Australian musician and composer Percy Grainger was BOTD in 1882. Born in Melbourne to a wealthy middle-class family, he was raised in artistic milieu including the opera singer Nellie Melba. Largely home-schooled by his mother, he showed an early talent for music and art, and began studying piano aged 10, giving public recitals by his early teens. He and his mother left Australia when he was 13, to take up an offer to study at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. He formed the Frankfurt Group with fellow student (and queer) Roger Quilter with the aim of popularising British and Scandinavian folk music. He and his mother relocated to London in 1901, where he found a patron in socialite Lillith Lowrey, who traded sex for introductions into fashionable London society. He became a popular society pianist, touring widely in Britain and Europe and befriending composers Frederick Delius, Richard Strauss, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Claude Debussy. He formed a particularly close friendship with Finnish composer Edvard Grieg, sharing a love of Nordic culture and white supremacy. “I love him like I love a young woman”, Grieg said after meeting Grainger, though it is unclear whether their friendship was consummated. Grainger became a prominent figure in the British folk music revival of the early 20th century, making Edison cylinder recordings of folk singers and transcribing over 300 traditional songs. In 1914, he toured the United States, serving as a bandsman in the US Army during World War One and giving a number of benefit concerts. He and his mother became US citizens in 1918, settling in White Plains New York while Grainger resumed his career as a concert pianist, and popularised “elastic scoring”, allowing his music compositions to be played by large orchestras and small ensembles. After his mother’s suicide, he married the Swedish artist Ella Ström in 1926, adopting her daughter from an earlier relationship. An enthusiastic masochist, he enjoyed flagellation and other sado-masochistic activities, writing to Ström before their wedding that “blows [with a whip] are most thrilling on breasts, bottoms, inner thighs, sexparts”, though adding “I shall thoroly thoroly understand if you cannot in any way see yr way to follow up this hot wish of mine”. During the 1920s and 1930s, he became a renowned teacher, giving classes at Chicago Musical College and New York University and recording a radio series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. In later years, he established the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, offering his whips, bloodstained shirts and sexually explicit photos of himself as exhibits. (Perhaps wisely, the Museum was not opened to the pubic during his lifetime). During World War Two, he gave over 270 charity concerts at US Army and Air Force camps. Diagnosed with cancer in 1953, he retreated from public performance, but worked with physicists to develop electronic “free music” machines. He died in 1961, aged 78.