For Basil Cameron's music festival at the Torquay Pavilion over April 15 and 16, 1914, Grainger appeared as soloist in the Delius Piano Concerto, conducted by Thomas Beecham (not yet Sir), and on the evening of the 16th conducted his own Colonial Song in an arrangement for two voices, three strings, harp, and orchestra. That summer, at a soirée given by the Princesse de Polignac at her London home, Beecham exclaimed: "My dear Grainger, you have achieved the almost impossible: you have written the worst piece of modern times." Begun in 1905 and completed in 1911, Colonial Song is, indeed, unadulterated schmaltz, proffering Graingeresque heart-on-sleeve lilt, given melodic lift by the newly fashionable example of Puccini. Grainger himself labeled it the first of an unfulfilled series of "Sentimentals." The "Short Program Note" heading the 1921 solo piano version avers that "in this piece the composer has wished to express feelings aroused by thoughts of the scenery and people of his native land, Australia. It is dedicated to the composer's mother." The expansive "Long Program Note," printed beneath, goes to the heart of the matter by making explicit Grainger's intention "to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general...that patiently yearning, inactive sentimental wistfulness that we find so touchingly expressed in much American art; for instance in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and in Stephen C. Foster's adorable songs 'My Old Kentucky Home,' 'Old Folks at Home,' etc."

As a description, the performance indication for the piano solo may hardly be bettered: "Wayward in time. Rich, broad and vibrating, with ample swells." Grainger's warmly captivating tune, couched in lushly melting harmonies, is irresistibly gorgeous and will be heard again in the course of "The Gum-Suckers' March," from Grainger's oddly mixed suite In a Nutshell, composed about the same time. The work seems to have been emblematic, the English musicologist and composer Wilfred Mellers amusingly refers to Colonial Song as "a deliberate attempt to create a quasi-folk song for his native land" and calls it Grainger's "National Anthem for his antipodal home." Though marked optional wherever they are part of the scoring, the wordless voices are, obviously, integral to Grainger's conception and add startlingly to its pathos, no less in the version for piano or the arrangement for violin, cello, and piano, than in the elaborate orchestration with three string soloists and harp (all from 1913). On the other hand, voices are dispensed with in the arrangements for band and piano solo (both 1921) and that for theater orchestra (1928). If the upshot of such earnest underlining is vulgar—and it certainly is—one can do no better than to cite the composer's reaction to Richard Strauss: "It is my theory to like vulgarity—to think well of it, to champion it, to gird myself to always fight on its side...Richard Strauss is a greater, grander genius than Maurice Ravel because he (Strauss) has so amply the vulgarity that Ravel lacks."

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