Molly on the Shore, folk song for string quartet or string orchestra (BFMS 1)

• Date: 1907 -1911
• Composer: Percy Grainger
• Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909)

Review

"When I saw d'Albert swash around over the piano with the wrong notes flying to the left & right & the whole thing a welter of recklessness, I said to myself, 'That's the way I must play.'" Grainger was already a remarkable pianist when he heard Eugen d'Albert during his student days in Frankfurt, but the recognition of d'Albert's sheer voltage must have given a fillip to his own highly idiosyncratic approach to the piano, which was not taming well to German models. But for Grainger the composer, this sense of sheer kinetic adventure had very specific uses, as the unique punctilio of his scores confirms.

In the piano setting of Molly on the Shore, for instance, the most important directions are in English -- not Presto but Fast. And while he allows himself an occasional pp or mf, when he wants volume, he writes "louden lots." His pedaling directions are more elaborate than his expression marks, and make extensive use of the sostenuto, or middle, pedal to achieve both resonance, against the plucked crackle of the melody, and a bit of harmonic blur adding to the general mêlée. And though Grainger did extensive field work collecting folk songs in England and Denmark, during the same pre-Great War years in which Bartók and Kodály were making their first forays into the Hungarian hinterlands, he took good tunes wherever he found them. At the head of his piano setting ("Dished up for piano, April 1918, Baybridge, Brooklyn"), he tells us that Molly on the Shore is "based on two Cork Reel tunes, 'Temple Hill' and 'Molly on the Shore,' respectively Nos. 901 and 902 of The Complete Petrie Collection of Ancient Irish Music edited by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford" by whose permission they are used. After both have been heard in skeletal form, with "Molly" taken briefly to the bass, Grainger rings beguiling variations upon them, separately and together, which pass in a mercurial flash to give way, ppp, to an effect of distance, as if the dancers were disappearing over the hill, before a final ffff chord.

Composed originally for string quartet and presented as a birthday present to his mother in 1907, Grainger also made arrangements of Molly on the Shore, at various times, for orchestra, wind band, pit band, violin and piano, and so on, called into existence less by the piece's immense popularity than by his democratic practice of "elastic scoring" which sought to make his music available to almost any instrument or combination of instruments. The upshot, in any version, is a miniature tone poem bristling with charm and animated by keen delight in physical movement. ~ Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Free Spirits	2001
Grainger: Works for Chamber Ensemble 2	2000
Pleasure Songs for Flute	1987
Stolen Gems	1985
Themes of Grainger	1995

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