Editing Frederick Delius (section)

===Influences===
[[File:Jubilee singers image-London Ill-450wide.jpg|thumb|The [[Fisk Jubilee Singers]], portrayed during a European tour in the 1870s]]
After the 1929 London festival ''The Times'' music critic wrote that Delius "belongs to no school, follows no tradition and is like no other composer in the form, content or style of his music".<ref name= Times29>{{cite news|title= The Delius Festival: A retrospect|page=10|date= 2 November 1929|newspaper= The Times}}</ref> This "extremely individual and personal idiom"<ref>{{cite news|title= The Delius Festival: First Concert at Queen's Hall|page=16|newspaper= The Times|date= 14 October 1929}}</ref> was, however, the product of a long musical apprenticeship, during which the composer absorbed many influences. The earliest significant experiences in his artistic development came, Delius later asserted, from the sounds of the plantation songs carried down the river to him at Solano Grove. It was this singing, he told Fenby, that first gave him the urge to express himself in music;<ref>Palmer, p. 6</ref> thus, writes Fenby, many of Delius's early works are "redolent of Negro hymnology and folk-song", a sound "not heard before in the orchestra, and seldom since".<ref>Fenby (1971), p. 21</ref> Delius's familiarity with "black" music possibly predates his American adventures; during the 1870s a popular singing group, the [[Fisk Jubilee Singers]] from [[Nashville, Tennessee]], toured Britain and Europe, giving several well-received concerts in Bradford. When Delius wrote to Elgar in 1933 of the "beautiful four-part harmonies" of the black plantation workers, he may have been unconsciously alluding to the spirituals sung by the Fisk group.<ref>{{cite journal|last= Jones|first= Philip|title= Delius and America: a new perspective|jstor=963053|journal= The Musical Times|date= December 1984|pages=701–02|volume=125|doi=10.2307/963053}} {{subscription}}</ref>

At [[Leipzig]], Delius became a fervent disciple of [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]], whose technique of continuous music he sought to master. An ability to construct long musical paragraphs is, according to the Delius scholar [[Christopher Palmer]], Delius's lasting debt to Wagner, from whom he also acquired a knowledge of chromatic harmonic technique, "an endlessly proliferating sensuousness of sound".<ref>Palmer, pp. 95–96</ref> Grieg, however, was perhaps the composer who influenced him more than any other. The Norwegian composer, like Delius, found his primary inspiration in nature and in folk-melodies, and was the stimulus for the Norwegian flavour that characterises much of Delius's early music.<ref>Palmer, pp. 46–50</ref> The music writer [[Anthony Payne]] observes that Grieg's "airy texture and non-developing use of chromaticism showed [Delius] how to lighten the Wagnerian load".<ref name= grove/> Early in his career Delius drew inspiration from Chopin, later from his own contemporaries Ravel and Richard Strauss,<ref>Fenby (1971), p. 82, Palmer, p. 98</ref> and from the much younger [[Percy Grainger]], who first brought the tune of ''Brigg Fair'' to Delius's notice.<ref>Palmer, pp. 89–90</ref>

According to Palmer, it is arguable that Delius gained his sense of direction as a composer from his French contemporary [[Claude Debussy]].<ref>{{cite journal|last= Palmer|first= Christopher|title= Delius, Vaughan Williams and Debussy|url= http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/content/L/4/475.full.pdf|journal= Music and Letters|year= 1969|pages=475–80|jstor=73162|doi=10.1093/ml/L.4.475}} {{subscription}}</ref> Palmer identifies aesthetic similarities between the two, and points to several parallel characteristics and enthusiasms. Both were inspired early in their careers by Grieg, both admired Chopin; they are also linked in their musical depictions of the sea, and in their uses of the wordless voice. The opening of ''Brigg Fair'' is described by Palmer as "perhaps the most Debussian moment in Delius".<ref name= P138/> Debussy, in a review of Delius's ''Two Danish Songs'' for soprano and orchestra given in a concert on 16 March 1901, wrote: "They are very sweet, very pale – music to soothe convalescents in well-to-do neighbourhoods".<ref>Debussy, Claude, ed. Richard Langham Smith (1988): ''Debussy on Music'' New York, Cornell University Press {{ISBN|0-436-12559-5}} pp. 16–17</ref> Delius admired the French composer's orchestration, but thought his works lacking in melody<ref name= P138>Palmer, pp. 138–41</ref> – the latter a comment frequently directed against Delius's own music.<ref name= Stylistic/><ref name= Cardus/> Fenby, however, draws attention to Delius's "flights of melodic poetic-prose",<ref>Fenby (1971), p. 75</ref> while conceding that the composer was contemptuous of public taste, of "giving the public what they wanted" in the form of pretty tunes.<ref>Fenby (1981), pp. 188–89</ref>