This article highlights the paucity of musicological scholarship on street music in the nineteenth century but examines narratives of noise, music and morality that are situated in studies of street music in related literature. The article argues that a new history of street music in the nineteenth century is overdue and charts ways in which such studies may be undertaken given the substantial primary source material to work with and the proliferation and usefulness of theoretical studies in related disciplines.

What evidence is there that street music was widespread, problematic and immoral in nineteenth-century London? This article re-examines a substantial literature that has been used to build a case or argument of the pervasive notion that street music was a curse in nineteenth-century London. Looking at a variety of sources afresh the article argues that historical evidence has often been misunderstood, misread or misconstrued in establishing historical narratives about street music in nineteenth-century London.

Spanish estudiantina plucked string ensembles achieved immense popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were an important catalyst in the creation of the sonority of a variety of European and American popular musics. Such ensembles had precedents in Spanish student groups dating back to the Renaissance and the rondallas (or groupings of plucked instruments) that were associated with popular outdoor serenades. However, the modern estudiantina movement can be traced back to 1878, and was consciously framed as a modern historical construct. A large grouping of youths and former students, donning Renaissance student dress, decided to form a society to visit Paris during Carnival, on the eve of the 1878 Exposition Universelle. They took Paris by storm, performing in a variety of street settings, reinforcing the exotic stereotypes of serenading musicians associated with Spain, and bringing to life historical notions of the minstrel. In the decade that followed, the European performance contexts of the estudiantinas included theatres, outdoor venues and expositions, garden parties and salons – and they became fixtures of the music hall and the café chantant. This paper explores early English and French constructions of the estudiantina phenomenon, and how the groups were framed in the light of exotic street musics and prevailing tropes of Spain. It also examines how the outdoor performance settings of the estudiantinas were translated onto the theatrical stage.

Although largely forgotten today, bands of German musicians (generally from the Westpfalz region) were regular visitors to New Zealand’s shores from the 1850s up until the outbreak of World War I, making them among the earliest professional European musical ensembles to be heard in the country. Plying their trade on the streets and in other public spaces, German bands were also routinely hired to perform for garden parties, school sports days, dances and boat trips, as well as on countless other occasions. Yet despite their apparent popularity, contemporary comment published in newspapers of the day demonstrates that reactions to their performances were decidedly mixed. While some members of the public clearly enjoyed the contribution German bands made to local musical life, others were less than delighted by their (often noisy) presence. In 1893, for example, one Wellington resident complained that ‘a German Band … may be heard braying at every street corner at all hours of the day and night’, while noting also that ‘It is the genuine article, all the performers being wanderers from the “Vaterland”, unmistakeable “sauerkrauts”’ Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, ten members of a German band had been arrested in Auckland and taken to Somes Island in Wellington harbour, where they were interned for the duration of the conflict. This article examines the New Zealand public’s changing perceptions of this particular brand of street musician from colonial times until shortly after the end of the First World War.

‘The ‘German band’ as a concept remains integrally associated with German ethnicity in the Australian public mind though such things as the extroverted oom-pah music of present-day Oktoberfest, or the live and recorded oom-pah music in German or ‘Bavarian’-themed venues. However, the costumed ‘German bands’ that were a feature of nineteenth-century British street and seaside resort life also began to appear ubiquitously in various gold-rush era Australian population centres and remained a fixture of Australian street entertainment until the First World War. Gold-rush era chronicler William Kelly described their music as being able to ‘drive swine into anguish’. Yet they had an opposing reputation for excellence in playing Strauss waltzes, polkas and other popular dance music of the era. They were sought after by dance venue, circus and other theatrical entertainment proprietors and were furthermore hired for private balls, picnics, showgrounds and racetrack entertainment. By appearing at German social functions and venues they buttressed pan-German cultural identity and traditions and, for non-Germans, the sight and sound of a disciplined, groomed and costumed German band provided a mildly exciting cultural tourism experience. In blaring street, circus parade or showground mode they, in fact, conformed to the present-day global stereotype of the Bavarian Biergarten oom-pah band. Through foundation research, this article attempts to apply some social, cultural and musicological ‘flesh and bones’ to what has more or less remained the ‘myth’ of the ubiquitous ‘German bands’ (and their not-always-German bandsmen) that sometimes entertained and charmed pedestrians while at other times represented a social and sonic blot on the streetscapes and public spaces of pre-World War I Australia.

The history of live street music is the history of an endangered species, either suppressed or trivialized as little more than ‘local colour’. Five hundred years ago the streets of Elizabethan London were rich with the sounds of street vendors, ballad-makers and musicians, and in general the worst that might be said of the music was that the same songs were too often repeated – what we would now call ‘on high rotation’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet Wordsworth and advocate of the ‘common man’ was describing street music as ‘monstrous’, and throughout that century vigorous measures were being applied to suppress such sounds, which were now categorized as noise. By the twenty-first century, live street music has been virtually silenced but for the occasional licensed busker or sanctioned parade. Paradoxically, this process of decline is intersected by a technologically sustained ‘aural renaissance’ that can be dated from the late nineteenth century. This article explores the reasons for the gradual extinction of live street music and the transformation of the urban soundscape. It argues connections with issues of class, the rise of literacy, the sacralization of private property and the formation of the politics of modernity.