Sospeso presents the Australian composer Percy Grainger's Work for Four Theremins at the July 19 Lincoln Center Festival 2000 theremin concert with grand thereminist Lydia Kavina.  

Percy Grainger was born in Australia on July 8th, 1882. He studied in Frankfurt before beginning a successful career as a concert pianist in England at the turn of the century. His first compositions were experimental in nature, culminating with Hill Song I in 1902. He subsequently modified his style in the popular British Folk-Music Settings and the Room-Music Tit-Bits. 

In 1914 he sailed for America and took up residence, becoming an American citizen after a period in the US army. He toured North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia on several occasions, setting up the Grainger Museum in the grounds of Melbourne University during visits to Australia in the 1930’s. 

He had a musical mind of unusual breadth and vision, with interests spanning the ages from Mediaeval music to the latest twentieth century developments. With Dom Anselm Hughes and Arnold Dolmetsch he made modern transcriptions of early music; in later life he devoted his energies to the design and construction of Free Music machines on which a composer could write his music as graphs on transparent sheets to be performed by the machine free of restrictions on rhythm and pitch. 

In his own compositions he was mainly a miniaturist, though he composed a number of larger works including The Warriors, Marching Song of Democracy and the two Hill Songs. During his early career he regarded himself primarily as a choral composer, developing new choral textures in his Kipling settings and folk-music arrangements. In later life he composed and arranged many works for wind band, including his masterpiece, the Lincolnshire Posy, based mainly on his meticulous notations of folksongs taken down in the first decade of the twentieth century using an Edison phonograph. Grainger was the first collector in England to make extensive recordings of folksong. In the 1920’s he made further recordings in Denmark which gave rise to his Danish Folk-Music Suite and other Danish folk-music settings. 

He studied the Grieg Piano Concerto with the composer in 1907 and published the definitive annotated edition containing Grieg’s explicit directions. For his piano recitals he transcribed his favourite melodies from a wide variety of composers including Dowland, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Delius, Faure and Strauss. He worked unceasingly to promote the music by his contemporaries , especially Cyril Scott, Delius and Grieg. 

Of Grainger’s own music, the Norwegian Spaare Olsen wrote, "he masters the whole scale of human feeling—the soft, the tender, the lyrical, the intense, the dramatic, the wild."

He died at White Plains, New York in 1961.