About
The Grainger Museum was established in the 1930s by the prominent Australian-born composer, pianist, folklorist, educator and collector Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961). Grainger was a prolific composer and a virtuoso pianist with an international reputation. He was also an important figure in the preservation and arrangement of English folk song. In the United States, where he lived most of his life, he is highly regarded as a music educator, composer and arranger of band music. He also had an extraordinary facility for languages, a strong talent for design and an innovative approach to museology. The evidence of his creative life - his thoughts, compositions, recordings, archive and eclectic collection of artifacts - forms the core of the Grainger Museum Collection.
Our collection
Grainger Museum (University Of Melbourne) (1935)
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an internationally renowned Australian-American composer and pianist. His extraordinarily full life also included pioneering work as a folk music collector and arranger, educator, social and musical commentator, clothing designer and Free Music inventor. He was a skilled linguist and became known, in addition to his musical accomplishments, for his forthright opinions on many subjects. Percy Grainger preserved the evidence of his creative life - his archive, personal library and many of his possessions - in his Museum or 'Past-hoard-house' on the campus of the University of Melbourne, the city of his birth. The Grainger Museum was established in the 1930s by the composer and arranger, pianist and social commentator, Percy Grainger, to show the 'sources from which composers [and creative minds] draw their inspirations'. The collection includes music manuscripts and printed editions by many composers, correspondence, business archive, library, musical instruments, ephemera, photography, fine and decorative arts, costumes and textiles.
Themes: Shaping cultural and creative life
