Grainger Museum

This collection is fully listed in the publication: G.W.L. Marshall-Hall: A biography and catalogue by Thérèse Radic (Marshall-Hall Trust, 2002). 

It is well-known to those familiar with the life of Percy Grainger (1882 –1961) that Marshall-Hall arranged the fundraising concert that would send the young Grainger to Frankfurt in order to commence his music studies in 1895.

George W.L. Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) arrived in Melbourne in 1891 to take up the position of first Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne. Possessed of a seemingly boundless passion for all forms of art, Marshall-Hall contributed much to the development of musical culture in Melbourne.  He established the Marshall-Hall Orchestra as well as the University conservatorium of Music. He was also patron to a number of emerging Australian visual artists.

In 1934, Percy Grainger contacted Sir James Barrett (then Chancellor of the University of Melbourne) and Marshall-Hall’s family to negotiate the purchase of his music manuscripts for inclusion in his proposed museum. By 1939 (just after the Grainger Museum opened), the Marshall-Hall material formed the first of a series of collections relating to Australian composers featured in the Grainger Museum.

Far from being a simple collection of printed music and manuscripts, the Marshall-Hall collection also contains his published literary works, news clippings and articles, scrapbooks, correspondence, photographs and artworks. The range of disciplines represented in this collection demonstrates Grainger’s notion that his Museum should shed light on the ‘process of creative genius’, not just the fruits of that genius.