![]() ![]() Grainger wrote to publisher Max Steffans: ‘I AM SO GRATEFUL TO PUBLISH MY CYCLE COMPLETE.’ Between then and Grainger’s death three years later, the work received scant attention and it was to be another twenty-one years before the work received its British premiere at the 1982 Aldeburgh Music Festival. The cycle was eventually published in its entirety in 1958. Of the settings composed between 18, Grainger wrote in a programme note: ‘These settings written under the strong spell cast upon me by Kipling’s Jungle verses (the passion for the face of virgin nature, the intimate sympathy with the wild creatures that roam the jungle, the revolt against civilization …’ And later in a preface to the published score: ‘My Kipling “Jungle Book” Cycle, begun in 1898 and finished in 1947, was composed as a protest against civilization.’ In this ‘nature’ music, with its irregular rhythms and unrestricted harmonies, Grainger points the way to his interest in the musical freedom which was to culminate in his ‘Free Music’, which he first thought of at the age of ten when seeing the waves lapping against his sailing boat on the Albert Park Lagoon in Melbourne. Its genesis dates from December 1898 when the young Percy composed three settings, a fourth following in January 1899. ![]() The Jungle Book cycle, here receiving its first recording, was composed and reworked over a period of fifty-nine years. ![]()
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