Percy Grainger (1882-1961) was a piano prodigy turned composer who was known for his strange personal habits, his blunt and colorful prose, and his equally unusual music – his many admirers today still recognize that he possessed “the supreme virtue of never being dull.” Born in Australia, he began studying piano at an early age. He came to the U. S. at the outbreak of World War I and enlisted as an Army bandsman, becoming an American citizen in 1918. He went on to explore the frontiers of music with his idiosyncratic folk song settings, his lifelong advocacy for the saxophone, and his Free Music machines which predated electronic synthesizers. His many masterworks for winds include Lincolnshire Posy, Irish Tune from County Derry, and Molly on the Shore.

Lads of Wamphray first appeared in print in 1941, more than 30 years after its composition in 1905, when Grainger was 23. It is a remarkably mature piece, showing many of Grainger’s compositional habits already in full flower. His program notes reveal its origin, from the 1941 score (reproduced in Joseph Kreines’s 2003 full score edition):

The Lads of Wamphray March, conceived from the first for wind band, was composed in 1905 (possibly begun very late in 1904) as a birthday gift to the composer’s mother. At about that time it was played by the Band of His Majesty’s Coldstream Guards conducted by J. Mackenzie Rogan, in London. The scoring was superficially revised in 1937 and 1938, without, however, alteration of the music itself. No folks songs or other traditional tunes of any kind are used in the work, which is based on melodies and musical material written by Grainger in his setting (composed in 1904) for male chorus and orchestra or two pianos (published by G. Schirmer, Inc., New York) of a Scottish Border Ballad text, The Lads of Wamphray, drawn from Sir Walter Scott‘s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This folk-poem, which celebrates a bloody skirmish between the Maxwell and Johnstone clans that took place at Biddes-burn in 1593, closes with the following verse:

“For were’er I gang, or e’er I ride,
The lads of Wamphray are on my side;
And of a’ the lads that I do ken,
A Wamphray lad’s the king of men.”

In the march the composer has wished to express the devil-may-care dare-deviltry of the cattle-raiding, swashbuckling English and Scottish “borderers” of the period (roughly, the 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-centuries) so grimly yet thrillingly portrayed in the border ballads collected and published by Scott, Motherwell, Jamieson, Johnson, Buchan, Kinloch, Swinburne, and others.

Grainger goes on to describe at length his views on band instrumentation and balance. Among other things, he champions the soprano saxophone and the entire sarrusophone family. Not all of his wishes have come true.

Jerry Junkin and the Dallas Winds perform Lads of Wamphray at exactly Grainger’s indicated tempo (q=108):

For more on the Lads of the title, check out this educational article. As for the music, the Kreines edition, created with help from Daniel Schmidt and Larry Clark, remains the standard edition of this piece. It can be found at the Wind Repertory Project, HeBu music, Carl Fischer, J. W. Pepper, the Australian Music Centre, and Sheet Music Plus. There is also a terrific write-up about the piece at Aux Arcs Music. This company also publishes the band and choir arrangement:

Percy Grainger Society – Based in White Plains, NY, they take care of the Grainger house there as well as the archives that remain there. They also like to support concerts in their area that feature Grainger’s music.

Grainger Museum – in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, at the University there.

Grainger’s works and performances available at Naxos.com

Two interesting Grainger articles at The Guardian and WRTI.