Percy Grainger - The Warriors (1916) - Audio and Sheet Music
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) - The Warriors, Music to an Imaginary Ballet (1916) - Audio and Score/Sheet Music
"No definite program or plot underlines the music, though certain mind pictures set it going. Often the scenes of a ballet have flitted before the eyes of my imagination in which the ghosts of male and female warrior types of all times and places are spirited together for an orgy of war-like dances, processions and merry-makings broken, or accompanied, by amorous interludes, their frolics tinged with just that faint suspicion of wistfulness all holiday gladness wears. I see the action of the ballet shot thru, again and again, with the surging onslaughts of good-humoredly mischievous revellers who carry all before them in the pursuit of voluptuous pleasures. At times the lovemakers close at hand hear from afar the proud passages of harnessed fighting-men, and for the final picture I like to think of them all lining up together in brotherly fellowship and wholesale animal glee; all bitter and vengeful memories vanished, all hardships forgot, a sort of Valhalla gathering of childishly overbearing and arrogant savage men and women of all the ages,--the old Greek heroes with fluttering horse-haired helms, shining black Zulus, their perfect limbs lit with fire-red blossoms, flaxen-haired Vikings clad in scarlet and sky-blue, lithe bright Amazons in winds wept garments side by side with squat Greenland women in ornately patterned furs, Red Indians resplendent in bead-heavy dresses and negrito Fijians terrible with sharks' teeth ornaments, their woolly hair dyed pale ochre with lime, graceful cannibal Polynesians of both sexes, their golden skins wreathed with flowers and winding tendrils,--these and all the rest arm in arm in a united show of gay and innocent pride and animal spirits, fierce and exultant."
-Percy Grainger
For further reading, please visit http://www.percygrainger.org/progno10...
Orchestra: Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner