Untangling the “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon”:Racialism in Percy Grainger’s Engagement with Non-Western Music

Date: 19 Nov 2025 (Weds)

Time: 5 PM (HKT)

Venue: B0404, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Speaker: John Gabriel, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne

All are welcome! No registration required.

Racialist ideologies were notoriously widespread in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, and their legacies endure to the present day. Certain racialist ideologies in music history, like Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism, have attracted substantial attention, but these examples tend to follow similar and well-known racial frameworks, which can obscure the malleability of racialist thinking, particularly on an individual level. This adaptability was an important factor in racialism’s ubiquity; by selectively drawing on and adapting the pseudoscientific “facts” presented in racialist discourse, individuals could develop their own frameworks to fit their beliefs and experiences.

Australian-American composer and pianist Percy Grainger offers a revealingly idiosyncratic example of how racialist ideology could be molded to fit an individual’s musical agenda. Throughout his life, Grainger made racialist claims about music. Scholarship on Grainger and race has largely focused on his adaptation of intra-European racial categories and explored how this informed his approach to Anglo-Saxon folklore (which he championed), the Austro-German canon (which he was highly critical of), and other aspects of the European musical heritage. While his fascination with certain non-Western musics has attracted some scholarly attention, the position of non-European music in his broader racialist agenda has been obscured by his seemingly bizarre framework. His invention of new categories like “Mongolian-Nordic” or “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon” tends to be dismissed as risibly unserious and/or transparently obvious attempts to justify personal preference.

In this talk, I explore Grainger’s idiosyncratic and often baffling racialist categories. Focusing on how he recombined ideas from multiple sources, I reveal how he blended speculative discourse over the origins of music with other major concerns at the time, particularly over such modern ills as urban crowding and overpopulation, labour exploitation, industrial pollution, and authoritarianism. I argue that attending to Grainger’s racialist categories of world music broadens our understanding of both how racialist thinking impacted musical thought beyond well-worn models like Wagner and how racialism’s adaptability on the individual level facilitated its pervasion of mainstream white western culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

John Gabriel is Senior Lecturer and Head of Musicology & Ethnomusicology at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MA from the Free University of Berlin and a PhD from Harvard University, and he previously held positions at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, USA, and in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses primarily on German and Czech speaking Central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a developing secondary area in Australia and the South Pacific. Recent publications have appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth Century Music, and edited volumes with University of Pennsylvania Press and the German publisher Campus Verlag.