[10] After Pabst returned to Europe in the autumn of 1894, Grainger's new piano tutor, Adelaide Burkitt, arranged for his appearances at a series of concerts in October 1894 at Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building.

[3] Encouraged by Klimsch, Grainger turned away from composing classical pastiches reminiscent of Handel, Haydn and Mozart,[15] and developed a personal compositional style, the originality and maturity of which quickly impressed and astonished his friends.

[13] At this time Grainger discovered the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and began setting it to music; according to Scott, "No poet and composer have been so suitably wedded since Heine and Schumann.

[22] Grainger returned to London in July 1903; almost immediately he departed with Rose on a 10-month tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as a member of a party organised by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.

[29] In 1907 he met Frederick Delius, with whom he achieved an immediate rapport – the two musicians had similar ideas about composition and harmony, and shared a dislike for the classical German masters.

[34] After fulfilling a hectic schedule of concert engagements in Britain and continental Europe, in August 1908 Grainger accompanied Ada Crossley on a second Australasian tour, during which he added several cylinders of Maori and Polynesian music to his collection of recordings.

[47] However, according to Bird, Grainger often explained that his reason for leaving London was that "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and to have laid himself open to the possibility of being killed would have rendered his goal unattainable".

[48] The Daily Telegraph music critic Robin Legge accused him of cowardice, and told him not to expect a welcome in England after the war,[7] words that hurt Grainger deeply.

[57] After leaving the army in January 1919, Grainger refused an offer to become conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and resumed his career as a concert pianist.

[57][61] Amid his concert and teaching duties, Grainger found time to re-score many of his works (a habit he continued throughout his life) and also to compose new pieces: his Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away, and the orchestral version of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart both originated in this period.

In autumn 1922 he left for a year-long trip to Europe, where he collected and recorded Danish folk songs before a concert tour that took him to Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and England.

[73] Away from music, Grainger's preoccupation with Nordic culture led him to develop a form of English which, he maintained, reflected the character of the language before the Norman conquest.

"[83] The couple were married on 9 August 1928 at the Hollywood Bowl, at the end of a concert which, in honour of the bride, had included the first performance of Grainger's bridal song "To a Nordic Princess".

In this role he delivered a series of lectures under the heading "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music", which introduced his students to a wide range of ancient and modern works.

[84][n 5] His New York lectures became the basis for a series of radio talks which he gave for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1934–35; these were later summarised and published as Music: A Commonsense View of All Types.

He began collecting and recovering from friends letters and artefacts, even those demonstrating the most private aspects of his life,[87] such as whips, bloodstained shirts and revealing photographs.

To finance the project, Grainger embarked on a series of concerts and broadcasts,[89] in which he subjected his audiences to a vast range of the world's music in accordance with his "universalist" view.

[8] In 1954, after his last Carnegie Hall appearance, Grainger's long promotion of Grieg's music was recognised when he was awarded the St. Olav Medal by King Haakon of Norway.

[102] But he expressed a growing bitterness in his writings and correspondence; in a letter to the Danish composer Herman Sandby, a lifelong friend, he bemoaned the continuing ascendency in music of the "German form", and asserted that "all my compositional life I have been a leader without followers".

[103] Next was the "Estey-reed tone-tool", a form of giant harmonica which, Grainger expectantly informed his stepdaughter Elsie in April 1951, would be ready to play free music "in a few weeks".

[106] Nevertheless, he continued to visit Britain regularly; in May of that year he made his only television appearance, in a BBC "Concert Hour" programme when he played "Handel in the Strand" on the piano.

[110][111] Subsequently confined to his home, he continued to revise his music and arrange that of others; in August he informed Elsie that he was working on an adaptation of one of Cyril Scott's early songs.

[8] The conductor John Eliot Gardiner describes Grainger as "a true original in terms of orchestration and imaginative instrumentation", whose terseness of expression is reminiscent in style both of the 20th-century Second Viennese School and the Italian madrigalists of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Experimentation is evident in Grainger's earliest works; irregular rhythms based on rapid changes of time signature were employed in Love Verses from "The Song of Solomon" (1899), and Train Music (1901), long before Stravinsky adopted this practice.

[3] In search of specific sounds Grainger employed unconventional instruments and techniques: solovoxes, theremins, marimbas, musical glasses, harmoniums, banjos, and ukuleles.

[130] At interview, Ella said it was "built with money earned from an ABC concert tour in 1934"; and, that Percy saw it "as a tribute to the city in which he was born in 1882 and also as a key way of preserving the achievements of a new era in English music...".

His pioneering work in the recording and setting of folk songs greatly influenced the following generation of English composers; Benjamin Britten acknowledged the Australian as his master in this respect.

[140] His failure to be recognised as a composer for anything beyond his popular folk-song arrangements was a source of frustration and disappointment;[141] for years after his death the bulk of his output remained largely unperformed.

[1] An unsigned tribute published on the Gramophone website in February 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Grainger's death opined that "though he would never be put on a pedestal to join the pantheon of immortals, he is unorthodox, original and deserves better than to be dismissed by the more snooty arbiters of musical taste".

[150][151] This reproduction system allowed Grainger to make a posthumous appearance in the Albert Hall, London, during the 1988 last night of the Proms as soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Grieg's Piano Concerto.