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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, as you all know, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Imani Mosley, who is an assistant professor at the University of Florida School of Music. She is a musicologist and cultural historian specializing in 20th century, British and American composing slash composers, which is why she's here today. Welcome to the show.
- [01:07]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here because.
- [01:10]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I feel like this is a question people will ask, probably ask you all the time. So I'm sorry if you're tired of answering it for the audience. What is a musicologist and what does that have to do with history?
- [01:22]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Great question. We don't even know the answer, which is why I love whenever anyone asks us that question. So the really simple definition of what a musicologist is is someone who talks about the history of music, the study of music. And I mean that in the kind of widest, broadest possible sense. I like to tell people that some musicologists are historians. Not all musicologists are historians. They don't all self style in that way. You can be a musicologist and not be a historian. Even though we all have some degree of historical training. I consider myself a historian as well as the just kind of dyed in the wool musicology label. And so what it has to do with history is that we talk about historical musicologists, which is usually the term that people like to use, is we talk about music throughout time and how music is related to people, events, culture, philosophy, all the ways in which music has come up within the world. And so we have to do history in a very similar way that regular historians do. We just have this one little added piece which is this musical byproduct. We're very similar to art historians in that. In that way, but with extra neuroses, I think.
- [02:55]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Maybe different neuroses.
- [02:57]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah, maybe different. I mean, I think I would say.
- [02:59]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Different and extra, but yeah, bonus neuroses.
- [03:04]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes. Yes.
- [03:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Okay. So I think that actually provides us with a Good segue into who and why. We are talking about the person that we are talking about today. But who is it to. To begin with?
- [03:17]
Dr. Imani Mosley
So we are talking about Percy Granger, who is a early 20th century British Australian composer, rather Australian British composer, born in Australia, made his name in England.
- [03:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
What is he famous for? Like, what is his. If someone had encountered him or if they hadn't encountered him and they're just now hearing of him, what would they sort of. How would they know him? What are the things he's famous for?
- [03:43]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Sure. So anyone who's encountered him most likely did it when they were 15 in band. So Granger is like. If you. If you played in your high school band, you know who Percy Granger is. He. He's probably most well known as this kind of quintessential wind ensemble, wind band composer. And so I like to think about people, people in high school having these very kind of traumatic experiences playing Granger's music, which I'll explain in a bit. But that's probably the thing that he's most well known for. He also was an early ethnographer, so he collected a lot of folk music and folk songs at the beginning of the 20th century when that started to be a thing that was possible via recording technology. So the minute we have these kind of like mobile phonographs, he goes out into the world and collects folk songs. So he's also well known for that. And he's a linguist and philologist, though that does not come up quite as much for people who are not sort of in the world of Granger. But that's a huge part of his. Of his legacy. So, yeah, mostly writing wind band music, music that military bands play also. That's his big claim to fame.
- [05:12]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He's also really into sort of the revival and the collection of British folk music. Right. So that is the other thing that I had. The other way that I had come across him, I. I was a middle school band person. Every episode I have to drop some lore. But yeah, I play. I was in some. I was in some bands as a. As a youth and I. So I also encountered him in his. Some of the like compositions and rearrange and arrangements. Slash rearrangements he did of folk music are in particular. So probably a lot of people will have heard his music in the background of films and things like that because it is used to sort of signify like quaint Britishness, I think.
- [06:01]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if. If you've ever heard a very kind of lush arrangement of the fol Tune that we call Danny Boy. It's very likely that it's probably Granger's arrangement that's known as Irish tune from County Derry. So, yeah, those folk song arrangements that he did, that he did for vocalists, for choirs and for bands pops up kind of everywhere. Also for piano. He himself was a. Was an acclaimed concert pianist. So a lot of his arrangements also exist for piano or for forehand piano to pianists. Yeah. So very much background music as someone's riding on a train throughout Lincolnshire somewhere like that. You'll. You probably hear his.
- [06:47]
Dr. Claire Aubin
His arrangement 100%. There are some other sort of like, interesting things about his life. Again, this is pre. The what's wrong with him, but then I think contribute to why it's important to sort of talk about him in this nuanced, critical way. So he moves to the US in 1914 at age 32. But before that he. So he's. He's very prolific and very talented. As a child, he attends the Hook Conservatory in Frankfurt. At around age 12 or 13, he. His father is this architect in Australia. His mother is an. A hotel heiress. His. His mother is also. This is a. Not a. Not why he sucks, but contributes to it. He has a very strange relationship with his mother, who is. Which I think is putting it lightly, but she's sort of this what we describe as sort of autodidact. Like she teaches herself all these things and becomes obsessed with teaching him a lot of things. She's very interested in his development as an artist, very invested in his future as an artist. And so she's taking him around Europe and showing him, introducing him to all of these sort of important European artists and composers too. And because he's living in Europe and he's around this sort of musical milieu, he starts to meet really important European composers like Frederick Delius. Delius. Delius. I'm sorry, I don't know my composer.
- [08:28]
Dr. Imani Mosley
That's.
- [08:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And Norwegian Romantic composer Edvard Grieg, which is very, very important to him. And that is someone that people will almost certainly have come across, you will have heard at some point in your life, whether you realize it or not. So he has these really strong relationships with these European. European composers who he sees as being really like the height of. Of composing. And if people already can't tell with where this is going, I will be shocked. He's also, as a youth, very obsessed with Nordic culture. This is a big part of him and his contributions to the world. Right?
- [09:12]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes, yes. He's his biographers and many people who've written about him, have, have said many times about how the fact that when he was young, about 10 or so, he used to lie awake at night stressed over the fact that the English language had been corrupted basically and that he wanted to sort of write the wrongs of modern English. So he had a real problem with the Norman Conquest. Basically. England was great until 1066, and then it's just a kind of like sharp downhill from there. Because the minute that we have the Norman Conquest, we have the, the introduction of French into the English speaking language and, you know, it disseminates and gets weird as the years go on to create the English that we now know and love and hate. And he sees that particular moment as this huge point of divergence where everything kind of goes wrong. So this is sort of the beginning of this infatuation with all things Nordic. And he uses Nordic as a weird kind of stand in for a whole host of things. So it, it does mean sort of Scandinavian countries, but some other things as well. It's very like, you know, Kalmar Union, Rise up, you know, North Sea League. So he learns, he's a polyglot, he learns Dutch and Danish and bits of Norwegian and Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese. This becomes a big part of his own sort of language, making and thinking about things. But this is how he starts to create this sort of racial hierarchy for himself at which the Nordic race, which is the terminology that he uses, becomes his primary focus. And it really, it really undergirds everything that he does, says, composes, moves through the world. It's at the heart of it. I mean, at one point he says, you know, the only things that I kind of preoccupy myself with are sex, race, art and sport. And he was not kidding. Like, those are his main, those are his main concerns. And I would say that races, well, race and sex are kind of like duking it out for which one is going to be the top one. But I would, I would say for our purposes, it's probably race.
- [12:07]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And you know, what's so funny is we haven't even fully gotten to what's wrong with him yet. This is just like things that you need to know to understand him. Like, this is these, this is a foreshadowing of what the problems are going to be.
- [12:18]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes.
- [12:19]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I mean, who, who among us from age 10 has, you know, who from age 10 has not been obsessed with racial and linguistic purity? You know, like, I just think it's so wild that so many of these things that he ends up being real preoccupations for the rest of his life and which are the real point of this show are things that he gets interested in, literally, as a child and maintains as being sort of central to his worldview from then on out. And I think this also fits with the understanding of his mother as being this, like, intense. I mean, almost like emotionally incestuous character in his life. He has all these really strange relationships with his parents. I mean, his dad dies, but with his mother. And so there's like a. His whole thing. I will say this now, we're however many episodes into the show, by the time this comes out, I'll have recorded quite a few of them. But I will say this is one of the weirdest guys that I have encountered.
- [13:26]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Oh, I'm so glad I could be the one to do that. He's very strange.
- [13:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He's very strange. Everyone else, not everyone, but a lot of the other people I've read are like, okay, well, they. They're kind of illogical or they're a little bit, you know, they're bad, they're violent, they're whatever. With him, yes, he is those things. And also everything you read about him, everything written by him, et cetera, is this, like, wild, bizarre, fantastical ride is the only way I can describe it. And so I did not know who he was going into this episode. When you told me that this is who you wanted to talk about, I thought, okay, sure, I'm open to whoever. That sounds great. I looked him up and was like, oh, my God, who is this kid guy? It's crazy. Some of these are so wild.
- [14:15]
Dr. Imani Mosley
He's deeply strange. And, you know, I think one of the reasons why he becomes so attractive to us as. As musicians and as musicologists is that when we're introduced to him at that sort of middle school, high school age, we don't get any of the reasons or the. Even the sort of scope of his strangeness. But there are things that peek through and then it starts to make sense the more you learn about him. So, you know, anyone who's played his music will understand this. You know, in the. In the actual sort of sheet music will get all of these tempo markings and direction markings. So basically instructions on how to play the thing that he's asking you to play on. On the page. Very typically, regardless of what kind of art music you're playing, those instructions will be usually in Ital. They may be in French, they may be in German, depending on the composer. But even composers who are French or German will often use Italian markings. But not Granger. There's not Italian word to be seen. And so you're a 15 year old who's playing his music for the first time, and you get a direction that says like, stumpy or loud and lots of. Or haltingly. And you're like, what does that mean? Like, I don't know, like, I learned, like crescendo, right? I don't know what.
- [15:51]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, you're learning andante. You're learning fortissimo. You are not.
- [15:55]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Right? Yeah. You're not stumpy or any of these things. And you're watching your director try to explain what those things are to you. And you're like, you know, whispering to the person sitting next to you, why doesn't you just say crescendo, right? Like, why doesn't he just use the words? But nobody, nobody explains it to you, right? Nobody tells you why his musical grammar is what it is, right? Or that he uses the time signature. So this is basically just what tells us what the meter is of the piece that we're playing, why he uses the weird time signatures that he uses, why he has this sort of predilection with arranging folk tunes. Because in many of his pieces, he won't call himself a composer, he calls himself an arranger, right? Because they are songs that he has gone out into the world and recorded and then put into this format, whether it's for choir or for wind band. And again, you're like, okay, well, I kind of understand that, but I don't know why he styles himself this way. And nobody tells you, right? You're just like, okay, the music is weird and like, the way it's written about is weird, but it's just. That's just who he is, right? And it's only later, if you have the opportunity to read more about Granger. I mean, you know, I came to this because I work on British music and it's like, oh, that's why, of course, no one is going to tell you this at 15 years old, 16 years old, if the, the band directors even know themselves, right? This is not the thing to address to a room full of high schoolers, right? Or a room full of middle schoolers. But you do wonder because faced with stuff you've never seen on the page before and you never see it anywhere else again, no other composer does this uses those terms. So there's a thing that kind of, you know, sticks up in your brain that goes, huh, this guy's kind of weird. Well, I wonder what that's about, you know?
- [17:54]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah.
- [17:54]
Dr. Imani Mosley
And Then you just don't know to get to all of it till later.
- [17:58]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And to get to the, you know, the reasons why he sucks, because I think we're almost there. The, the sort of like spoiler alert to the reason why he's doing the, the little, the writing his own music notations in, in this like sort of funky JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis esque thing is because he's trying to purify even the language that he's using when he's writing. So he's trying to, for example, this Norman Conquest thing that you brought up, he's trying to get rid of words that have Greek and Latin roots, which is one of the more. Many things are wild about this guy, but reading his writing, where he tries to do that in his writing, which I'll read a passage later in the episode, but is so wild. And so what he was trying to do, even with things like music notation that you're coming across as a 13, 14, you know, 14 year old clarinet player is, is you're. You're discovering that he, he's saying, I don't want people to even use Italian words with my music because I want my music to even be linguistically pure. And, you know, no surprise to anyone that purity plays out in lots of other ways in his imagination. So let's get to why you think he sucks. Hi there, it's Claire. The episode you're currently listening to is free for everybody, but the next one won't be because we're trying to make this show independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you are a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means that everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pair of socks, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives. To sweeten the deal, just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in the episode description to sign up.
- [20:00]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Foreigner basically was a racist. And I will, I will put an asterisk by that because there are a lot of people who. This requires some nuance, I think. We can't call him a racist in the way that we would use that terminology now with the understanding that there is a sort of deep vitriol or hatred for people who are of other races. That was not really Granger's concern, as far as we can tell, from any of his own writings or the things that people have written about him. But he is deeply preoccupied with race in a way that permeates absolutely everything. So the way he writes about his own music, the way he writes his own music, what he chooses to set as sort of inspiration, how he talks about other music that's happening at this time, and then also, like, kind of deeply personal things, the people he's in, personal relationships, the way he moves through the world, the way he sees the world. Everything about how Granger understands himself and the world is through this very specific understanding of race. And it's kind of not cool, but it's also very. It's very strange the way he employs it. You know, my friend calls him a creative racist, which I like.
- [21:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah.
- [21:31]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Which I like quite a bit. And so, having spent all of this time as a performer before I got to this point where I knew all of these things about Granger not understanding that that was the thing that made the music go. And then learning about it felt like a kind of weird musical betrayal in a way. Like, why didn't anyone take the time to explain. Explained to me that this is why the music looks, sounds, feels, operates the way that it does. And I see that as a. As a musicologist and as a performer, as a huge problem. But also, we can't understand any of his music, really, if we don't talk about race, because he has even said that, like, this is the thing. It's the most important thing, and it is the only way to really understand what I'm trying to do, and that that is paramount over pretty much anything else. So every relationship that he has with another composer, the way he writes about music that's happening at this time, music that's happened in the past, everything is through this very specific lens of race and racial hierarchy, which is very problematic.
- [22:53]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And it seems like a lot of what I was coming across with him is not necessarily that he, like, hates other races, which I think is what makes it so difficult for people to understand him as this person who is very, very supremely dedicated to racial hierarchies and ethnic hierarchies. It's not so much that he hates other races so much as he very strongly prefers the race that he sees himself as being a part of. And he. And he very strongly privileges that race in his understanding of music, in his understanding of history, in the kind of music that he makes, in the. Even the arrangements he's working with, the. The way he privileges specific instruments and the associations he has with those instruments and instrumentation in general, like, all of these are. Are colored by his understanding of race. And. And it's very easy to.
- [23:42]
Dr. Imani Mosley
To.
- [23:42]
Dr. Claire Aubin
If you don't think about it in those terms, to. To miss that. To miss that. This is key to everything he's doing. And you're totally right. He says repeatedly that it is key to everything he's doing.
- [23:54]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes.
- [23:55]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And there's an attempt. I think I came across this a lot in the research that I did for this episode. There's a real strong attempt to rehabilitate him outside of that or to find some other explanation for these things that I don't think exists or even has to exist. It just makes people uncomfortable to think of him that way. And so because they're uncomfortable about it, they just try to logic their way out of it and do these gymnastics around it. And it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't work. Because he is even saying these things out. Yeah, he's writing them down.
- [24:33]
Dr. Imani Mosley
He's made it very clear. Like, he. At every point in time throughout his life, this is not something that's like a predilection of youth. Like, it continues throughout his whole life. He says, no, please let me make this so very clear. Like, let me be so for real. And it is about this. Like, it is about that. Like, there's no. There's no two ways around it. And, you know, I have also, you know, seen so much attempts at rehabilitation and apologia, because also, there's lots of discussion about Granger being an anti Semite. And the language around that is, well, you know, he's not any more anti Semitic than anyone else was at that time. But it's like, okay, possibly, but I feel like necessitates just a little bit more discussion than that, don't you think? You know?
- [25:26]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And this is. This is a good prompt for a quote that got me really heated, actually, when I was reading this. And it's not a quote by Granger. It's a quote about Granger that really pissed me off, as. It pissed me off in a. In a historiographic sense and as a historian, because this was being written by someone who I think kind of considers themselves a historian, but clearly does not have the methodological training to be able to say that, which is fine. It happens. But they're Mischaracterizing history in the way that they talk about Granger. So in this article, the author writes, is it any comfort that Granger's racism was hardly unusual in his day? Does that make it simply disappointing rather than deplorable and perhaps list. People who are listening at home will grow tired of me saying this, but hardly unusual for who? Too often, when we think of historical figures with complex legacies like Granger, we defend them by offering a justification that suggests that their beliefs or their behavior were acceptable. But this is a retroactive assessment that we're applying to them. We think that these things are or were. Sorry, I'm on a rant, I'm on a roll. We think that these, that these things were, slash. Are historically acceptable because we've learned about them as a normative part of life, because the people enacting them, people who are sympathetic to Granger, for example, have had an enormous amount of power over what we consider to be history and historical norms. If the guy, this is another example. If the guy saying certain races shouldn't be allowed to read and write in the way that like Enslavers were. If, if the person saying those races shouldn't be allowed to read or write is part of the group who are allowed to read and write, who do you think is initially writing the history of the relations between these two groups of people? Like, it's not written by the victors, it's written by whoever has access to power. And it's bullshit to look at people like Granger and say, well, he's a man of his time. And everyone was thinking that. Again, the other people who he was thinking that about were not thinking that.
- [27:28]
Dr. Imani Mosley
We'Re not thinking that, we're not thinking that. And we're at a, we're at, like, we're at a moment in time when for, for people who are thinking about music, this is a huge issue because we're, we're entering the beginning of the 20th century. There's this feeling like we are careening towards the thing that will be World War I. And you know, we're still, Europe is still reeling from this very chaotic nation forming period. And so there's a lot of discussion in music about musical superiority being akin to some kind of racial or ethnic superiority. And like these conversations are happening and not everyone is in it. Agreement. So the idea that Granger's own thoughts about race is somehow appropriate for the time. Like, we know that that's not true, even musicologically like, that is absolutely not the language that's happening in this moment. And so there is a movie that was made about Granger's life in 1998 called Passion. And I only watched it recently when I knew I was going to do this, because I've been trying to find this mov. As you can imagine, it's an Australian movie. And so in 1999, or a kid in North Carolina is not going to be able to get access to this Australian art movie about Percy Granger, even though I wanted it really badly. And so when I knew I was going to do this, I said, oh, yes, now it's finally time for me to get my. My hands on it. And thankfully, some. Some Wonderful Soul uploaded the whole thing to YouTube. So shout out to you, whoever you are.
- [29:06]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Incredible. That is public history in action, right?
- [29:11]
Dr. Imani Mosley
We live for it. And at the beginning of the movie, we're about eight minutes in, and Granger and his mother are in the uk and he's performing a big public concert. And the Queen is there. I remember this is 1901. And he meets her after the performance and starts talking to her in Danish, which is fine for who we're talking about Queen Alexandra. And so she's like, okay, I guess we'll do that. And so they're having a conversation in Danish with each other where everyone else is kind of like, what are these two people talking about? And it starts off fairly normally. And then he says something to the effect of, you know, it's so great to see the reunification of. Of the English and Danish empires. And she's like, huh? What are you talking about? And she's like, oh, you know, it's only been, like, 800 years. And she's like, oh, okay. And he goes on this whole screen about, like, how. How much better England was again before the Norman Conquest. And she's just like, what the fuck is this guy saying? So even though this is obviously a fictionalized representation of a meeting that maybe didn't even happen, but. But even then, they're like, he is saying these things to people, and people are like, nah, dude, absolutely not. You sound like an insane person. And who is talking about race in this way. So, like, I really, really have to push back on a lot of the ways that some writers about Granger have really tried to rehabilitate him in this language about race, as if he is talking in a way that everybody is talking, and therefore that makes it fine, because he isn't talking in a way that everyone is talking. And again, to your point, like, fine for whom? Like in. In Relationship to whom. Right. So I don't, I don't buy it. I don't buy it.
- [31:16]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I mean, even being like, well, everyone is anti Semitic at this time. Okay. You know who probably didn't appreciate that, the juice that they're talking about. Like, like, yeah, it's, it's, it is a, it's a really baffling not, not even baffling once you understand historical methodologies and how history is written and by whom and for what purposes. It's not that baffling when you think about it in that way. But if you just look at how frequently this argument appears and how publicly accepted that argument is, it's a deeply frustrating thing as someone, you know, who spends all your time thinking about this.
- [31:50]
Dr. Imani Mosley
This.
- [31:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
There are a few other things that came up when people were talking about Granger, and we can actually should get to some literal things that Granger said and wrote because sometimes people are like, we want more facts. But there's another article I read written, and we have them. Imani sent me the most insane thing. There's an interesting article called the Paradox that was Percy Granger that came out in 2014 in the London Magazine. That itself also starts from some very strange assumptions. Chiefly that artists are popular, popularly imagined to be immune to or above social, political, slash cultural issues, which is obviously just blatantly untrue. And it's probably just what the author of the article imagines. But then they have to spend the whole time being like, but Percy Granger was a little bit different. He was different then too, all of these things. He was weird at the time that he was writing and living and existing like he was already weird then, which is just is, I mean, it's. I, I. The whole thing is, is funny. There's.
- [32:58]
Dr. Imani Mosley
I'm gonna.
- [32:59]
Dr. Claire Aubin
To give you an example.
- [33:00]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes.
- [33:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
To give you an example of some shit that he said. Slash wrote. Because I, I need people to get this sort of why the where. How race is so fundamental to everything he's saying. His. In 1939, he wrote a letter to his friend, composer Roger Quilter. So this is in a conversation with another musician and composer. Quilter had expressed his distress at the suffering faced by Jews during the Reich. And after talking about the Jews, the individual Jews that he personally admires or treats well, which includes his secretary or his former secretary, Granger writes, my own horror arises out of a wish to see nature realize her dream. Horror at needless destruction of nature's dreams, whatever the fuck that means. I do not pretend to understand nature or Even to sympathize with her aims. I do not know why nature should give birth to dreams like peace, kindliness, impersonality. I will not say that I am sure I really share these dreams myself. We're getting to the weird part. I think I would always prefer to see some cruelty practiced, provided it had a sexual color, for instance. To see a child or a woman whipped or otherwise ill treated than any kindness I can imagine. But I am passive in the hands of nature. I bow to her aims and dreams as far as I understand them. And I can see that nature has given birth to peace, kindliness, impersonality, tenderness, wistfulness in one race. The Nordic.
- [34:29]
Dr. Imani Mosley
The Nordic what? Oh, man. Yeah. So there's a lot there.
- [34:38]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He was like, I'm gonna write this in a letter to my friend Wild. He's opining on the nature of nature. He's opining on sexuality and nature. He's also pining on how, once again, let's bring it back to what really matters. The Nordic race.
- [34:53]
Dr. Imani Mosley
The Nordic race, yeah. So I mean that all of that is Granger in a Nutshell. I apologize for the pun because he did write a piece called In a Nutshell. And I didn't mean to do that, but you wouldn't have known if I hadn't said anything. So there we go. But yeah, that is the distillation of. Of Percy Granger, all of those things. He talks about nature a lot. He anthropomorphizes nature in a very weird way. When he talks about what it is that makes Nordic music, quote, unquote, Nordic music, more interesting, do music better than other types of music. He talks about virgin nature. So Nordic music's ability to convey nature in the natural and sort of its purest realist form. That's one of the reasons why he is so fascinated with folk music and folk song and those kind of portrayals of nature. He sees the people who make folk songs in certain places as the sort of agent of nature. Right. So he has a whole sort of feeling about the performance of music, this idea of the composer and then the musical object. He doesn't really like performers. He thinks performers actually get in the way of conveying that naturalness that comes like directly from nature to the composer out into the musical object. Which is why he's so fascinated with machines. He loves pianolas and piano rolls because they are not human interpretants. But he sees folk singers as this kind of composer like thing that is a part of nature. So they are not performers in the way that musicians in a wind band or a choir are performers because they are this thing that is uniquely tied to the landscape, to nature and how it works. And this is not a particularly like, individual view. We see this in other people in the past. Charles Bernie, when he goes and surveys other people within the sort of wider British empire in the 18th century, he has a whole feeling about primitive races being more musical because they are closer to the sort of start of not what we would say is evolution. Obviously, we're not quite there yet using that kind of language, but that's what he's thinking. And so, like, the use of complex rhythms and meter is more natural, and those things become simplified and rarefied as we get to the European race. Granger is kind of saying something similar without the sort of aspect of primitivism. So because he sees those people as part of nature and part of the landscape, that they are going to be sort of more inherently musical and perform music in sort of more complex ways. Which is why when he goes around to different places recording things on phonographs and then he arranges those things, instead of being like a Hungarian composer, Bella Bartok, who also is going all over Hungary and recording folk music in a similar sort of way, instead of how Bartok notates those things, which is very traditional Western art music notation, Granger's like, it has to be exactly the way the singer sang it or whatever. And so the. The time signatures are weird, the meters are weird, the phrasing is weird because he doesn't want to get in the way of the natural. But that can only exist for the people that he deems to be that which is anyone who belongs to the sort of Nordic race, which again, is still slightly unsure and kind of nebulous. So. So all of that is connected in this. In this very weird way. And also his feelings about sex and sexuality, he. He calls himself a sadist, that the only way that he understands sex and sexual relations is through cruelty. So he is very much a big fan of a sort of warlike spirit. So, like, when World War I happens, he's kind of excited about it. He doesn't. He. He doesn't relate to, again, like you said in, in that quote, these ideas, sort of peace and kindness and winsomeness, even if he believes that it kind of comes from nature, him personally, his own personal identity, like, can't jive with that. So he's like, well, if it does happen, it happens in the Nordic race. And so for that it has virtue. And I want to talk about it in this way through these people and through this music. I personally can't access it because I'm a sadist and I personally think people should be whipped. So it's a lot.
- [40:25]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi everybody, it's Claire again with my usual quick shout out to tell you about other Multitude shows I think you might be interested in today. I want to talk about the show that got me hooked on Multitude's whole catalog, which is Join the Party. If your nerdiness is not restricted to history and extends to things like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, this is the show for you. Join the party as an actual play podcast with tangible, engaging worlds, genre pushing, storytelling and sound design, and collaborators who make each other laugh every week, as well as me as the audience member. Join GM Eric and players Amanda, Brandon and Julia as they welcome everyone to the table from longtime TTRPG players to folks who've never touched or listened to a role playing game before. You can start by hopping into their current campaign, the drama and Excitement of a superhero high school told using the game Masks. Or you can marathon one of their previous completed stories which include Plant and Bug Pirates, Monster of the Week at a Summer Camp, and High Fantasy Worlds. What are you waiting for? Pull up a seat and join the party. Available on your local podcast app. Yeah, and I mean I. I wrote down violent alternative sexual proclivities and I'm not gonna yuck anybody's yum as and involved as a consenting adult. You know, do your thing. But actually what I think is interesting about this, that he's into that stuff is not why he sucked. Obviously I don't give a shit. But yeah, the way that he's writing and thinking about these things does suggest a sort of rich inner imaginative fantasy life, a fantastical tendency or even an inability or like a desire not to separate inner fantasy from material reality. He's not able to have fantasies about the world about himself, about sex, about race, about his relationships with his mother, with his wife. He's not able to separate those from what he believes are material realities in the world. Like where things come from, what the historical reality of something is, why things are the way that they are. He can't separate the way that he's thinking in his mind about them from what is actually happening. And I think sex is a good example of that. Where he's talks about how he's not. He like regularly talks about how he's not able to separate him, his fantasy life from things he feels he must enact, things he has to do, things that must be done to him as well. And so the whole thing is like this. It, it doesn't. The sex thing is not what's wrong with him. It's right the way that he thinks and talks about it reflects the way that he thinks and talks about other parts of his life and the world. But he is also really obsessed with sex.
- [42:57]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Oh, deeply obsessed with, really obsessed. Like, like the man was, you know, big old freak seven days a week. And again, that is, that is not why he sucked. But it reveals so much about how Granger moves through the world. The way he projects himself sexually, both while he was alive and posthumously is really deeply fascinating. The fact that, you know, here I was like college age Imani, doing some research and coming across this book about Granger and stumbling to, you know, the middle of the book where all the pictures tend to be in books like that, and seeing these pictures of Granger naked self styled photographs that he had taken of his health and of his wife after they had engaged in flagellation and self flagellation and being like, oh, I don't know why I'm seeing this. And then learning that he actively said, you know, please have these things available after I have died. Right. And so he is curating these aspects of his life for future onlookers and he makes the active choice for that to be a part of that curation, which, you know, I think most people maybe wouldn't, or at least maybe not to that extreme extent. Like the fact that we're seeing all of these photographs that he, that he's taken of himself. There's a letter that he wrote that shows up in a sort of posthumous edition of his, of his letters that's basically like, it's titled something to the extent of what to do if Percy Granger, or Ella Granger, this is Percy's wife, are found dead. Right. And the letter basically says if you find one or either of these us dead in a way that doesn't seem like, you know, it's not old age or, or something like that, and you find either of our bodies, and our bodies look like they have been, you know, some severe violence has been enacted upon them, please know that we did that to each other. And we also recognize that engaging in these kinds of sexual acts could, for someone who is young and otherwise in shape, bring about something like cardiac arrest that would cause you to just die. And so please do not investigate it as a murder. We were not murdered. And that's the whole letter.
- [45:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I, I can't, I can't even like Process the idea of being like, sorry to my parents who will probably listen to this. But I can't imagine being like I'm. If we, if I show up dead with my wife or I show up dead early, it's because we is a crazy, crazy thing to have written down. I can't. And that is like, I'm sorry. That is wild. And again, that's not the problem.
- [46:04]
Dr. Imani Mosley
But it's not the problem.
- [46:05]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Even when he's, when he's writing about these things and he's doing the curation that you're talking about, that also indicates this inability to separate fantasy from material reality where he's being like, okay, well I'm also fantasizing about how people will imagine me after I die. And therefore I, I must ensure that that is how they imagine me after I die. Like he, he, he has fantasies and needs to make them real and so, or he needs to find some justification for their reality. And it's just, I mean. Yeah, and, and some of the things we've said where we're like, okay, he's, he's really into the Nordic race. It's also worth mentioning that he does very specifically talk about how the Nordic race is better than other races. It's not just that he's only into, into the Nordic stuff, but I think this is also a good example of him fantasizing about this sort of mystical, mythical. What I wrote down, him being a Nordic freak guy. Without him, without, without just him doing sort of this mythical thing. He also, in order to do that, he has to come up with sort of, of realities that reflect that. So a quote I have from him is must we Nordics? So now he's, he's. Because he feels he's assimilated into Nordic culture through his study of it. And because he's also blonde and blue eyed, that's a big thing for him is that he's all blonde and blue eyed.
- [47:32]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah, not just blonde and blue eyed, but like, like really blonde and really blue eyed.
- [47:39]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And he's also like, he's one of these guys. No, no, no, please, please, please. Is also one of these guys that everyone like. I hate when they do this. We just did this in another episode. Four historians are like, he's so hot. He's a, he's a Byronic beauty. His aquiline blonde, his aqualine nose is blonde hair. What a gorgeous man. And I'm like, oh God, okay, whatever. Yeah, but that's happening with this guy too.
- [48:05]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes. I mean I'm looking at my Copy of the new Percy Grange and companion that has, that has this painting of him on it that's very, that's very twink. Like, you know, that he's just this like very, very like thin, you know, toe haired, you know, sparkling blue. Like, no wonder all he thought about was sex. You know, like he's, he's always been described that hot. Yeah, you would, you would be doing the same thing. And it's like, well, all right, everybody cool?
- [48:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's chill. Yeah. Would I think that if I also was doing sort of proto Nazi. Probably not.
- [48:44]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Right?
- [48:45]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But okay, so the quote I was gonna say is he says he writes this in the thing that you sent me. Must we Nordics go on forever shamming that we do not know that we are over men in beauty, soul, depth, spirit powers? Must we stand by silently forever while the lower races, parentheses, French, German, Jews tell us they own powers and gifts that we know they don't? Not only does he see himself as Nordic, but he's also like magical and everyone else are liars.
- [49:17]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes, yes. That whole, that whole article is, is talking about. I mean, the whole article is absolutely nuts. I mean, everything that he writes is nuts to some degree. But this one especially, which is why I sent it to you, because this is where it's one of the clearest ways in which he talks not only about the superiority of the Nordic race, but how this directly comes in contact to the way people are thinking about music at this time, which is, you know, we are coming off of these centuries of kind of Austro Germanic supremacy in Western classical music. And they are seen as the innovators, the creators, the kind of people who hold the keys to this like, hegemonic way of, of doing music composition. And you know, this is, this is post Wagner, right? Like, Granger is born in 1882. And so, you know, the beginning of his life is in this kind of post Wagnerian moment. And so there are all these feelings of people who are like, yeah, actually, maybe these composers are. Maybe they are the ones who've got it all figured out, right? And he's like, no, absolutely not. Not only have we been lied to all of these years with all of these people telling us that the Germans are the ones who know about music or beauty or art or life, and that people saying that they know all of these things has actively put a sort of like, you know, boot on the neck of the Nordic race. And it's time now we have the freedom to show the world that we, the Nordics again, this man is from Australia. Like, I can't. I cannot stress this enough. He is Australian. Not that you can't be Nordic and Australian, but he's. He's not. So I just want to make that very clear.
- [51:09]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He's not.
- [51:09]
Dr. Imani Mosley
You know, but he's not. He isn't. But it's time that we rise up and we show everyone that, you know, we have always been the ones who. Who have been the progenitors of. Of beauty and art and actual real musical composition and. And. And how dare anyone say otherwise? So this idea that he actually doesn't believe in a kind of, like, racial hierarchy and racial superiority is just. It's not true whether those feelings kind of lessen as he gets older or he talks about it less in that way. I think there is a little bit of that, but it's not like it never existed. It's not like he's never said, you know, that there is one race that's better than the others, and it's this one, the one I've been talking about since I was literally 10 years old. Old. It's that one, the one that I. That I. That I say that I belong to.
- [52:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I think what's funny about that, or there are a lot of things that are funny about this, to be fair. But one of the things that's funny about this is I feel like he talks about Nordic people the way that, like, Lord of the Rings fans talk about elves, where he's like, there's this special race that are more beautiful, they're more magical, they have more. They're more musical.
- [52:21]
Dr. Imani Mosley
They.
- [52:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
They get along with the natural world and you. And when you start seeing his thinking in that light, it's a little bit more, at least to me, comprehensible, where you're like, oh, he's just kind of crazy. But also he's crazy in a way. Or he's. He's.
- [52:36]
Dr. Imani Mosley
He's. He's.
- [52:37]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He's strange and. And, you know, existing outside of. Of reality in a way that still coincides with serious social and cultural problems of the time that he's alive in. I will say, though, I do. I don't want to give Percy Granger flowers because he's a terrible person. But it is very funny, though, the way that he talks about French and Germans, which is.
- [53:03]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Oh, my gosh.
- [53:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Which does not fit with the way that the Germans see French and Germans later. Like, they. Because, you know, it's also. He's kind of doing the sort of proto Nordic Aryanist thing.
- [53:14]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah.
- [53:15]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But he is also saying things like ugly swines such as the French and the Germans. I mean, in the main, I know that a German here and there has, has the gift of beauty. Should not be ashamed of themselves for their loathsome beautylessness. And then talks about the shapes of their skulls, their heavy bellies and legs. Their sorry, heavy bellies. Small legs. He doesn't like small legs. Yeah, he said thick thighs or nothing, baby. He taught, which, you know, you know what go off.
- [53:47]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Sure.
- [53:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He has like a. The things he says are also like there what I would classify and what we actually said before we recorded this episode. This sort of old school European style racism. Like old timey. He hates the Jews, but he also hates the French and the Germans. Like it's, it's not about skin color. It's about what he sees as inherent racial characteristics in the way that Europeans are thinking of race at this point in time or actually at a much earlier point in time than this point in time. He's bringing back this sort of like early, early racial ethnic animus that I think is, is if you don't understand it that way, it's hard to get what's wrong with him. But when you start to figure it out, you're like, okay, yeah, his whole thing is crazy.
- [54:40]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah. I mean, as someone who, as a musicologist, I mean anyone in musicology will tell you any time that anybody kind of like dunks on Germans is, is, is really humorous just because it happens so rarely. And it's like, yeah, okay, go off King. But he, but he, he talks so interestingly about like he has to make these really important distinctions in order for this, this view to make sense. And he says that he thinks about race as, as a sort of lived experience in the sense that it animates everything that everyone does. So like, everything that you create is reflective of this racial identity, just regardless of whether you choose to do it intentionally. Right. So because he sees Germans as being devoid of beauty, they therefore cannot make anything that has beauty in any it. And the thing that I think is really interesting is that he makes a very specific distinction between the Nordic race and the Teutonic race. Whereas somebody like Wagner would say, well, aren't they kind of related? And he's like, no, absolutely not. Those German Teutons over there with their weird stocky legs, they don't know anything about beauty. They're not like these tall, svelte, blonde haired, you know, demigods from Sweden. And like the fact that he has to make that very specific distinction at a Time where it might have otherwise been collapsed for personal, professional, racist reasons. Like, really goes to, again, this idea of this kind of inner world that he is then making a kind of material reality that he's got to say, oh, no, actually, like, you need this very clear definition because this. You might think when you hear Nordic based on the way that other people have maybe used that term in the past, that that includes this much sort of wider scope of. Of people and place and ethnicity. And I'm actually saying, no, it doesn't. And here's. And here's why. And it kind of works in both directions where this idea of, okay, there's been this long history of music composed by German composers to which he says, no, I don't like it, and I don't think it's good. And every now and then, because Granger's favorite composer was Bach, who was, last time I checked, very indisputably German. And he tries to find these ways to attribute the way that Bach does things well as sort of non Teutonic. But he. He's thinking about all of these composers and compositional techniques that have existed for a really long time. And he says, no, it's not good. It's also not good because of the people who made it, like, by proxy of them being who they are. It is also not good. And my music is in direct opposition to that. And it is in direct opposition to that, not necessarily because my music is good, but because it is the byproduct of my racial categorization. So it cannot be what all of this other music is because that music is reflective again, of this kind of racialized existence. And because my music is a representation of my racialized existence, it therefore is going to operate and live and be understood differently musically. So it's all kind of tangled up up in each other. Yeah.
- [58:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And even when he talks about other musicians. So in that same letter essay screed thing that you sent, he. He does talk about this just a little bit. He says. He talks about Debussy. He says. He calls him one of his life's art loves and says, amongst other things, I introduced his music into eight lands. But he says, you know, he can see some bewitching beauty in Debussy, but he does not rise to the peaks of Nordic grandness, Nordic understanding of the all life, the all Frith, whatever that means. He also then later talks about Bach, Wagner and Brahms and says they can. That. He says that they're nearly Nordic, if not quite Nordic souls can at times rise to the full heights of pure Nordic beauty. But he's being very clear through. They can do that sometimes. But no whole work of theirs is as lovely as it might have been had they been real Nordic people like me. So he very clearly says this informs the kind of music that he writes and how he thinks about music. So to separate the two of them is simply not possible because he is saying they are inseparable. Like, he's saying, no, this is made up. The things I'm writing, the way I'm approaching music, the things I'm thinking. Thinking are made up of this thing are like. Are necessitate this other thinking that I'm doing. So it. It's. Yeah, there. It's. It's. Yeah, he sucks. He sucks. I mean, basically, he sucks is kind of the highlight here. I mean, it pretty much, It's. Yeah, his whole thing is wild. And I really strongly suggest to anyone listening to this to go out and look up some of the things that he says and writes just so that you can understand the way he even writes and you can kind of hear what's going on in his head. But I mean, with even the writing, to sort of actually bring this back to some of the linguistic stuff that we started with. Even within his writing, he acknowledges that he's trying to engage in linguistic purity because he'll make up words. Words like out singled, which he'll make up a word, and then he'll put the sort of commonly used word next to it. And the reason he's doing that is because he's trying to, you know, reinstate the Saxon and Scandinavian roots into these words. And so he'll say out singled means certain. Or this one, he says soul tilth means culture. Mind tilt. Education.
- [61:13]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes.
- [61:15]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Part against part metments, which means. Or part against part meetments, which means proportions.
- [61:21]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes. And it's like, what are you. The lengths that he goes to. To kind of engage in this sort of linguistic purity. Like, the words that he comes up with, they're all. They're all. They're often these kind of weird word hyphenate. Sometimes the words like in. Like soul, tilth, the other word will be not an English word or very old English word that he. That he employs throughout all of his writing. It's so funny because in. In many of the edited volumes of his writings, there'll be like a translator's note, like an editor's note, like a glossary. Like, these are the. These are the things that he's actually. That he's actually trying to Say, and so even within his own, his own letters, like things that you'd think maybe he would sort of like, relax. I guess, like that is the place where you really see his commitment to these ideals is because he is inserting this language everywhere. And so, you know, the editors of his letters will be like, there is in addition to these words that he's created, he'll write in English, he'll write in Dutch, he'll write in Danish, he'll write in German sometimes. And German kind of stands in here for this kind of like old European professional language. He also writes in fares, in, in Icelandic, in Maori or what he calls Maori. After he goes to New Zealand, he becomes really fascinated with Maori language. But, but even more interestingly, I think is the private intimate language that he creates kind of from, from nothing, which is. He creates this language that has, I believe it's Danish at its root for parts of the body and specifically genitalia. Classic, of course. And, and sex acts. So he, like, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm pulling up my little list here now of, of, of some of these words that I'm not going to be able to pronounce correctly because I, I unfortunately don't speak any of the languages that he employs here. But I.
- [63:49]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Listeners get in the chat.
- [63:51]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yeah, I'm so, yeah, please all of our Scandinavian friends. Yeah, Scandinavian hive. Please, please, this is your time. So he has, he has a long term girlfriend who is Danish, who. I love that when writers talk about her, they're like, well, she has brown eyes. But he lets that go. Like he doesn't even want to date. Like a woman who.
- [64:13]
Dr. Claire Aubin
What a lucky girl.
- [64:14]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Oh yeah. I mean, hey, they, they were a match apparently. But he writes this.
- [64:20]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Is this the one who becomes his wife? She's Swedish.
- [64:23]
Dr. Imani Mosley
No, his wife is, she's Swedish lady. Yeah. Yes, yes, this girlfriend is also Swedish. This is before the woman who becomes this wife, Karen Holden.
- [64:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Gotcha.
- [64:34]
Dr. Imani Mosley
So he creates this language kind of with and for her. And in the volume of essays and letters from which I sent you that pure Nordic beauty one, there's a whole section that's entitled like sex. And it's all of his writings about sex. And you see a lot of these words come up. And so it's stuff like. So he says, he says to her, quote, it seems to me we lack words for many parts of the body. And I'm like, I don't think that we do, but I mean, sure, go up. And he says, I suggest the following. And so again, I Apologize in huge advance because I don't know how any of these are pronounced. Just gonna have to go with me here. So 1. So Mava Brister. Which means. Which literally means tummy, breasts. Huh?
- [65:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
What body part is.
- [65:34]
Dr. Imani Mosley
It's the butt. Because.
- [65:36]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Shut up.
- [65:37]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes. No, because this is how. Because he gives explanations for all of these things he says for what Herman calls. And again, it's another Danish word, possibly Rove ass, and which have got new importance since you now receive guests from the back.
- [65:54]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Oh, God. Real freak hours all day, every day with this guy.
- [66:02]
Dr. Imani Mosley
The red light was on all the time.
- [66:06]
Dr. Claire Aubin
The thing is, right, like, it's. These are funny. Like, this is funny. And it is easy to be like, this guy is this funny, crazy person. But also, like, I think. And that's the difficulty with him, and that's why we're talking about him and why it's important to talk about him with someone who acts. Actually knows what they're talking about. Right. Is because it's important to integrate these two things together in understanding him and being like, you can be an insane person who writes wild things. And also we can be like, you're a straight up racist. And these things, they don't have to be. One doesn't have to determine. The other one doesn't have to preclude the other one from being true. It's okay to talk about in these. Both these things, because he also seems to be of sound mind while he's doing all of this. This.
- [66:51]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Oh, yes, 100%.
- [66:52]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So he just is like. I think a lot of people have kind of portrayed him as this sort of like. What's the word I'm looking for? Like a. A. A very sort of chaotic, artistic, creative, silly, quirky guy.
- [67:10]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Yes.
- [67:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, he's just like a quirky old professor kind of guy. And it's like, I don't know about that. And again, I. I think to sort of wrap a lot of this up also is, again, he's very actively positioning the future that he wants. The future that he wants for himself. Even after dying, he is saying, this is how I want to be remembered. So we are actually remembering him the way he wants to be remembered.
- [67:33]
Dr. Imani Mosley
To be clear, 100%. It's important to note that. So there is a Granger Museum in Melbourne where he's from, and he started to create that museum while he was alive. So he was like, there's gonna be a museum about me, you guys, and here's what I want to be in it. And this is how it's Supposed to look. He sends these like paper mache, like full size paper mache dolls of himself and his mother and his wife. Well, she's kind of like, sure, why not? Right? You know, the things that you just have around the house, a lifelike paper mache version of yourself. He sends these to the museum to be like, this is what the. Like this is how things are going to be modeled. Because, like, he makes these things called toweling clothes. He made his own clothes. And like, so the clothes have to be put on the, the. The model of him. And again, to talk about, like, this is how he's actively sort of curating himself, he says, about his toweling clothes. And this is a thing that he writes and ends up in the museum, he Sundays, and around 1910, after we. This is. He and his mother both had been fired by the beauty of Maori and South Sea island clothes and fabrics seen in museums in New Zealand, Australia. My mother mooted the idea of clothes made of Turkish towels. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Da da, da, da. I leaped at the idea, seeing therein a chance to return to something comparable with the garish brilliance of the sky blue and scarlet garments of our Saxon and Scandinavian forefathers. Others, I resented very much that the darkness and dullness of more southerly European fashions, parentheses after the Norman conquest, close parentheses, had ousted the bright colorfulness natural to the north of Europe. So, like, even in this, like, again, there's this very easy way of us thinking about him as this kind of weird, kooky guy, oh, my God, he made clothes out of towels. Isn't that so bizarre? Even that is insight into how his idea of race fashions everything in his life. And that he is telling us in that moment that this is how we need to understand him. This is not something that people come up with. It's not musicologists or music theorists or historians now who are saying, this is the way we need to think about Grainger. All of this stuff comes directly from him. He says, this is the way. If you want to know who I am, this is the. This is the way to do it. And yet we don't, we don't get it when we're encountering his music. I mean, again, I don't know that I necessarily should have heard a lot of this stuff when I was 14. I think it would have, like, rocked my little baby brain. But, you know, I. I'm pretty sure that that's not the reason why I didn't hear it. And it does our sort of larger Understanding of Granger. A huge, huge disarray service.
- [70:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And I will also say it's not like you're. We're saying this because we have some kind of grudge, too. It proves that it's not like, oh, there's some. There's some secret, you know, agenda here where we're trying to make everyone sound like a racist. Actually, what we're doing is directly remembering him the way that he specifically is, is asking people to remember him. And the other people who are remembering him are the ones who are erasing the parts of his past that he was trying to make sure would be preserved. So. So, because I think we're out of time, I would like to formally say that we are remembering him the way he would want to be remembered, which is as a Nordic freak guy who definitely sucked.
- [71:12]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Definitely, definitely sucked. And anyone who knows me knows that I love Granger's music really deeply. And I have a. I have a deep personal relationship with it. And that has never gotten in the way of me saying that he is a. A weird little sex pervert racist who sucked.
- [71:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, little pervert racist guy we have. And, you know, I. I think he's also the second guy we've had on the show that if he were alive today, would absolutely be on Reddit being the most annoying person you've ever encountered in your life. He's on the norm R. Norman Conquest.
- [71:48]
Dr. Imani Mosley
Just never shutting, lighting it up, never shutting it.
- [71:55]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Thank you so much for coming on to the show. I didn't need to really be convinced as soon as I read, like two sentences of his writing. Dr. Mosley can be found on Twitter at Imani Mosley Blue Sky. Also Imani Mosley. Do you have anywhere else people can find you?
- [72:12]
Dr. Imani Mosley
No, I'm all over the Internet. Very easily findable. My website is imani mostly.com. i'm the Imani Mosley on the Internet.
- [72:22]
Dr. Claire Aubin
The one I am and to be the one, the Imani Mosley on the show. All of these things will be linked in the episode description as always. And everyone go have a good day. And maybe if you listen to any Percy Granger, do it with an asterisk in your head from now on out about what a real, real freak guy he was. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude podcast collection. This episode was hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dr. Imani Mosley, and produced and edited by Tom Umani. All of our theme music was written and produced by concrete artist Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe@patreon.com thisguysucked See you next week.