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6 - Cultivating a European Concert Culture in Colonial Sydney and Hobart, 1826–1840

from Part II - Encounters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2024

Amanda Harris
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
Clint Bracknell
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
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Summary

This chapter considers evidence of European music making in the early colonial towns of Sydney and Hobart. Two concert series in 1826 show the role of music in reimagining colonial towns as organised and aesthetic cities. The musicians that led the concerts shaped these musical worlds, bringing European instruments, forms of opera and vocal music, chamber, orchestral and solo instrumental music that would continue to develop over the next two centuries in Australia’s urban centres. We trace several key musicians who shaped the early phase of these towns’ music-making, looking to the cultural practices of the British Isles and continental Europe. While contextual evidence from this time reminds us of the ongoing presence of Aboriginal people, there is only an occasional glimpse of the musicians’ awareness that their efforts to import a European musical culture took place on Aboriginal land.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bashford, A. and MacIntyre, S., The Cambridge History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
English, H., Music and World-Building in the Colonial City: Newcastle, NSW, and Its Townships, 1860–1880 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).Google Scholar
Karskens, G., The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009).Google Scholar
Murphy, K., ‘Choral Concert Life in the Late Nineteenth-Century “Metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere”’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2(2) (2005), https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409800002172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teo, H-M. and White, R. (eds.), Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Waterhouse, R., Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788 (Melbourne: Longman, 1995).Google Scholar
Watt, P., ‘Buskers and Busking in Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, Musicology Australia, 41(1) (2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2019.1621437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, L., Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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