"He was a physical fitness devotee before it became fashionable to be one. He would walk between cities where he was to give piano performances, arriving at the last minute, and wheeled visitors' luggage from the White Plains railroad station to his house in a wheelbarrow. At the house, you can see the actual wooden wheelbarrow, as well as the exercise bar suspended between hallway and living room, and you can walk up the same front steps that he would hop up and down on one leg to strengthen his muscles!

"But the same characteristics that made Grainger eccentric in his personal life were responsible for his "out-of-the-box" thinking about music. He was one of the first to collect folk songs on several continents using the Edison cylinders. You can see an Edison machine like the one he used at the Grainger House, and an LP of some of the actual songs collected by him is available through the Grainger Society.

"He created an original body of work for concert band (a space previously occupied largely by Sousa), for which band leaders and teachers continue to be grateful. But Grainger considered his most important contribution to be his development of a series of Free Music Machines, which produced music inspired by natural sounds, with continuous pitch and without formal rhythm. The earliest of these were mechanical, the later were electronic, the forebears of today's synthesizers, as well as of today's microtonal music. A small model of one of these machines is at the Grainger House, while larger examples are in the Grainger Museum in Melbourne . . . Continued at About Percy Grainger

Location: White Plains

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Historic Sites | Historic Hudson Valley