The Warriors

Those who know Percy Grainger only from his numerous shorter pieces and folk song arrangements may be surprised by The Warriors. Cast in a single, 18-minute movement (the longest Grainger wrote), this “imaginary ballet” was written over three years from 1913-16, and scored for a large orchestra including three pianos, two harps, a celesta, tubular bells and a raft of percussion instruments. Although Grainger claimed that “no definite programme or plot underlies the music,” he actually provided a detailed scenario for The Warriors. In it he pictured “the ghosts of male and female warrior types of all times and places” gathered together for “an orgy of warlike dances”, interspersed with “amorous interludes.” This bacchanalian atmosphere is reflected at the opening of The Warriors, where wildly pulsing rhythms and swirling volleys of percussion evoke “the surging onslaughts of good-humouredly mischievous revellers”. Between the faster sections, spiked with the pungent influence of Stravinsky, more languorous interludes suggest the “voluptuous pleasures” the warriors are enjoying. The central “slow pastoral” episode, with its “staccato organ-paint consisting of harp harmonics and piano strings struck by marimba mallets”, vividly demonstrates Grainger’s acute ear for unusual timbres and combinations of instruments. The concluding section of The Warriors builds gradually in orgiastic intensity, before ending in what the typically quirky Grainger called “an abrupt anticlimax”.