Irish Tune from County Derry (Danny Boy)

• Grainger composed this piece in 1902 and subsequently created many arrangements of it.¹
• When Grainger first set this tune he was based in London, working as a concert pianist and teacher, and a dedicated collector and transcriber of English folk songs.²
• Grainger on folk music: In his essay “The Influence of Anglo-Saxon Folk Music,” Grainger argues that the art of melody flourishes in the folk music of cultures where people sing alone (in his words, “the lone shepherd, the farmer who ploughs alone, the cowboy who rides alone, the boatman who rows alone”) whereas the art of harmony tends to  develop in urban areas where people are likely to sing and make music together – to the detriment of pure melody.

“Where men sing in groups…and the musical expression takes the form of harmonic partsinging…the addition of harmonic interest soon weans the creative concentration away from melodic inventivity in the direction of a more harmonic expression…That is why we find the greatest geniuses among classical composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, and Delius, incapable of creating melodies that, viewed solely as melodies, can compare with such pinnacles of folksong melodiousness as…the Irish “Tune from County Derry.”

Percy Grainger ³

• In his essay “Modernism in Pianoforte Study,” Grainger discusses where he found the “Tune from County Derry” for his own piano setting.

“The melody is believed to be very old and was collected by Miss J. Ross, of Limavady, County Derry, and the melody was first published in the Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland.”

Percy Grainger ⁴

1. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, “Grainger, (George) Percy,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 10, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011596.
2. Ibid.
3. Percy Grainger, “The Influence of Anglo-Saxon Folk Music (1920),” Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114.
4. Percy Grainger, “Modernism in Pianoforte Study,” Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70.