An examination and conductor's analysis of Percy Grainger's 'Jungle Book'

The purpose of this study is to examine and describe the scope of the choral output of Percy Grainger and to gain an understanding of what he considered an important project, his Kipling Jungle Book Cycle. The first chapter contains a biography of Percy Grainger. Chapter 2 presents a survey of his arrangements and original compositions for chorus. The third chapter is a brief biography of Rudyard Kipling and a survey of Grainger's choral compositions on texts by Kipling. Chapter 4 discusses general stylistic characteristics of Percy Grainger's compositions as proposed by his essay on his Hill-Song No. 1. Chapter 5 is a discussion of the origin of texts, compositional history and important compositional characteristics of the eleven movements contained in the Jungle Book Cycle. Chapter 6 contains conclusions of the author related to obstacles in preparing a performance of the Jungle Book Cycle and addresses the significance of the Cycle as part of twentieth century choral literature. This chapter also briefly addresses Grainger's view of programming, which imparts an understanding to Grainger's organization of the Jungle Book Cycle and its disparate instrumentation and voicing.