Free Country
Recording
- Free Country Listen
Notes
This takes the listener on a sonic journey from Percy Grainger's most famous composition Country Gardens to the electronic 'Free Music' that he created at White Plains during the last decades of his life. The recordings that start and end the piece were both made by Grainger himself, one at the piano, the other at a Free Music machine. There is also a sample of the 'Butterfly Piano', a microtonal instrument that he built to simulate the effect of a continuous pitch glide when playing a fast chromatic scale. The remaining samples are all from the GLOSS collection, including an improvisation on the autoharp and an array of lights and furniture. These samples are sometimes processed quite heavily and sometimes in their raw state.