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Choral Concert Life in the Late Nineteenth-Century ‘Metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
Extract
This issue of the Nineteenth-Century Music Review is devoted to Australia and more specifically to music-making in colonial Melbourne. The colony of Victoria was acknowledged as the cultural heart of Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Melbourne hosted two International Exhibitions in the 1880s and welcomed innumerable travelling musicians to its shores, where significant amounts of money could be made. Because of Melbourne's standing and cultural significance at the time and the extensive body of material available for study, the articles in this journal focus on this ‘metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’. However, the activities discussed here can all be found, to varying degrees, in other parts of Australia as well. Liedertafels, for instance, were very prominent in Adelaide and its surrounding areas (and indeed still exist today), because of the significant German migration there. Philharmonic choirs were also widely established.
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References
1 As Palmerston: the name was changed to Darwin in 1911. These figures are taken from Robin Brown (comp.), Collins Milestones in Australian History 1788 to the Present, ed. Appleton, Richard (Sydney, 1986)Google Scholar.
2 Factual information in this paragraph has been extracted from Brown, Collins Milestones.
3 Selected statistics taken from ‘Table: Population Distribution, Colonial and State Censuses 1861–1981’, quoted in Vamplew, Wray, ed., Australians, Historical Statistics (New South Wales, 1987): 26, 41Google Scholar.
4 Davison, Graeme in The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne, 1978): 6.Google Scholar
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7 Radic, Thérèse, ‘Aspects of Organised Amateur Music in Melbourne 1836–1890’, 2 vols, MMus diss., University of Melbourne, 1969Google Scholar; Radic, Thérèse, ‘Some Historical Aspects of Musical Associations in Melbourne 1888–1915’, 3 vols, PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 1977Google Scholar.
8 Other forms of amateur music-making that arrived in the colonies with British migrants, the brass bands and the church choir, also flourished, but they do not form part of this present study.
9 Kerry Murphy gratefully acknowledges generous financial assistance from the Australian Research Council in assisting this University of Melbourne research project. The research project has also involved a number of postgraduate students at the Faculty of Music and we acknowledge in particular the wonderful work undertaken by Alexandra Williams and Jessica Smith on the database, and Peggy Lais's research assistance. The preparation of this volume of essays could not have been completed without the outstanding contribution of Jennifer Hill in every area of production. Suzanne Cole's support has also been invaluable. Illustrations from the Liedertafel collection are reproduced by kind permission of the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne.
10 This database, which has been designed by one of the research team, Suzanne Cole, consists of almost 5,000 records of performances of roughly 2,800 separate musical works, and brings together information on performances, concerts, composers and performers.