Percy Grainger
SEVEN MEN FROM ALL THE WORLD for piano
edited by Penelope Thwaites
Bardic Edition BDE905

This particular piano piece was part of a series of pieces that Grainger cut onto a series of piano rolls in February 1918. At that time he was in the US army and there was a possibility that his unit, the 15th Coast artillery band would be sent to France on stretcher duty. Grainger had many ideas for compositions in his head and instead of writing them on paper (time was short) he decided to commit them to piano roll. These sketches for compositions on the privately cut Duo-Art piano rolls lay in the collection of the Grainger Museum, Melbourne for some 80 years before being transferred to Clavierdisc by the doyen of piano roll experts, Denis Condon. From these discs, John Lavender was able to transfer the information via midi to a digital keyboard and eventually extract the notation to paper.
The title Seven Men from all the World comes from the words of a poem by Rudyard Kipling which was originally used by Grainger for his Kipling setting "The Ballad of the Bolivar" for large men’s chorus and orchestra sketched between January 15 -26, 1901. The piano version published here for the first time has been edited by Penelope Thwaites whose premiere recording can be heard on Vol.16 of the Chandos Grainger Series (CHAN 9895) or CD No.17 of The Complete Grainger Edition: 60 Years: 1961-2021 (CHAN 20196 (21)) Barry Peter Ould