavily influenced by British folk music. He is well known as a musical experimenter. Some of his notable works include “Country Gardens,” “Molly on the Shore,” and “Shepherd’s Hey!” In the 1930s he founded the Grainger Museum at Melbourne, which was built to hold documents and artifacts from his life and career.