Balough authors second book on historic composer Percy Grainger

A longtime lecturer in Eastern’s Department of Music recently published a book that both solidifies and removes controversy from the name of Australian American composer Percy Grainger. Teresa Balough’s “The Essential Grainger: Percy Grainger’s Kipling Settings” delves into the composer’s special interest in the works of the often-misunderstood English author Rudyard Kipling.  

Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in early 2026, Balough explained that the book is based on her doctoral dissertation from her studies at the University of Western Australia, where she earned a Ph.D. in musicology. The book represents her dissertation “revised, expanded, and updated years later,” said Balough. 

According to Balough, Grainger spent most of his life being written off as an oddball due to his pastimes and unorthodox nature. 

“He was a very good person, but people thought he was eccentric — he jogged before jogging became a thing, he was a vegetarian before that became a thing, and he even made his own toweling clothes because they were comfortable,” said Balough. 

She continued: “Grainger was one of these people who just did as they wanted and didn’t worry about public opinion.” 

Balough added that Grainger became a phenomenal figure in music after his death. People started taking notice of his work, especially his compositions inspired by Kipling. Grainger would go on to compose nearly 50 different musical settings of Kipling’s poetry, including settings of verses from Kipling’s legendary “The Jungle Book.” 

“Grainger’s father gave him a book of Kipling’s poetry when he was 16, and that started his career as a modernist composer,” said Balough. 

According to Balough, Grainger’s misperceived character paralleled that of his muse, Kipling. People often took Kipling’s work out of context and framed him as having ideologies he was actively trying to oppose. 

“People assume (Kipling) was an imperialist, but he believed in one brotherhood of all nations — he even refused a knighthood because he wanted to be able to criticize his country,” she said. “The situation is similar to what happens with works like the Bible or Shakespeare’s writing: people take a quote out of context without considering the (period) or what the author was going through.” 

In the book, Balough also discusses Grainger as a pioneer for ethnomusicology during a time when world music studies did not yet exist. 
 
“He believed we needed to listen to all the world’s music just as we look at all the world’s art,” she said.  

Balough has been studying Grainger’s life and works for 50 years, having begun a long-term project concerning his work in January 1976, which would be published in 2023 as “The Life and Work of Percy Aldridge Grainger: Till Life Become Fire.” On the impetus for this project, Balough said, “He believed music could bring us peace, harmony, understanding, and brotherhood — that captured me.” 

Balough explained that the purpose of her new book is to encourage others to re-evaluate the context surrounding Grainger and Kipling through a contemporary lens. She is set to deliver a keynote speech on her research at Brigham Young University in late March of 2026. 

“I feel passionately that a lot of what Grainger wrote about is only now being recognized — it’s time to re‑evaluate him,” she said.