Burnett Cross: In Memoriam
A tribute by Dr Kay Dreyfus
A man of great charm and good humour, Burnett assisted Percy Grainger with his experiments in Free Music from 1945 until Grainger's death in 1961. As a friend and intimate of the Grainger household during these years, Burnett's recollections and reminiscences of Ella and Percy Grainger are quite unique.
Burnett himself, formerly a science editor for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, was a writer whose main interest was the presentation of science to young people.
As a youth, Burnett had heard Grainger give a solo piano recital at the White Plains High School, where he was a student. In June 1945, he met Grainger on the platform of White Plains station while waiting for the train to Grand Central and they sat together and talked during the train journey to Manhattan. From that meeting their friendship and co-operation lasted and deepened until Grainger's death.
The roots of Grainger's Free Music went back to his childhood: the rolling hills of South Australia which he saw from the train that took him from Melbourne to Adelaide; the water which lapped at the side of the rowing boat in Albert Park Lake, and above all the sound of the wind as it howled through the telegraph wires on the Australian country roads. Often he thought that just as the sounds and shapes of nature knew no arbitrary scales or metres so there should be reason why in its search for full emotional expressiveness, music should not enjoy a similar freedom.
Grainger wanted the means to reproduce any note or group of notes within the physical limits of the given apparatus and proceed to the next by whatever kind of jump or glide took the composer's fancy. This music could not be reproduced by conventional instruments and in Grainger's words he wanted to "free music from the tyranny of the performer." Conventional music notation also became redundant, for he wanted to translate his musical ideas directly into sounds. In other words, he wanted a composer's machine. His machines utilised all kinds of junk as well as the more common items that were bought at local hobby and hardware stores. They included such improbable articles as pencil sharpeners, milk bottles, bamboo, roller-skate wheels, carpet rolls and miles of strong brown paper and string.
The first experiments with the machines began in 1946 and by the end of Grainger's life he and Burnett had achieved, by their own criteria, a large measure of success. The first of their machines was based on the piano roll system but utilised pneumatics instead of electronics to produce the sounds. On this machine in 1951 they reproduced for the first time a fragment of Grainger's Free Music. The next machine - the "Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-Pouch" system - was Grainger's most elaborate mechanical device. Essentially it comprised two huge vertically mounted carpet rolls around which had been wound two strips of coloured paper whose specially cut "hill-and-dale" upper contours corresponded to the pitch and dynamic needs of the music.