In Chapter One, I quoted from a profile published in the New York Times in 1915 shortly after Grainger's American debut. The author concluded that, for an audience member, after a few moments in the presence of Grainger's ‘sweetness and light … you are his – or, to put it another … way, you feel he is yours’. The idea that a performer might belong to their audiences is hardly new, and much recent celebrity studies research has identified the ways in which fans claim ownership over their favourite artists. But throughout the research and interviews I have conducted, it seems that, for Grainger, even long after his death, questions of ownership arise again and again. Legalities and copyright questions aside, who does Grainger, his life and works, ‘belong’ to? Who gets to tell his story, or to say which elements of his life should be discussed, or for what purposes they should be used? These questions have influenced the direction of the works I have considered here, and the ways their creators interacted with Grainger's established life-narrative and the institutions that preserve it.

Questions of ownership over Grainger and his legacy might begin with his physical body. As we have seen, the final version of Grainger's will, signed in 1959, included a clause that directed ‘that my flesh be removed from my bones and the flesh destroyed’ as he bequeathed his ‘skeleton to the University of Melbourne … for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum’.