Full Spectrum

At about the age of 25, the famous Australian-born pianist and composer Percy Grainger became convinced his visionary music of the future, Free Music, was beyond the ability of human performers. Much of his work until his death in 1961 was devoted to the invention of a machine capable of playing his Free Music. Sadly for Grainger his ideas were years ahead of the technological means of realising them.

What Grainger was looking for was an instrument which could play precisely notated gliding pitches, at variable amplitudes, with absolute rhythmic precision, for any number of simultaneous, independent voices. Free Music Nos. 1 and 2, the only surviving sketches in Free Music style, were written about the time of his Australian tour of 1934–35. They are made on graph paper with the top half of the vertical axis marked out with pitch levels and the bottom half with loudness levels. The horizontal axis represents time measured in metronome beats. Each voice is then represented as a line on the pitch graph with a corresponding line on the amplitude graph.

Whether or not Percy Grainger's Free Music is worthy of a place in the history of twentieth-century music is yet to be decided. Whatever the outcome, Grainger's ideas deserved a better fate than to have had to wait so many years after their conception to be realised.

(The Free Music materials are on display at the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne.)

Some forty-three years after he conceived them it is now possible to realise Grainger's concept of freely gliding tones taken direct from a graphic score. The realisation of this recording was made on the Music V system running at the Computer Music Project at the University of Melbourne. The graphs, taken from reproductions of the score in the composer's own hand, were put into the machine as functions. Certain translation had to be done as the original data is not in hertz or decibels, but in Grainger's own adaptation of traditional musical terms. For instance, the octave is divided into 24 divisions, the amplitude into 70 divisions. Also, to attain the accuracy of the data in each voice (four in Free Music I, six in Free Music II) each one was synthesised separately, then mixed digitally before outputting the final result through a digital-to-analogue converter.

No attempt has been made to add colour to the sound; it is pure sine wave, as Grainger would have wished. There seems no other way to obtain the desired accuracy other than by a computer synthesis technique.