Hugh Philpott on sex, sexuality and the creative process in the music of Grainger, Delius and Smyth.
‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’
This assertive line is usually attributed to Oscar Wilde. Whether he said it or not, it certainly feels uncomfortably true. And it provokes an interesting question: what happens when desire, repression, or obsession begin to shape the process of artistic creation? With visual artists, the evidence can be disarmingly plain. We need little help to see how central sex and sexuality were to figures such as Francis Bacon, Eric Gill and Duncan Grant. We may not always like what we find, but it is there, visible and insistent.
But how does this work when it comes to music?
Percy Grainger, Frederick Delius and Ethel Smyth are three 20th-century composers whose publicly lived private lives offer us a way into exploring the question. Their sexual identities and personal practices do not merely contextualise their music, but can be heard, structurally and expressively, within it.
Grainger, perhaps best known for Handel in the Strand and Country Gardens, is easily passed over as a composer of bucolically evocative English tunes. He was born in Australia and died in the US, but did spend much of his creative life in the UK, including periods in Sussex collecting folk songs. And there are unmistakeable English vibes, albeit with a twist, all over his music. We could stop there, but listening more closely we soon realise there is so much more going on.
Percy liked his sex rough and slow. He engaged in lengthy sessions of auto-erotic and consensual-partner sado-masochism, usually with his wife Ella. We know this because he wanted us to. He left his carefully documented records to his own museum. His legacy of explicit letters, lists and notes shows he treated his sex-life like a kind of lifelong research
project, and the results of these ‘experiments’ became the de facto theory of his musical composition.
Shallow Brown is a good example. It’s one of Grainger’s many pieces based on a folk tune. In my playlist [overleaf], I’ve chosen Benjamin Britten’s version, where John Shirley Quirk takes the solo part. As one might expect, Britten really gets into the pent-up maleness of this work, leaving us in no doubt about how he feels. It’s based on a rather dull sea shanty, but Grainger’s take on this, intensified here by Britten’s sweatily homoerotic interpretation of the orchestral score, manages to accentuate the straining muscles and pumping action of hard labour. You can hear and feel the coordinated pull of male bodies straining for a longed for but continually delayed release, while thinking aloud about a desired absent woman. Grainger uses harmonic circles with no resolving cadence to give the textures and colours which quiver and tremble. It becomes a continuous condition of intensification without release, which is as close to musical edging as you can get.
Go back to those other works now. Once you hear this treatment you will find he does this sort of thing all over the place. Often favouring piano music, he rolls it along, continually accumulating and building up. There is always that sensation of being caught in a tireless, almost monotonous, masturbatory process. He seeks more and more stimulation. Nothing is sublimated. I guarantee you will never hear Country Gardens the same way again.
Delius does something quite different. So often his music simply dissolves. It’s diaphanous atmospheric quality favours a drifting suspension in which harmonic boundaries blur and time loosens. It’s difficult to see his formal architecture. He allows the music to meander ever forwards rather than finding resolution. Once again, it is tempting to hear this as purely aesthetic, but I hear more than that.
Unlike Grainger, Delius kept no explicit records of his sex life, but we know that he was famously promiscuous. Sadly, his voracious appetite and sometimes reckless attitude to unsafe sex eventually caught up with him. Along the way he contracted one of the nastier STDs and consequently by the late 1920s was suffering from a combination of blindness, paralysis and a gradual loss of physical independence.
It is at this point that help arrived. Enter Eric Fenby. Fenby was not a formally trained musician, but a passionate and competent organist and devoutly religious young man. He had read about Delius’ failing health and saw an opportunity. He wrote offering help, and soon found himself part of the Delius household. The benefit was mutual. He learnt much from the master and he in turn enabled the composition process to continue through his role as amanuensis. This austere, and devoted young man became a creative conduit, asserting a vital presence in the final chapter of Delius’ career.
I believe A Song of Summer, composed in 1931, to be a perfect example of this partnership. It is not just about the style of composition. It reflects too the conditions of its making. We might imagine the music passing from one man’s body to the other and then dissolving into the ether. Technically Fenby may not be composing here, but his physical presence is integral. This symbiotic union is so much more than a simple collaboration.
In contrast, Ethel Smyth was unambiguously out and proud. Her life, like her music, is head up, insistent and unwilling to be contained within the expectations of her time. Her relationships with society ladies such as Virginia Woolf and Emmeline Pankhurst were loud, open and visible. She wanted to be defined, and actively courted disapproval. Her involvement in the suffrage movement and her refusal to accept the limitations placed upon her as a female composer are also all part of the visible fabric of who she was.
This approach to life is all there in her music. Let’s listen to The March of the Women first. This is music with clear purpose and intent. It refuses to hide and does not allow its rhythmic tread to be ignored. There is strong melodic purpose and unavoidable presence. Yet this declaration does not exclude emotional depth. The lines rise and fall with a kind of shared breath saying ‘we are many, make sure you hear and see us’. Smyth’s harmonic language is strong, but she never becomes aggressive or shrill. It functions not only as protest, but as an articulation of solidarity, loyalty, and collective strength. Smyth’s own relationships and personal commitment are not coded messages in this music. They are clearly fundamental and form the shaping force behind its confidence, openness, and refusal to retreat. It’s great stuff.
Her larger works extend this further. In the Mass in D, the Gloria surges forward with an exultant physicality. Its energy is driven by collective assertion. Her opera The Wreckers, most recently seen in 2022 at Glyndebourne, is propelled by moral and emotional confrontation rather than ambiguity. It demonstrates the uncompromising approach she took to her own principles. Principles usually come at a cost. Smyth knew that cost perfectly well, but simply refused to let the price determine the truth.
‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex.’ I do not claim to resolve Wilde’s provocation. But it works for these three composers. Sex may not be the subject of their work, but we can certainly sense it as the underlying force shaping their creative process. You don’t have to hear or feel it to enjoy the music, but perhaps once you do, it may be difficult to unhear.
Listen to the The Sound of Desire playlist on Spotify via the QR code.
- Percy Grainger, Country Gardens, North Texas Wind Symphony, Eugene Migliaro Corporon
- Percy Grainger, Shallow Brown, John Shirley-Quirk, Ambrosian Singers, English Chamber Orchestra, Benjamin Britten
- Percy Grainger, Molly on the Shore, Academy of St Martin in the Fields
- Percy Grainger, Handel in the Strand, Academy of St Martin in the Fields
- Frederick Delius, A Song of Summer, London Symphony Orchestra, Anthony Collins
- Frederick Delius, Fantastic Dance, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, David Lloyd-Jones
- Frederick Delius, Violin Sonata No 1, Yehudi Menuhin, Eric Fenby
- Eric Fenby, Rossini on Ilkla Moor, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba
- Dame Ethel Smyth, The March of the Women, Suffrage Sinfonia
- Dame Ethel Smyth, Mass in D: II. Gloria, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, Susanna Hurrell, Catriona Morison, Ben Johnson
- Dame Ethel Smyth, The Wreckers: Overture, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
