Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon by Grainger arr. Chalon Ragsdale

Grainger was friends with the great American instrument builders, the Deagan family of Chicago (as his mother Rose once said “both the people and the instruments”), and began including complete families of metal and wooden mallet instruments in his compositions, usually scored in combination with piano, celesta, other keyboard instruments (the harmonium and dulcitone being particular favorites) and harp. He developed literature for large ensembles of this type, most notably in his scoring of Claude Debussy’s Pagodes, and it is with this knowledge that we are confident Percy Grainger would approve of the concept of an arrangement of Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon for large percussion ensemble. Given that his band arrangement of Ye Banks and Braes was partly written as an experiment in “elastic scoring”, and designed so that discrete choirs of flute and double reeds, clarinet choir, saxophone choir, or brasses within the band arrangement can perform it independently, it would seem that providing the same opportunity for Grainger’s beloved “tuneful percussion” would be a natural extension of that philosophy.