title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On May 24, 2010, the United States set plans to participate in new military exercises with South Korea as a direct military response to the sinking of a South Korean warship by what officials called a North Korean torpedo.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On May 28, 2010, the official (North) Korean Central News Agency stated that "it is the United States that is behind the case of 'Cheonan.' The investigation was steered by the U.S. from its very outset." It also accused the United States of manipulating the investigation and named the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama directly of using the case for "escalating instability in the Asia-Pacific region, containing big powers and emerging unchallenged in the region." The report indicated to the United States to "behave itself, mindful of the grave consequences."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In July 2010, the DPRK government indefinitely postponed a scheduled talk at Panmunjom relating to the sinking. The meeting was intended as preparation for future talks at higher governmental levels.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Just over two years later on March 16, 2012, North Korea announced it would launch its Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 satellite to mark the 100th anniversary of the late Kim Il-sung's birthday. This announcement triggered American anxiety as satellite launches are technologically contiguous with missile launches. This tampered with Kim Jong-un's earlier optimistic overtures and generated speculation on the issues confronting the new and young leader back in North Korea. The United States also suspended food aid to North Korea in retaliation for the missile plans.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Daniel Russel, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Asia, and Sydney Seiler flew to Pyongyang from Guam in August 2012 and stayed there for two days. A South Korean diplomatic source said "apparently President Barack Obama, who was then bidding for a second term in office, secretly sent the officials to North Korea to minimize disruptions to the U.S. presidential election." Other analysts say, "Nobody can rule out that such direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang will continue in the future."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: However, on December 11, 2012, North Korea successfully launched a missile in contrast to its failure in March. The United States strongly condemned the action as it was widely believed that North Korea was developing long-range ballistic missile that could reach the West Coast of the United States.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On March 29, 2013, Kim Jong-un threatened the United States by "declaring that rockets were ready to be fired at American bases in the Pacific." The declaration was in response to two B2 stealth bombers that flew over the Korean peninsula on the day before. After Jong-un's declaration, the Pentagon called for an advanced missile defense system to the western Pacific on April 3. United States Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, said that North Korea posed "a real and clear danger" to not only the United States, but Japan and South Korea as well. The deployment of the battery to the US territory of Guam is the biggest demonstration yet that Washington regards the confrontation with North Korea as more worrying than similar crises of the past few years. It also suggested they are preparing for long standoff. While visiting Seoul, South Korea on April 12, 2013, United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, said "North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power", and that a missile launch by North Korea would be a "huge mistake". On April 18, 2013, North Korea issued conditions for which any talks would take place with Washington D.C. or Seoul. They included lifting United Nations sanctions and an end to United States-South Korean Key Resolve military exercises.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On April 26, 2013, North Korea said it had arrested a U.S. citizen for committing an unspecified crime against the country. U.S. officials said that person was Kenneth Bae. On May 2, 2013, Bae was convicted of "hostile acts" and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. The U.S. has called for his release but North Korea has rejected any possibility of allowing prominent Americans to visit the country to request his release. Dennis Rodman, who had previously visited North Korea and become friends with Kim Jong-un, tweeted a plea for Bae's release. Rodman has since said he will visit North Korea again in August and attempt to free Bae. On May 2, 2014, Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released an article composed of four essays written by North Korean citizens. The content of the article carried heavy criticism and racist remarks towards U.S. President Barack Obama.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Two American citizens were detained in North Korea in June 2014, accused of "hostile acts". On July 28, 2014, the United States House of Representatives voted to pass the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2013 (H.R. 1771; 113th Congress), but it was never passed by the Senate. On August 20, 2014, during annual U.S.-South Korea military drills, a spokesman for the North Korean government referred to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as a "wolf donning the mask of sheep", the latest in an exchange of taunts between U.S., South Korean and North Korean government officials. In January 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama indicated that he believed that over time the North Korean government will collapse. On July 28, 2016, a North Korean top diplomat for U.S. affairs claimed that the United States crossed the "red line" for putting leader Kim Jong-un on its list of sanctioned individuals, which was perceived by officials as the United States declaring war.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On May 24, 2015, International Women's Day for Disarmament, thirty women—including US feminist leader Gloria Steinem, two Nobel Peace laureates and retired U.S. Colonel Ann Wright—from 15 countries linked arms with 10,000 Korean women, stationing themselves on both sides of the DMZ to urge a formal end to the Korean War (1950-1953), the reunification of families divided during the war, and a peace building process with women in leadership positions to resolve decades of hostility.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In the weeks leading up to crossing the DMZ, Steinem told the press, “It's hard to imagine any more physical symbol of the insanity of dividing human beings."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On the day of the crossing, South Korea refused to give the women permission to walk through Panmunjom, a border town where the 1953 truce was signed, so the women had to eventually cross the border by bus. Nevertheless, Steinem labeled the crossing a success. "“We have accomplished what no one said can be done, which is to be a trip for peace, for reconciliation, for human rights and a trip to which both governments agreed.”


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In 2017, tensions mounted as U.S. President Donald Trump weighed military options against North Korea's ballistic missile program. In the second week of April 2017, global media outlets erroneously reported that the USS "Carl Vinson" supercarrier had been deployed to the Sea of Japan heading towards North Korea, as a result of confusion created by a "miscommunication" between the "Pentagon and the White House." A premature announcement on April 8 from the Navy led to a "glitch-ridden sequence of events". On April 17 North Korea's deputy United Nations ambassador accused the United States of "turning the Korean peninsula into "the world's biggest hotspot" and the North Korean government stated "its readiness to declare war on the United States if North Korean forces were to be attacked." President Donald Trump called Mr Kim "Little Rocket Man" and a "sick puppy", and promised that continued North Korean threats to America "will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen". President Trump has at times called diplomacy with the Kim regime "a waste of time". In reality on April 18, the "Carl Vinson" and its escorts were 3,500 miles from Korea engaged in scheduled joint Royal Australian Navy exercises in the Indian Ocean. The "Carl Vinson" aircraft carrier had been in the South China Sea in 2015 and again in February 2017 on routine patrols. In late April 2017, Trump stated that "[t]here is a chance that we [the United States] could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea". In July 2017, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson authorized a "Geographical Travel Restriction" which banned Americans from entering North Korea. On August 30, 2018, the ban was extended until August 31, 2019.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: An American citizen by the name of Tony Kim, also known by the Korean name of Kim Sang-duk, was detained while attempting to leave North Korea through Pyongyang International Airport. In January 2016, an American student, Otto Warmbier, was detained at Pyongyang International Airport after allegedly attempting to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel. He was traveling with a group of Americans, all of whom safely returned to America without any conflict, while he was stopped by security and searched. Security footage showed him allegedly going into a banned area in the hotel and ripping out the poster from the wall and putting it in his bag. He claims that he was following orders from his church to take something from North Korea back to the church. In March 2016, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, but in June 2017 was released from North Korea, having suspiciously fallen into a coma-like state. He died a few days after being repatriated to the U.S. North Korea claimed that they had nothing to do with his death. The Chinese travel company that took Warmbier to North Korea as part of a tourist group has stated that it will no longer accept American citizens on its tours to prevent similar circumstances from happening. After Americans heard about Warmbier's death, 49% wanted the administration to act, while 35% did not. Of those Americans who wanted action to be taken, the most popular response was for the U.S. to tighten sanctions on North Korea, and the second most popular was a total travel ban between the two countries. United States military action was the least popular response.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In August 2017, "The Washington Post" reported on a confidential assessment carried out by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency which suggested that North Korea had successfully developed nuclear warheads for missiles within reach of the US mainland. Reacting to the report President Trump stated that future threats would be "met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before." In response North Korea announced that it was examining an operational plan to strike areas around the U.S. territory of Guam in the Pacific, including the Andersen Air Force Base. Officials stated that Joseph Y. Yun, the US envoy for North Korea policy, and Pak Song-il, a senior North Korean diplomat at the country's UN mission, were making regular contact during this dispute, through a conduit of communication they called the "New York channel".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On August 8, 2017, President Trump suggested that the United States was prepared to inflict "fire and fury" against North Korea if they failed to cease nuclear testing and threats. In response, North Korea issued a series of threats against the U.S. territory of Guam as well as allies such as Japan and South Korea. Two missiles were flown over Japanese territory and a nuclear test was conducted.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, Trump threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea if the United States were "forced to defend itself or its allies"; he repeated his recent nickname for Kim Jong-un as "Rocket Man". In response North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the speech "unprecedented rude nonsense" and "mentally deranged behaviour".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On September 23, 2017, the U.S. Military flew B-1B bombers from Guam, along with F-15C Eagle fighter escorts from Okinawa, Japan flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea. Unlike on previous missions, the U.S. aircraft were not accompanied by South Korean or Japanese planes. Afterward North Korea said a missile strike against the U.S. is "inevitable all the more".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On September 30, 2017, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. and North Korea were in "direct contact", and "probing" the possibility of talks.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On October 9, 2017, US Air Force B-1 bombers carried out mock missile launches off both coasts of South Korea. Two bombers operating out of Andersen Air Force Base in Guam carried out the drills along with fighter jets from the South Korean and Japan militaries. This was the first nighttime B-1 bomber exercise between the three allies.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On November 28, 2017, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and it was the first such launch from the rogue regime in more than two months. The missile, believed to be an ICBM by the U.S. Military, was launched from Sain Ni, North Korea and flew roughly 620 miles before landing in the Sea of Japan.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On March 8, 2018, following a meeting with President Trump, South Korean diplomat Chung Eui-yong revealed that Kim Jong-un had expressed "eagerness" to meet with the President, and that his offer had been accepted, with a meeting proposed to take place before May. The move was described by South Korean President Moon Jae-in as a "miracle." The meeting had been scheduled to be held on June 12 in Singapore, although after military exercises between the United States and South Korea, Kim Jong-un threatened to pull out of the summit, and on May 24 President Trump cancelled it. On June 1, 2018, Trump announced that the summit was "back on" for June 12 in Singapore after meeting with North Korean officials at the White House. President Trump met with Chairman Kim on June 12. During the meeting, a historic agreement was signed between the two countries calling for North Korea to reaffirm its commitment to the 2017 Panmunjom Declaration signed between North and South Korean to work towards completely denuclearizing the entire Korean Peninsula. The agreement declared a new start to US-DPRK relations between the two countries to achieve "peace and prosperity" through cooperation on issues such as the recovery of POW/MIA remains. Trump subsequently announced that war game exercises between the US and South Korean militaries would end.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Thousands of U.S. military personnel went missing during the Korean war. Between 1990 and 2018, North Korea returned the remains of 340 soldiers, but about 7,700 bodies were still unaccounted for. The June 12, 2018 summit between the US and North Korea included a vague agreement to begin repatriating American POW/MIA remains. One month later, North Korea returned 55 boxes to the US. They were accompanied by the military identification tag of only one person, but other servicemen could be identified through matching DNA, chest X-rays, and dental records. By October 2019, it was reported that 35–40 servicemen had been identified.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea's state media declared a new era of peace following the summit. Reports emerged on June 23 that North Korea was removing anti-US propaganda.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On June 24, Trump stated that North Korea still posed an 'extraordinary threat' to the US and maintained sanctions on the country despite declaring them no longer a threat the day following the summit.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's first visit to North Korea in July 2018 invoked disgruntled remarks from Pyongyang that the Trump Administration was using "unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization". Pompeo maintained that the July talks were "productive". However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since stated North Korea is continuing with their nuclear program, and Trump announced the cancellation of Secretary of State Pompeo's scheduled visit in August 2018 to North Korea due to insufficient progress in the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Interactions between the Washington and Pyongyang continue to fluctuate following the September 2018 United Nations General Assembly. In his speech, President Trump commended Kim Jong-Un for ceasing nuclear testing, dismantling several military facilities, releasing American hostages, and returning POW/MIA remains. Trump reaffirmed that sanctions will continue to be held on North Korea until denuclearization occurs.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On February 22, 2019 around 3 pm a group of 10 persons carrying real or simulated weapons entered the North Korean embassy in Madrid, Spain. They rounded up the eight embassy staffers who were present, put bags on their heads, tied them up, beat several of them and interrogated them. They robbed mobile phones and computer drives. The assault lasted for two hours, until Spanish policemen entered the building and the attackers fled in two of the embassy's cars. On March 13, Spanish police and intelligence services identified two of the attackers as CIA operatives. The CIA denied any involvement.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: The 2019 North Korea–United States Hanoi Summit was a two-day summit meeting between North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump, held in Vietnam on February 27–28, 2019. The leaders had intended to hold a signing ceremony on February 28, but the summit ended without a signed agreement. North Korea immediately resumed rebuilding its long-range rockets at its Sohae Launch Facility.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: It was the second meeting between leaders of the North Korea and United States. It had been planned since the previous September, and its location and date was announced during President Trump's third State of the Union on February 5, 2019.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: After the summit, President Trump said he believed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's denial of personal knowledge about Otto Warmbier's treatment in North Korean custody. Trump contended that it was not to Kim's benefit to allow such abuse.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On June 26, 2019, it was announced that talks were underway to hold a third US-North Korean summit. President Trump previously contended in April 2019 that a third summit "would be good," On June 12, 2019, President Trump announced that he received a letter from Kim Jong-un which he described as "beautiful". On June 22, 2019, an undated photo was also released by the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un reading a letter from President Trump. Kim described the letter as "excellent" and described President Trump as the "supreme leader" of the United States. However, Kim later denied that talks were still being held between North Korea and the United States, and relations still remained tense between North Korea and the US State Department.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On June 30, 2019, President Trump met with Kim along with Moon Jae-in at the DMZ and briefly crossed the border line into the North Korean side of the DMZ, making him the first sitting U.S. president to enter North Korea; former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had previously visited North Korea after they left office. After crossing into North Korea, Trump and Kim, who stated through an interpreter "it's good to see you again", "I never expected to meet you at this place" and "you are the first US President to cross the border," met and shook hands. Both men then briefly crossed the larger border line before crossing into South Korea. During their meeting, President Trump also invited Kim to the White House, although later acknowledged that it probably wouldn't happen in the near term.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: It was also revealed that Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner had visited North Korea to meet with Kim beforehand and acted as lead American diplomats during the summit. Footage of Ivanka meeting with Kim was broadcast by the North Korean media. Ivanka also described her visit to North Korea as "surreal."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On September 10, 2019, Trump said he sacked National Security Adviser John Bolton as he strongly disagreed with Bolton's suggestion about applying Libyan model to North Korea. However, Bolton himself said he was not sacked but resigned. Trump selected hostage negotiator with DPRK Robert C. O'Brien as the new National Security Adviser.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Talks in Stockholm began on 5 October 2019 between US and North Korean negotiating teams. After one day, the North Koreans said that talks had broken down, blaming US inflexibility. The US team, however, said discussions were good, and would be resumed in two weeks. On October 7, 2019, North Korea's chief negotiator Kim Myong Gil cautioned about a "terrible" event that might take place if the U.S. did not offer a better deal to Pyongyang. He said that the ball is currently in U.S.’ court to resume dialogue.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In December 2019, US Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft said during a meeting of the UN Security Council that was called at her request that the US was prepared to take "simultaneous steps" with North Korea to achieve peace. But she also warned the North Koreans against conducting further missile tests.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In April 2020, U.S. Rewards for Justice Program offered $5 million for information leading to identify North Korean hackers threatening the United States.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: As of May 2020, North Korea has shown no indication that it is willing to unilaterally denuclearize as per U.S. intentions.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On June 12, 2020, the two-year anniversary of the Singapore summit, the North Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs released a press statement that the Trump administration efforts in the past two years were for political achievements without returns for North Korea and "Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise." North Korea subsequently cut communications with South Korea, demolished the four-story joint-liaison office building it shared with South Korea on June 17, and ceased efforts for diplomatic relations with the United States.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In an article written in the Hankyoreh daily newspaper in July 2020, Moon Chung-in, Special Advisor to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, argues that the hardline approach of John Bolton and other US figures concerning North Korean disarmament will lead to eventual war, not peace. He believes a more effective approach towards North Korean denuclearization is for the two Koreas to work together economically until both sides depend on each other enough to be invested in each other's national security.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In early 2021, the United States under the presidency of Joe Biden attempted a new outreach to North Korea, to which they were unresponsive. On 18 March, the Korean Central News Agency put out a statement by North Korean first vice minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son-hui acknowledging attempts at contact, and stating that North Korea would continue to ignore such attempts in the future. In it, she also criticized the United States for continuing military drills and maintaining sanctions against North Korea, and said that "no dialogue would be possible until the United States rolled back its hostile policy toward North Korea and both parties were able to exchange words on an equal basis."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In October 2021, Kim Jong Un said the United States was a continuing source of hostility, and he made a public appearance in a showroom of advanced weapons. These weapons included one that Kim identified as a newly tested type of hypersonic missile that is difficult to shoot down; a new type of low-flying cruise missile; and what may be the world's largest, but still untested, intercontinental ballistic missile.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On February 26, 2022, North Korea's foreign ministry stated that the US measures that "disregard" Russian security concerns are a "root cause of the Ukrainian crisis," in its first remark since Moscow launched a military invasion of its neighbour days earlier.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On March 5, 2022, North Korea conducted its ninth weapons test of the year, shooting a suspected ballistic missile into the sea east of the Korean peninsula, just days before the presidential election in South Korea. The launch was met with condemnation from the US, South Korea, and Japan, which worry the North is planning a major nuclear test in the coming months.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On March 11, 2022, after North Korea launched elements of its largest intercontinental ballistic missile in two recent tests, the US Treasury Department imposed fresh penalties.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In May 2022, the United States and South Korea announced expanded military exercises, which according to South Korean military officials would involve field training for the first time since 2018. A North Korean foreign ministry-run think tank stated that these exercises will create "unprecedented instability security-wise."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: From January 1958 through 1991, the United States held nuclear weapons due to its diplomatic and military influence in South Korea for possible use against North Korea, peaking in number at some 950 warheads in 1967. Reports establish that these have since been removed but it has never confirmed by any independent 3rd party organization such as IAEA. The U.S. still maintains "the continuation of the extended deterrent offered by the U.S. nuclear umbrella".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In September 1956, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Radford told the U.S. Department of State that the U.S. military intention was to introduce atomic weapons into South Korea. In January 1957, the U.S. National Security Council began consideration of this proposal upon President Eisenhower's instruction, and then agreed to this. However, paragraph 13(d) of the Korean Armistice Agreement mandated that both sides should not introduce new types of weapons into South Korea, so preventing the introduction of nuclear weapons and missiles. The U.S. decided to unilaterally abrogate paragraph 13(d), breaking the Armistice Agreement, despite concerns by United Nations allies. At a June 21, 1957 meeting of the Military Armistice Commission the U.S. informed the North Korean representatives that the U.N. Command no longer considered itself bound by paragraph 13(d) of the armistice. In August 1957, NSC 5702/2 permitting the deployment of nuclear weapons in Korea was approved. In January 1958 nuclear armed Honest John missiles and 280mm atomic cannons were deployed to South Korea, a year later adding nuclear-armed Matador cruise missiles with the range to reach China and the Soviet Union.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea denounced the abrogation of paragraph 13(d) as an attempt to wreck the armistice agreement and turn Korea into a U.S. atomic warfare zone. At the U.N. General Assembly in November 1957, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia condemned the decision of the United Nations Command to introduce nuclear weapons into Korea.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea responded militarily by digging massive underground fortifications, and forwarded deployment of its conventional forces for a possible counterattack against the United States forces stationed in South Korea. In 1963, North Korea asked the Soviet Union for help in developing nuclear weapons, but was refused. However, instead the Soviet Union agreed to help North Korea develop a peaceful nuclear energy program, including the training of nuclear scientists. China later, after its nuclear tests, similarly rejected North Korean requests for help with developing nuclear weapons.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapons state in 1985, and North and South Korean talks begun in 1990 resulted in a 1992 Denuclearization Statement. However, US intelligence photos in early 1993 led the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to demand special inspection of the North's nuclear facilities, which prompted Kim Il Sung's March 1993 announcement of North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT. UN Security Council resolution 825 from May 11, 1993, urged North Korea to cooperate with the IAEA and to implement the 1992 North-South Denuclearization Statement. It also urged all member states to encourage North Korea to respond positively to this resolution and to facilitate a solution of the nuclear issue.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: U.S.–North Korea talks began in June 1993 but with lack of progress in developing and implementing an agreement, North Koreans unloaded the core of a major nuclear reactor, which could have provided enough raw material for several nuclear weapons. With tensions high, Kim Il Sung invited former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to act as an intermediary. Carter accepted the invitation, but could only act as a private citizen not a government representative. Carter managed to bring the two states to the negotiating table, with Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Robert Gallucci representing the United States and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju representing his country.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Historians Paul Lauren, Gordon Craig, and Alexander George point out that the agreement suffered from a number of weaknesses. There was no specific schedule made for reciprocal moves, and the United States was granted a very long time to fulfill its obligations to replace the dangerous graphite-moderated reactors with LWRs. Furthermore, no organization was chosen "to monitor compliance, to supervise implementation ... or to make mid-course adjustments that might become necessary." Finally, other interested nations, like South Korea, China, and Japan, were not included in the negotiations.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Soon after the agreement was signed, U.S. Congress control changed to the Republican Party, who did not support the agreement. Some Republican Senators were strongly against the agreement, regarding it as appeasement.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In accordance with the terms of the Agreed Framework, North Korea decided to freeze its nuclear program and cooperate with United States and IAEA verification efforts, and in January 1995 the U.S. eased economic sanctions against North Korea. Initially U.S. Department of Defense emergency funds not under Congress control were used to fund the transitional oil supplies under the agreement, together with international funding. From 1996 Congress provided funding, though not always sufficient amounts. Consequently, some of the agreed transitional oil supplies were delivered late. KEDO's first director, Stephen W. Bosworth, later commented "The Agreed Framework was a political orphan within two weeks after its signature".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In January 1995, as called for in the Agreed Framework, the United States and North Korea negotiated a method to safely store the spent fuel from the five-megawatt reactor. According to this method, U.S. and North Korean operators would work together to can the spent fuel and store the canisters in the spent fuel pond. Actual canning began in 1995. In April 2000, canning of all accessible spent fuel rods and rod fragments was declared complete.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea agreed to accept the decisions of KEDO, the financier and supplier of the LWRs, with respect to provision of the reactors. International funding for the LWR replacement power plants had to be sought. Formal invitations to bid were not issued until 1998, by which time the delays were infuriating North Korea. In May 1998, North Korea warned it would restart nuclear research if the U.S. could not install the LWR. KEDO subsequently identified Sinpo as the LWR project site, and a formal ground breaking was held on the site on August 21, 1997. In December 1999, KEDO and the (South) Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) signed the Turnkey Contract (TKC), permitting full scale construction of the LWRs, but significant spending on the LWR project did not commence until 2000.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In 1998, the United States identified an underground site in Kumchang-ni, which it suspected of being nuclear-related following a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment. In March 1999, North Korea agreed to grant the U.S. "satisfactory access" to the site. The U.S. inspection in spring 1999 showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency assessment was wrong. In October 2000, during Special Envoy Jo Myong Rok's visit to Washington, and after two visits to the site by teams of U.S. experts, the U.S. announced in a Joint Communiqué with North Korea that U.S. concerns about the site had been resolved.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: As called for in Dr. William Perry's official review of U.S. policy toward North Korea, the United States and North Korea launched new negotiations in May 2000 called the "Agreed Framework Implementation Talks".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: George W. Bush announced his opposition to the Agreed Framework during his candidacy in the 2000 United States presidential election. Following his inauguration in January 2001, the new administration began a review of its policy toward North Korea. At the conclusion of that review, the administration announced on June 6, 2001, that it had decided to pursue continued dialogue with North Korea on the full range of issues of concern to the administration, including North Korea's conventional force posture, missile development and export programs, human rights practices, and humanitarian issues. As of that time, the Light Water Reactors (LWRs) promised in the Agreed Framework had not been delivered. The two reactors were finally supplied by the Swiss-based company ABB in 2000 in a $200 million deal. The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Korea's east coast. Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, was on the board of ABB when it won this deal, but a Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said that Rumsfeld does not recall it being brought before the board at any time. Construction of these reactors was eventually suspended.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In 2002 the US Government announced that it would release $95m to North Korea as part of the Agreed Framework. In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework's requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors. President Bush argued that the decision was "vital to the national security interests of the United States".


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In 2002, the administration asserted that North Korea was developing a uranium enrichment program for nuclear weapons purposes. American-DPRK tensions mounted when Bush categorized North Korea as part of the "Axis of Evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: When U.S.-DPRK direct dialogue resumed in October 2002, this uranium-enrichment program was high on the U.S. agenda. North Korean officials acknowledged to a U.S. delegation, headed by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James A. Kelly, the existence of the uranium enrichment program. Such a program violated North Korea's obligations under the NPT and its commitments in the 1992 North-South Denuclearization Declaration and the 1994 Agreed Framework. The U.S. side stated that North Korea would have to terminate the program before any further progress could be made in U.S.-DPRK relations. The U.S. side also claimed that if this program was verifiably eliminated, the U.S. would be prepared to work with DPRK on the development of a fundamentally new relationship. In November 2002, the members of KEDO agreed to suspend heavy fuel oil shipments to North Korea pending a resolution of the nuclear dispute.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Following Kim Jong-il's death on December 17, 2011, his son Kim Jong-un inherited the regime. The latter announced on February 29, 2012, that North Korea will freeze nuclear tests, long-range missile launches, and uranium enrichment at its Yongbyon plant. In addition, the new leader invited international nuclear inspectors who were ejected in 2009. The Obama administration responded by offering 240,000 tonnes of food, chiefly in the form of biscuits. This indicated a softening of the west regarding North Korea's insistence that food aid must comprise grains.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In late 2002 and early 2003, North Korea terminated the freeze on its existing plutonium-based nuclear facilities, expelled IAEA inspectors and removed seals and monitoring equipment, quit the NPT, and resumed reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for weapons purposes. North Korea subsequently announced that it was taking these steps to provide itself with a deterrent force in the face of U.S. threats and the U.S.'s "hostile policy". Beginning in mid-2003, the North repeatedly claimed to have completed reprocessing of the spent fuel rods previously frozen at Yongbyon and lain cooperation with North Korea's neighbors, who have also expressed concern over the threat to regional stability and security they believe it poses. The Bush Administration's stated goal is the complete, verifiable, and irreversible elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. North Korea's neighbors have joined the United States in supporting a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula. U.S. actions, however, had been much more hostile to normalized relations with North Korea, and the administration continued to suggest regime change as a primary goal. The Bush Administration had consistently resisted two-party talks with the DPRK. A September 2005 agreement took place only after the Chinese government threatened to publicly accuse the U.S. of refusal to engage in negotiations.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In early 2003, multilateral talks were proposed to be held among the six most relevant parties aimed at reaching a settlement through diplomatic means. North Korea initially opposed such a process, maintaining that the nuclear dispute was purely a bilateral matter between themselves and the United States. However, under pressure from its neighbors and with the active involvement of China, North Korea agreed to preliminary three-party talks with China and the United States in Beijing in April 2003.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: After this meeting, North Korea then agreed to six-party talks, between the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia. The first round of talks were held in August 2003, with subsequent rounds being held at regular intervals. After 13 months of freezing talks between the fifth round's first and second phases, North Korea returned to the talks. This behavior was in retaliation for the US's action of freezing offshore North Korean bank accounts in Macau. In early 2005, the US government told its East Asia allies that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. This backfired when Asian allies discovered that the US government had concealed the involvement of Pakistan; a key U.S. ally was the weapon's middle man. In March 2005, Condoleezza Rice had to travel to East Asia in an effort to repair the damage.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: The third phase of the fifth round of talks held on February 8, 2007, concluded with a landmark action-for-action agreement. Goodwill by all sides has led to the US unfreezing all of the North Korean assets on March 19, 2007.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: As of October 11, 2008, North Korea has agreed to all U.S. nuclear inspection demands, and the Bush Administration responded by removing North Korea from a terrorism blacklist despite the American government threatening to end negotiations.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Starting in late August 2008, North Korea allegedly resumed its nuclear activities at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, apparently moving equipment and nuclear supplies back onto the facility grounds. Since then, North Korean activity at the facility has steadily increased, with North Korea threatening Yongbyon's possible reactivation.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: North Korea has argued that the U.S. has failed to fulfill its promises in the disarmament process, having not removed the country from its "State Sponsors of Terrorism" list or sent the promised aid to the country. The U.S. has recently stated that it will not remove the North from its list until it has affirmed that North Korea will push forward with its continued disarmament. North Korea has since barred IAEA inspectors from the Yongbyon site, and the South has claimed that the North is pushing for the manufacture of a nuclear warhead. The North has recently conducted tests on short-range missiles. The U.S. is encouraging the resumption of six-party talks.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On October 11, 2008, the U.S. and North Korea secured an agreement in which North Korea agreed to resume disarmament of its nuclear program and once again allowed inspectors to conduct forensic tests of its available nuclear materials. The North also agreed to provide full details on its long-rumored uranium program. These latest developments culminated in North Korea's long-awaited removal from America's "State Sponsors of Terrorism" list on the same day.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that a test occurred. Tony Snow, President George W. Bush's White House Press Secretary, said that the United States would go to the United Nations to determine "what our next steps should be in response to this very serious step." On Monday, October 9, 2006, President Bush stated in a televised speech that such a claim of a test is a "provocative act" and the U.S. condemns such acts. President Bush stated that the United States is "committed to diplomacy" but will "continue to protect America and America's interests." The Six-Party Talks, below, resulted.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On May 25, 2009, American-North Korean relations further deteriorated when North Korea conducted yet another nuclear test, the first since the 2006 test. The test was once again conducted underground and exploded with a yield comparable to the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The United States reacted favorably to China and Russia's reactions, who condemned North Korea's actions even though they are both strong allies of North Korea. The U.S., along with all other members of the stalled six-party talks, strongly condemned the test and said that North Korea would "pay a price for its actions." The U.S. also strongly condemned the subsequent series of short-range missile tests that have followed the detonation.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On January 24, 2013, officials in North Korea openly stated that they intended to plan out a third nuclear test. A written statement from the National Defence Commission of North Korea stated "a nuclear test of higher level will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people." The United States intelligence community believes that, as of January 2013, North Korea has the capability to target Hawaii with its current technology and resources, and could reach the contiguous United States within three years. The White House has declared the Korean statement as "needlessly provocative" and that "further provocations would only increase Pyongyang's isolation." Analysis of satellite photos done by the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site indicates that North Korea was readying for nuclear tests at the same time it issued the threat. Later statements by North Korea included direct threats against South Korea as well, stating that North Korea "will take strong physical counter-measures against" the South in response to UN sanctions against the North. A Gallup poll that was done in 2013 revealed that, "Americans (55%) said the U.S. should defend South Korea if it was attacked by its northern neighbor, while about a third (34%) said it should not."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: On January 6, 2016, North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test. North Korean officials also announced that North Korean scientists have miniaturized nuclear weapons.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: In February 2016, President Barack Obama enacted the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, which passed the House of Representatives and the Senate with nearly unanimous support. The "Inquisitr" reported: "In February, President Obama hit North Korea with a round of congressionally approved sanctions that severely limits the growth of the North Korean economy, a move that China criticized, stating that the sanctions could cripple North Korea's economy."


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: During Donald Trump's presidency, he and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have exchanged insults on numerous occasions. Trump often took to Twitter to talk about Kim Jong-un and the current North Korea situation. The situation had seriously elevated, worrying many Americans. A portion of Americans (22%) thought that North Korea posed a serious threat to the United States, while 60% of Americans thought it was no threat at all. Many Americans have shown doubt and sometimes outright opposition to then-President Trump during the crisis. A plurality of Americans believed Trump lacked the responsibility to handle the North Korea situation, and many had more trust in U.S. military leaders than they did in Trump. Still, many Americans seemed to be unsure on who they are more comfortable with handling the situation. Americans are still hesitant of military action, as a majority of Americans still oppose preemptive military intervention. Top people within the military and government see this situation escalating to military action, while some still have hope that peace is possible. Still, the U.S. continues to impose sanctions on North Korea.


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: How much do you trust Donald Trump to act responsibly in handling the situation involving North Korea – a great deal, a good amount, just some or not at all?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: How much do you trust North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to act responsibly in handling the situation involving North Korea – a great deal, a good amount, just some or not at all?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: How much do you trust U.S. military leaders to act responsibly in handling the situation involving North Korea – a great deal, a good amount, just some or not at all?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: To try to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, would you support or oppose the U.S. offering North Korea financial incentives such as aid money, or more trade?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: To try to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, would you support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: To try to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, would you support or oppose the U.S. agreeing to stop conducting U.S. military exercises with South Korea?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: In general, should the U.S. (launch a military strike on North Korea first, before it can attack America or U.S. allies) or should the U.S. (only attack North Korea if it attacks America or U.S. allies)?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: Q: If the U.S. launched a military strike on North Korea first, do you think it would or would not risk starting a larger war in East Asia? IF RISK: Do you think that would be a major risk; or a risk, but not major?


title: North Korea–United States relations

text: However, although Americans are inclined to defensive and or pacifist positions against North Korea, the Global Attitudes Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in the spring of 2017 suggests how a majority of Americans (64%) expects U.S. military intervention if one of its Pacific allies (particularly Japan and South Korea) were to come into military conflict with North Korea. In contrast, the survey points to how 30% of Americans are opposed to such interventionism. In both a parallel and comparative perspective, a majority of South Korean and Japanese citizens (91% and 82% respectively) also expect U.S. military intervention if their country was attacked by North Korea.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 188220 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who lived in the United States from 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune "Country Gardens".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racial or anti-Semitic terms.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely in Europe and Australia. He served briefly as a bandsman in the United States Army during the First World War through 1917–18, and took American citizenship in 1918. After his mother's suicide in 1922, he became increasingly involved in educational work. He also experimented with music machines, which he hoped would supersede human interpretation. In the 1930s he set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works, and as a future research archive. As he grew older, he continued to give concerts and to revise and rearrange his own compositions, while writing little new music. After the Second World War, ill health reduced his levels of activity. He considered his career a failure. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger was born on 8 July 1882 in Brighton, south-east of Melbourne. His father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who had emigrated to Australia in 1877, won recognition for his design of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne; His mother Rose Annie Aldridge was the daughter of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge.


title: Percy Grainger

text: John Grainger was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later gained worldwide fame as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. John's claims to have "discovered" her are unfounded, although he may have offered her encouragement. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose learned after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before coming to Australia. His promiscuity placed deep strains upon the relationship. Rose discovered shortly after Percy's birth that she had contracted a form of syphilis from her husband. Despite this, the Graingers stayed together until 1890, when John went to England for medical treatment. After his return to Australia, they lived apart. Rose took over the work of raising Percy, while John pursued his career as chief architect to the Western Australian Department of Public Works. He had some private work, designing Nellie Melba's home, Coombe Cottage, at Coldstream.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Except for three months' formal schooling as a 12-year-old, during which he was bullied and ridiculed by his classmates, Percy was educated at home. Rose, an autodidact with a dominating presence, supervised his music and literature studies and engaged other tutors for languages, art and drama. From his earliest lessons, Percy developed a lifelong fascination with Nordic culture; writing late in life, he said that the Icelandic "Saga of Grettir the Strong" was "the strongest single artistic influence on my life". As well as showing precocious musical talents, he displayed considerable early gifts as an artist, to the extent that his tutors thought his future might lie in art rather than music. At the age of 10 he began studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German-born graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, Melbourne's leading piano teacher. Grainger's first known composition, "A Birthday Gift to Mother", is dated 1893. Pabst arranged Grainger's first public concert appearances, at Melbourne's Masonic Hall in July and September 1894. The boy played works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Scarlatti, and was warmly complimented in the Melbourne press.


title: Percy Grainger

text: After Pabst returned to Europe in the autumn of 1894, Grainger continued his piano studies with Pabst's pupil Adelaide Burkitt, who arranged for his appearances at a series of concerts in October 1894 at Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building. The size of this enormous venue horrified the young pianist; nevertheless, his performance delighted the Melbourne critics, who dubbed him "the flaxen-haired phenomenon who plays like a master". This public acclaim helped Rose to decide that her son should continue his studies at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany, an institution recommended by William Laver, head of piano studies at Melbourne's Conservatorium of music. Financial assistance was secured through a fund-raising benefit concert in Melbourne and a final recital in Adelaide, after which mother and son left Australia for Europe on 29 May 1895. Although Grainger never returned permanently to Australia, he maintained considerable patriotic feelings for his native land, and was proud of his Australian heritage.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In Frankfurt, Rose established herself as a teacher of English; her earnings were supplemented by contributions from John Grainger, who had settled in Perth. The Hoch Conservatory's reputation for piano teaching had been enhanced by the tenure, until 1892, of Clara Schumann as head of piano studies. Grainger's piano tutor was James Kwast, who developed his young pupil's skills to the extent that, within a year, Grainger was being lauded as a prodigy. Grainger had difficult relations with his original composition teacher, Iwan Knorr; he withdrew from Knorr's classes to study composition privately with Karl Klimsch, an amateur composer and folk-music enthusiast, whom he would later honour as "my only composition teacher".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Together with a group of slightly older British students – Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Cyril Scott and Norman O'Neill, all of whom became his friends – Grainger helped form the Frankfurt Group. Their long-term objective was to rescue British and Scandinavian music from what they considered the negative influences of central European music. Encouraged by Klimsch, Grainger turned away from composing classical pastiches reminiscent of Handel, Haydn and Mozart, and developed a personal compositional style, the originality and maturity of which quickly impressed and astonished his friends. At this time Grainger discovered the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and began setting it to music; according to Scott, "No poet and composer have been so suitably wedded since Heine and Schumann."


title: Percy Grainger

text: After accompanying her son on an extended European tour in the summer of 1900, Rose, whose health had been poor for some time, suffered a nervous collapse and could no longer work. To replace lost income, Grainger began giving piano lessons and public performances; his first solo recital was in Frankfurt on 6 December 1900. Meanwhile, he continued his studies with Kwast, and increased his repertoire until he was confident he could support himself and his mother as a concert pianist. Having chosen London as his future base, in May 1901 Grainger abandoned his studies. With Rose, he left Frankfurt for the UK.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Before leaving Frankfurt, Grainger had fallen in love with Kwast's daughter Mimi. In an autobiographical essay dated 1947, he says that he was "already sex-crazy" at this time, when he was 19. John Bird, Grainger's biographer, records that during his Frankfurt years, Grainger began to develop sexual appetites that were "distinctly abnormal"; by the age of 16 he had started to experiment in flagellation and other sado-masochistic practices, which he continued to pursue through most of his adult life. Bird surmises that Grainger's fascination with themes of punishment and pain derived from the harsh discipline to which Rose had subjected him as a child.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In London, Grainger's charm, good looks and talent (with some assistance from the local Australian community) ensured that he was quickly taken up as a pianist by wealthy patrons. He was soon performing in concerts in private homes. "The Times" critic reported after one such appearance that Grainger's playing "revealed rare intelligence and a good deal of artistic insight". In 1902 he was presented by the socialite Lillith Lowrey to Queen Alexandra, who thereafter frequently attended his London recitals. Lowrey, 20 years Grainger's senior, traded patronage and contacts for sexual favours – he termed the relationship a "love-serve job". She was the first woman with whom he had sex; he later wrote of this initial encounter that he had experienced "an overpowering landslide" of feeling, and that "I thought I was about to die. If I remember correctly, I only experienced fear of death. I don't think that any joy entered into it".


title: Percy Grainger

text: In February 1902 Grainger made his first appearance as a piano soloist with an orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra. In October of that year he toured Britain in a concert party with Adelina Patti, the Italian-born opera singer. Patti was greatly taken by the young pianist and prophesied a glorious career for him. The following year he met the German-Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni. Initially the two men were on cordial terms (Busoni offered to give Grainger lessons free of charge) and, as a result, Grainger spent part of the 1903 summer in Berlin as Busoni's pupil. However, the visit was not a success; as Bird notes, Busoni had expected "a willing slave and adoring disciple", a role Grainger was not willing to fulfil. Grainger returned to London in July 1903; almost immediately he departed with Rose on a 10-month tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as a member of a party organised by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Before going to London Grainger had composed numerous Kipling settings, and his first mature orchestral pieces. In London, when he found time he continued to compose; a letter to Balfour Gardiner dated 21 July 1901 indicates that he was working on his "Marching Song of Democracy" (a Walt Whitman setting), and had made good progress with the experimental works "Train Music" and "Charging Irishrey". In his early London years he also composed "Hill Song Number 1" (1902), an instrumental piece much admired by Busoni.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1905, inspired by a lecture given by the pioneer folk-song historian Lucy Broadwood, Grainger began to collect original folk songs. Starting at Brigg in Lincolnshire, over the next five years he gathered and transcribed more than 300 songs from all over the country, including much material that had never been written down before. From 1906 Grainger used a phonograph, one of the first collectors to do so, and by this means he assembled more than 200 Edison cylinder recordings of native folk singers. These activities coincided with what Bird calls "the halcyon days of the 'First English Folksong Revival'".


title: Percy Grainger

text: As his stature in the music world increased, Grainger became acquainted with many of its leading figures, including Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Richard Strauss and Debussy. In 1907 he met Frederick Delius, with whom he achieved an immediate rapport – the two musicians had similar ideas about composition and harmony, and shared a dislike for the classical German masters. Both were inspired by folk music; Grainger gave Delius his setting of the folk song "Brigg Fair", which the older composer developed into his well-known orchestral rhapsody, dedicated to Grainger. The two remained close friends until Delius's death in 1934.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger first met Edvard Grieg at the home of the London financier Sir Edgar Speyer, in May 1906. As a student, Grainger had learned to appreciate the Norwegian's harmonic originality, and by 1906 had several Grieg pieces in his concert repertoire, including the piano concerto. Grieg was greatly impressed with Grainger's playing, and wrote: "I have written Norwegian Peasant Dances that no one in my country can play, and here comes this Australian who plays them as they ought to be played! He is a genius that we Scandinavians cannot do other than love." During 1906–07 the two maintained a mutually complimentary correspondence, which culminated in Grainger's ten-day visit in July 1907 to the composer's Norwegian home, "Troldhaugen" near Bergen. Here the two spent much time revising and rehearsing the piano concerto in preparation for that year's Leeds Festival. Plans for a long-term working relationship were ended by Grieg's sudden death in September 1907; nevertheless, this relatively brief acquaintance had a considerable impact on Grainger, and he championed Grieg's music for the rest of his life.


title: Percy Grainger

text: After fulfilling a hectic schedule of concert engagements in Britain and continental Europe, in August 1908 Grainger accompanied Ada Crossley on a second Australasian tour, during which he added several cylinders of Maori and Polynesian music to his collection of recordings. He had resolved to establish himself as a top-ranking pianist before promoting himself as a composer, though he continued to compose both original works and folk-song settings. Some of his most successful and most characteristic pieces, such as "Mock Morris", "Handel in the Strand", "Shepherd's Hey" and "Molly on the Shore" date from this period. In 1908 he obtained the tune of "Country Gardens" from the folk music specialist Cecil Sharp, though he did not fashion it into a performable piece for another ten years.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1911 Grainger finally felt confident enough of his standing as a pianist to begin large-scale publishing of his compositions. At the same time, he adopted the professional name of "Percy Aldridge Grainger" for his published compositions and concert appearances. In a series of concerts arranged by Balfour Gardiner at London's Queen's Hall in March 1912, five of Grainger's works were performed to great public acclaim; the band of thirty guitars and mandolins for the performance of "Fathers and Daughters" created a particular impression. On 21 May 1912 Grainger presented the first concert devoted entirely to his own compositions, at the Aeolian Hall, London; the concert was, he reported, "a sensational success". A similarly enthusiastic reception was given to Grainger's music at a second series of Gardiner concerts the following year.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1905 Grainger began a close friendship with Karen Holten, a Danish music student who had been recommended to him as a piano pupil. She became an important confidante; the relationship persisted for eight years, largely through correspondence. After her marriage in 1916, she and Grainger continued to correspond and occasionally met until her death in 1953. Grainger was briefly engaged in 1913 to another pupil, Margot Harrison, but the relationship foundered through a mixture of Rose's over-possessiveness and Grainger's indecision.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In April 1914 Grainger gave his first performance of Delius's piano concerto, at a music festival in Torquay. Thomas Beecham, who was one of the festival's guest conductors, reported to Delius that "Percy was good in the "forte" passages, but made far too much noise in the quieter bits". Grainger was receiving increasing recognition as a composer; leading musicians and orchestras were adding his works to their repertoires. His decision to leave England for America in early September 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, damaged his reputation among his patriotically minded British friends. Grainger wrote that the reason for this abrupt departure was "to give mother a change" – she had been unwell for years. However, according to Bird, Grainger often explained that his reason for leaving London was that "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and to have laid himself open to the possibility of being killed would have rendered his goal unattainable". "The Daily Telegraph" music critic Robin Legge accused him of cowardice, and told him not to expect a welcome in England after the war, words that hurt Grainger deeply.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger's first American tour began on 11 February 1915 with a recital at New York's Aeolian Hall. He played works by Bach, Brahms, Handel and Chopin alongside two of his own compositions: "Colonial Song" and "Mock Morris". In July 1915 Grainger formally registered his intention to apply for US citizenship. Over the next two years his engagements included concerts with Melba in Boston and Pittsburgh and a command performance before President Woodrow Wilson. In addition to his concert performances, Grainger secured a contract with Duo-Art for making pianola rolls, and signed a recording contract with Columbia Records.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In April 1917 Grainger received news of his father's death in Perth. On 9 June 1917, after America's entry into the war, he enlisted as a bandsman in the US Army with the military band of the 15th Coast Artillery in Fort Hamilton. He had joined as a saxophonist, though he records learning the oboe: "I long for the time when I can blow my oboe well enough to play in the band". In his 18 months' service, Grainger made frequent appearances as a pianist at Red Cross and Liberty bond concerts. As a regular encore he began to play a piano setting of the tune "Country Gardens". The piece became instantly popular; sheet music sales quickly broke many publishing records. The work was to become synonymous with Grainger's name through the rest of his life, though he came in time to detest it. On 3 June 1918 he became a naturalised American citizen.


title: Percy Grainger

text: After leaving the army in January 1919, Grainger refused an offer to become conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and resumed his career as a concert pianist. He was soon performing around 120 concerts a year, generally to great critical acclaim, and in April 1921 reached a wider audience by performing in a cinema, New York's Capitol Theatre. Grainger commented that the huge audiences at these cinema concerts often showed greater appreciation for his playing than those at established concert venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Aeolian. In the summer of 1919 he led a course in piano technique at Chicago Musical College, the first of many such educational duties he would undertake in later years.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Amid his concert and teaching duties, Grainger found time to re-score many of his works (a habit he continued throughout his life) and also to compose new pieces: his "Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away", and the orchestral version of "The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart" both originated in this period. He also began to develop the technique of elastic scoring, a form of flexible orchestration which enabled works to be performed by different numbers of players and instrument types, from small chamber groups up to full orchestral strength.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In April 1921 Grainger moved with his mother to a large house in White Plains, New York in what is now known as the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. This was his home for the remainder of his life. From the beginning of 1922 Rose's health deteriorated sharply; she was suffering from delusions and nightmares, and became fearful that her illness would harm her son's career. Because of the closeness of the bond between the two, there had long been rumours that their relationship was incestuous; in April 1922 Rose was directly challenged over this issue by her friend Lotta Hough. From her last letter to Grainger, dated 29 April, it seems that this confrontation unbalanced Rose; on 30 April, while Grainger was touring on the West Coast, she jumped to her death from an office window on the 18th floor of the Aeolian Building in New York City. The letter, which began "I am out of my mind and cannot think properly", asked Grainger if he had ever spoken to Lotta of "improper love". She signed the letter: "Your poor insane mother".


title: Percy Grainger

text: After Rose's funeral, Grainger sought solace in a return to work. In autumn 1922 he left for a year-long trip to Europe, where he collected and recorded Danish folk songs before a concert tour that took him to Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and England. In Norway he stayed with Delius at the latter's summer home. Delius was by now almost blind; Grainger helped fulfill his friend's wish to see a Norwegian sunset by carrying him (with some assistance) to the top of a nearby mountain peak. He returned to White Plains in August 1923.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Although now less committed to a year-round schedule of concerts, Grainger remained a very popular performer. His eccentricities, often exaggerated for publicity reasons, reportedly included running into auditoriums in gym kit and leaping over the piano to create a grand entrance. In 1924, Grainger became a vegetarian, although he hated vegetables; his diet comprised primarily dairy, pastry, fruit, and nuts.


title: Percy Grainger

text: While he continued to revise and re-score his compositions, he increasingly worked on arrangements of music by other composers, in particular works by Bach, Brahms, Fauré and Delius. Away from music, Grainger's preoccupation with Nordic culture led him to develop a form of English which, he maintained, reflected the character of the language before the Norman conquest. Words of Norman or Latin origin were replaced by supposedly Nordic word-forms, such as "blend-band" (orchestra), "forthspeaker" (lecturer) and "writ-piece" (article). He called this "blue-eyed" English. His convictions of Nordic superiority eventually led Grainger, in letters to friends, to express his views in crudely racial and anti-Semitic terms; the music historian David Pear describes Grainger as, "at root, a racial bigot of no small order".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger made further trips to Europe in 1925 and 1927, collecting more Danish folk music with the aid of the octogenarian ethnologist Evald Tang Kristensen; this work formed the basis of the "Suite on Danish Folksongs" of 1928–30. He also visited Australia and New Zealand, in 1924 and again in 1926. In November 1926, while returning to America, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist with whom he developed a close friendship. On arrival in America the pair separated, but were reunited in England the following autumn after Grainger's final folk-song expedition to Denmark. In October 1927 the couple agreed to marry. Ella had a daughter, Elsie, who had been born out of wedlock in 1909. Grainger always acknowledged her as a family member, and developed a warm personal relationship with her.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Although Bird asserts that before her marriage, Ella knew nothing of Grainger's sado-masochistic interests, in a letter dated 23 April 1928 (four months before the wedding) Grainger writes to her: "As far as my taste goes, blows [with the whip] are most thrilling on breasts, bottom, inner thighs, sexparts." He later adds, "I shall thoroly thoroly understand if you cannot in any way see yr way to follow up this hot wish of mine." The couple were married on 9 August 1928 at the Hollywood Bowl, at the end of a concert which, in honour of the bride, had included the first performance of Grainger's bridal song "To a Nordic Princess".


title: Percy Grainger

text: From the late 1920s and early 1930s Grainger became involved increasingly with educational work in schools and colleges, and in late 1931 accepted a year's appointment for 1932–33 as professor of music at New York University (NYU). In this role he delivered a series of lectures under the heading "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music", which introduced his students to a wide range of ancient and modern works. On 25 October 1932 his lecture was illustrated by Duke Ellington and his band, who appeared in person; Grainger admired Ellington's music, seeing harmonic similarities with Delius. On the whole, however, Grainger did not enjoy his tenure at NYU; he disliked the institutional formality, and found the university generally unreceptive to his ideas. Despite many offers he never accepted another formal academic appointment, and refused all offers of honorary degrees. His New York lectures became the basis for a series of radio talks which he gave for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1934–35; these were later summarised and published as "Music: A Commonsense View of All Types". In 1937 Grainger began an association with the Interlochen National Music Camp, and taught regularly at its summer schools until 1944.


title: Percy Grainger

text: The idea of establishing a Grainger Museum in Australia had first occurred to Grainger in 1932. He began collecting and recovering from friends letters and artefacts, even those demonstrating the most private aspects of his life, such as whips, bloodstained shirts and revealing photographs. In September 1933 he and Ella went to Australia to begin supervising the building work. To finance the project, Grainger embarked on a series of concerts and broadcasts, in which he subjected his audiences to a vast range of the world's music in accordance with his "universalist" view. Controversially, he argued for the superior achievements of Nordic composers over traditionally recognised masters such as Mozart and Beethoven.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Among various new ideas, Grainger introduced his so-called "free-music" theories. He believed that conformity with the traditional rules of set scales, rhythms and harmonic procedures amounted to "absurd goose-stepping", from which music should be set free. He demonstrated two experimental compositions of free music, performed initially by a string quartet and later by the use of electronic theremins. He believed that ideally, free music required non-human performance, and spent much of his later life developing machines to realise this vision.


title: Percy Grainger

text: While the building of the museum proceeded, the Graingers visited England for several months in 1936, during which Grainger made his first BBC broadcast. In this, he conducted "Love Verses from "The Song of Solomon"" in which the tenor soloist was the then unknown Peter Pears. After spending 1937 in America, Grainger returned to Melbourne in 1938 for the official opening of the Museum; among those present at the ceremony was his old piano teacher Adelaide Burkitt. The museum did not open to the general public during Grainger's lifetime, but was available to scholars for research.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In the late 1930s Grainger spent much time arranging his works in settings for wind bands. He wrote "Lincolnshire Posy" for the March 1937 convention of the American Band Masters' Association in Milwaukee, and in 1939, on his last visit to England before the Second World War, he composed "The Duke of Marlborough's Fanfare", giving it the subtitle "British War Mood Grows".


title: Percy Grainger

text: The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 curtailed Grainger's overseas travelling. In the autumn of 1940, alarmed that the war might precipitate an invasion of the United States eastern seaboard, he and Ella moved to Springfield, Missouri, in the centre of the continent. From 1940 Grainger played regularly in charity concerts, especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war in December 1941; the historian Robert Simon calculates that Grainger made a total of 274 charity appearances during the war years, many of them at Army and Air Force camps. In 1942 a collection of his Kipling settings, the "Jungle Book" cycle, was performed in eight cities by the band of the Gustavus Adolphus College from St. Peter, Minnesota.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Exhausted from his wartime concerts routine, Grainger spent much of 1946 on holiday in Europe. He was suffering a sense of career failure; in 1947, when refusing the Chair of Music at Adelaide University, he wrote: "If I were 40 years younger, and not so crushed by defeat in every branch of music I have essayed, I am sure I would have welcomed such a chance". In January 1948 he conducted the premiere of his wind band setting of "The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart", written for the Goldman Band to celebrate the 70th birthday of its founder. Afterward, Grainger denigrated his own music as "commonplace" while praising Darius Milhaud's "Suite Française", with which it had shared the programme.


title: Percy Grainger

text: On 10 August 1948, Grainger appeared at the London Proms, playing the piano part in his "Suite on Danish Folksongs" with the London Symphony Orchestra under Basil Cameron. On 18 September he attended the Last Night of the Proms, standing in the promenade section for Delius's "Brigg Fair". Over the next few years several friends died: Gardiner in 1950, Quilter and Karen Holten in 1953. In October 1953 Grainger was operated on for abdominal cancer; his fight against this disease would last for the rest of his life. He continued to appear at concerts, often performed in church halls and educational establishments rather than major concert venues.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1954, after his last Carnegie Hall appearance, Grainger's long promotion of Grieg's music was recognised when he was awarded the St. Olav Medal by King Haakon of Norway. But he expressed a growing bitterness in his writings and correspondence; in a letter to the Danish composer Herman Sandby, a lifelong friend, he bemoaned the continuing ascendency in music of the "German form", and asserted that "all my compositional life I have been a leader without followers".


title: Percy Grainger

text: After 1950 Grainger virtually ceased to compose. His principal creative activity in the last decade of his life was his work with Burnett Cross, a young physics teacher, on free music machines. The first of these was a relatively simple device controlled by an adapted pianola. Next was the "Estey-reed tone-tool", a form of giant harmonica which, Grainger expectantly informed his stepdaughter Elsie in April 1951, would be ready to play free music "in a few weeks". A third machine, the "Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-pouch", was completed by 1952. Developments in transistor technology encouraged Grainger and Cross to begin work on a fourth, entirely electronic machine, which was incomplete when Grainger died.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In September 1955 Grainger made his final visit to Australia, where he spent nine months organising and arranging exhibits for the Grainger Museum. He refused to consider a "Grainger Festival", as suggested by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, because he felt that his homeland had rejected him and his music. Before leaving Melbourne, he deposited in a bank a parcel that contained an essay and photographs related to his sex life, not to be opened until 10 years after his death.


title: Percy Grainger

text: By 1957 Grainger's physical health had markedly declined, as had his powers of concentration. Nevertheless, he continued to visit Britain regularly; in May of that year he made his only television appearance, in a BBC "Concert Hour" programme when he played "Handel in the Strand" on the piano. Back home, after further surgery he recovered sufficiently to undertake a modest winter concerts season. On his 1958 visit to England he met Benjamin Britten, the two having previously maintained a mutually complimentary correspondence. He agreed to visit Britten's Aldeburgh Festival in 1959, but was prevented by illness. Sensing that death was drawing near, he made a new will, bequeathing his skeleton "for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum". This wish was not carried out.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Through the winter of 1959–60 Grainger continued to perform his own music, often covering long distances by bus or train; he would not travel by air. On 29 April 1960 he gave his last public concert, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, although by now his illness was affecting his concentration. On this occasion his morning recital went well, but his conducting in the afternoon was, in his own words, "a fiasco". Subsequently confined to his home, he continued to revise his music and arrange that of others; in August he informed Elsie that he was working on an adaptation of one of Cyril Scott's early songs. His last letters, written from hospital in December 1960 and January 1961, record attempts to work, despite failing eyesight and hallucinations: "I have been trying to write score for several days. But I have not succeeded yet."


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger died in the White Plains hospital on 20 February 1961, at the age of 78. His remains were buried in the Aldridge family vault in the West Terrace Cemetery, alongside Rose's ashes. Ella survived him by 18 years; in 1972, aged 83, she married a young archivist, Stewart Manville. She died at White Plains on 17 July 1979.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger's own works fall into two categories: original compositions and folk music arrangements. Besides these, he wrote many settings of other composers' works. Despite his conservatory training, he rebelled against the disciplines of the central European tradition, largely rejecting conventional forms such as symphony, sonata, concerto, and opera. With few exceptions, his original compositions are miniatures, lasting between two and eight minutes. Only a few of his works originated as piano pieces, though in due course almost all of them were, in his phrase, "dished up" in piano versions.


title: Percy Grainger

text: The conductor John Eliot Gardiner describes Grainger as "a true original in terms of orchestration and imaginative instrumentation", whose terseness of expression is reminiscent in style both of the 20th-century Second Viennese School and the Italian madrigalists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Malcolm Gillies, a Grainger scholar, writes of Grainger's style that "you know it is 'Grainger' when you have heard about one second of a piece". The music's most individual characteristic, Gillies argues, is its texture – "the weft of the fabric", according to Grainger. Different textures are defined by Grainger as "smooth", "grained" and "prickly".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger was a musical democrat; he believed that in a performance each player's role should be of equal importance. His elastic scoring technique was developed to enable groups of all sizes and combinations of instruments to give effective performances of his music. Experimentation is evident in Grainger's earliest works; irregular rhythms based on rapid changes of time signature were employed in "Love Verses from "The Song of Solomon"" (1899), and "Train Music" (1901), long before Stravinsky adopted this practice. In search of specific sounds Grainger employed unconventional instruments and techniques: solovoxes, theremins, marimbas, musical glasses, harmoniums, banjos, and ukuleles. In one early concert of folk music, Quilter and Scott were conscripted as performers, to whistle various parts. In "Random Round" (1912–14), inspired by the communal music-making he had heard in the Pacific Islands on his second Australasian tour, Grainger introduced an element of chance into performances; individual vocalists and instrumentalists could make random choices from a menu of variations. This experiment in aleatoric composition presaged by many decades the use of similar procedures by avant-garde composers such as Berio and Stockhausen.


title: Percy Grainger

text: The brief "Sea Song" of 1907 was an early attempt by Grainger to write "beatless" music. This work, initially set over 14 irregular bars and occupying about 15 seconds of performing time, was a forerunner of Grainger's free-music experiments of the 1930s. Grainger wrote: "It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying, and yet not be able to execute tonal glides and curves." The idea of tonal freedom, he said, had been in his head since as a boy of eleven or twelve he had observed the wave-movements in the sea. "Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching "free" (non-harmonic) combinations of tones; yet we are unable to take up these beauties… into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony." In a 1941 letter to Scott, Grainger acknowledged that he had failed to produce any large-scale works in the manner of a Bach oratorio, a Wagner opera, or a Brahms symphony, but excused this failure on the grounds that all his works before the mid-1930s had been mere preparations for his free music.


title: Percy Grainger

text: As a student, Grainger had learned to appreciate the music of Grieg and came to regard the Norwegian as a paragon of Nordic beauty and greatness. Grieg in turn described Grainger as a new way forward for English composition, "quite different from Elgar, very original". After a lifetime interpreting Grieg's works, in 1944 Grainger began adapting the Norwegian's E minor Piano Sonata, Op. 7 as a "Grieg-Grainger Symphony", but abandoned the project after writing 16 bars of music. By this time, Grainger acknowledged that he had not fulfilled Grieg's high expectations of him, either as a composer or as a pianist. He also reflected on whether it would have been better, from the point of view of his development as a composer, had he never met the Griegs, "sweet and dear though they were to me".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger was known for his musical experimentation and did not hesitate to exploit the capabilities of the orchestra. One early ambitious work was "The Warriors" (1913), an 18-minute orchestral piece, subtitled "Music to an Imaginary Ballet", which he dedicated to Delius. The music, which mixes elements of other Grainger works with references to Arnold Bax, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss, requires a huge orchestral ensemble alongside at least three pianos – in one performance, Grainger used nineteen pianos with thirty pianists – to be played by "exceptionally strong vigorous players". Critics were undecided as to whether the work was "magnificent", or merely "a magnificent failure".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger considered himself an Australian composer who, he said, wrote music "in the hopes of bringing honor and fame to my native land". However, much of Grainger's working life was spent elsewhere, and the extent to which he influenced Australian music, within his lifetime and thereafter, is debatable. His efforts to educate the Australian musical public in the mid-1930s were indifferently received, and did not attract disciples; writing in 2010, the academic and critic Roger Covell identifies only one significant contemporary Australian musician – the English-born horn player, pianist and conductor David Stanhope – working in the Grainger idiom. In 1956, the suggestion by the composer Keith Humble that Grainger be invited to write music for the opening of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne was rejected by the organisers of the Games. A "Percy Grainger Festival" was held in London in 1970, organised by Australian expatriates Bryan Fairfax and William McKie and supported financially by the Australian government.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger was a life-long atheist and believed he would only endure in the body of work he left behind.


title: Percy Grainger

text: To assist that survival he established the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, which was given little attention before the mid-1970s; it was initially regarded as evidence either of an over-large ego or of extreme eccentricity. Since then the University of Melbourne's commitment to the museum has, Covell asserts, "rescued [it] permanently from academic denigration and belittlement". Its vast quantities of materials have been used to investigate not only Grainger's life and works, but those of contemporaries whom Grainger had known: Grieg, Delius, Scott, and others. The Grainger home at 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York, is now the Percy Grainger Library and is a further repository of memorabilia and historic performance material, open to researchers and visitors.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In Britain, Grainger's main legacy is the revival of interest in folk music. His pioneering work in the recording and setting of folk songs greatly influenced the following generation of English composers; Benjamin Britten acknowledged the Australian as his master in this respect. After hearing a broadcast of some Grainger settings, Britten declared that these "[knocked] all the Vaughan Williams and R. O. Morris arrangements into a cocked hat". In the United States, Grainger left a strong educational legacy through his involvement, over 40 years, with high school, summer school and college students. Likewise, his innovative approaches to instrumentation and scoring have left their mark on modern American band music; Timothy Reynish, a conductor and teacher of band music in Europe and America, has described him as "the only composer of stature to consider military bands the equal, if not the superior, in expressive potential to symphony orchestras." Grainger's attempts to produce "free music" by mechanical and later electronic means, which he considered his most important work, produced no follow-up; they were quickly overtaken and nullified by new technological advances. Covell nevertheless remarks that in this endeavour, Grainger's dogged resourcefulness and ingenious use of available materials demonstrate a particularly Australian aspect of the composer's character – one of which Grainger would have been proud.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1945 Grainger devised an informal ratings system for composers and musical styles, based on criteria that included originality, complexity and beauty. Of forty composers and styles, he ranked himself equal ninth – behind Wagner and


title: Percy Grainger

text: Delius, but well ahead of Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Nevertheless, in his later years he frequently denigrated his career, for example writing to Scott: "I have never been a true musician or true artist". His failure to be recognised as a composer for anything beyond his popular folk-song arrangements was a source of frustration and disappointment; for years after his death the bulk of his output remained largely unperformed. From the 1990s an increase in the number of Grainger recordings has brought a revival of interest in his works, and has enhanced his reputation as a composer. An unsigned tribute published on the "Gramophone" website in February 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Grainger's death opined that "though he would never be put on a pedestal to join the pantheon of immortals, he is unorthodox, original and deserves better than to be dismissed by the more snooty arbiters of musical taste".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Of Grainger the pianist, "The New York Times" critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that his unique style was expressed with "amazing skill, personality and vigor". The early enthusiasm which had greeted his concert appearances became muted in later years, and reviews of his performances during the final ten years of his life were often harsh. However, Britten regarded Grainger's late recording of the Grieg concerto, from a live performance at Aarhus in 1957, as "one of the noblest ever committed to record" – despite the suppression of the disc for many years, because of the proliferation of wrong notes and other faults. Brian Allison from the Grainger Museum, referring to Grainger's early displays of artistic skills, has speculated that had John Grainger's influence not been removed, "Percy Aldridge Grainger may today be remembered as one of Australia's leading painters and designers, who just happened to have a latent talent as a pianist and composer". The ethnomusicologist John Blacking, while acknowledging Grainger's contribution to social and cultural aspects of music, nevertheless writes that if the continental foundation of Grainger's musical education had not been "undermined by dilettantism and the disastrous influence of his mother, I am sure that his ultimate contribution to the world of music would have been much greater".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Between 1908 and 1957 Grainger made numerous recordings, usually as pianist or conductor, of his own and other composers' music. His first recordings, for The Gramophone Company Ltd (later HMV), included the cadenza to Grieg's piano concerto; he did not record a complete version of this work on disc until 1945. Much of his recording work was done between 1917 and 1931, under contract with Columbia. At other times he recorded for Decca (1944–45 and 1957), and Vanguard (1957). Of his own compositions and arrangements, "Country Gardens", "Shepherd's Hey" and "Molly on the Shore" and "Lincolnshire Posy" were recorded most frequently; in recordings of other composers, piano works by Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Grieg, Liszt and Schumann figure most often. Grainger's complete 78 rpm solo piano recordings are now available on compact disc as a CD box set.


title: Percy Grainger

text: During his association with the Duo-Art company between 1915 and 1932, Grainger made around 80 piano rolls of his own and others' music using a wooden robot designed to play a concert grand piano via an array of precision mechanical fingers and feet; replayings of many of these rolls have subsequently been recorded on to compact disc. This reproduction system allowed Grainger to make a posthumous appearance in the Albert Hall, London, during the 1988 last night of the Proms as soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Grieg's Piano Concerto.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Since Grainger's death, recordings of his works have been undertaken by many artists and issued under many different labels. In 1995 Chandos Records began to compile a complete recorded edition of Grainger's original compositions and folk settings. Of 25 anticipated volumes, 19 had been completed as of 2010; these were issued as a CD boxed set in 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. A reissue of this along with 2 extra CDs was released in January 2021 to mark the 60th anniversary of the composer's death.


title: Duchy of Bavaria

text: The Duchy of Bavaria (German: "Herzogtum Bayern") was a frontier region in the southeastern part of the Merovingian kingdom from the sixth through the eighth century. It was settled by Bavarian tribes and ruled by dukes ("duces") under Frankish overlordship. A new duchy was created from this area during the decline of the Carolingian Empire in the late ninth century. It became one of the stem duchies of the East Frankish realm which evolved as the Kingdom of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Duchy of Bavaria

text: During internal struggles of the ruling Ottonian dynasty, the Bavarian territory was considerably diminished by the separation of the newly established Duchy of Carinthia in 976. Between 1070 and 1180 the Holy Roman Emperors were again strongly opposed by Bavaria, especially by the ducal House of Welf. In the final conflict between the Welf and Hohenstaufen dynasties, Duke Henry the Lion was banned and deprived of his Bavarian and Saxon fiefs by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick passed Bavaria over to the House of Wittelsbach, which held it until 1918. The Bavarian dukes were raised to prince-electors during the Thirty Years' War in 1623.