Choral Concert Life in the Late 19th-century ‘Metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’

Volume 2 Issue 2 of 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 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.

In nineteenth-century Colonial Australia amateur and semi-amateur music making, in particular the concerts put on by the major choral societies of the time (the Liedertafels and the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society choir) played a formative role in the development of musical taste. The articles in this journal issue focus on these societies.  Although many of the articles examine the impact of British musical institutions, music journals and publishers on repertoire and taste formation, they also show how performing resources, institutional characteristics, and other European influences made the musical scene in Australia different from the British scene.

These articles are the result of a major research project, funded by the Australian Research Council and based at the Centre for Studies in Australian Music, Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, working on musical life in Melbourne from approximately the 1870s to Federation.

This issue of the Nineteenth-Century Music Review should be seen as an integrated volume rather than a series of discrete articles. All the contributions are connected and some of them treat the same topics from differing perspectives. Given that little prior knowledge can be assumed about the areas covered in the articles, the first article provides some contextual and historical background. This article, written by Thérèse Radic, also gives empirical information on the choral bodies as institutions. This is followed by other articles that examine issues arising out of study of the organizations. Although these articles stand alone, they also benefit from familiarity with the article by Radic. Readers may wish to start with Radic’s article before proceeding to any others.

The two articles directly following Radic look at external influences, British and German, on Melbourne musical life. Through a survey of substantial choral works purchased and performed by the Melbourne Philharmonic Society over the years 1876 to 1901, Jan Stockigt’s article reveals the development of a repertoire influenced by British opinion. She explores the correlation of items purchased and performed by the Melbourne Philharmonic Society (1876–1901) with announcements in The Musical Times of items to be performed at various British choral festivals. In examining the changes that took place within the Melbourner Deutsche Liedertafel as it became increasingly Australian, Kerry Murphy’s article analyses changes to the organizational structure and repertoire (using a case study of the transformation of Carl Elsasser’s chorus ‘Auf mein Deutschland’ into ‘Hail Britannia’).

The next two articles look at social and repertoire issues in the Liedertafel societies. Jennifer Hill studies the balance and tensions between the amateur and professional and the social and musical in the choirs and outlines some of the types of semi-social, social and ceremonial functions in which the societies involved themselves. Suzanne Cole also analyses the tensions between the social and concert-giving roles of the societies but does so through a close examination of the programme construction.

Finally, Jennifer Royle discusses how the omission of local works from the established repertories of Melbourne’s amateur societies does not indicate that there was no compositional activity in the colonies. Close inspection of programmes and holdings of the societies reveals an astonishing amount of music written by members of each of the three dominant societies, which to a large extent supported compositional activity in Melbourne during the late colonial period.

So much of music history is focused on the activities of professional musicians and institutions. The articles in this volume show, however, that a vital culture of amateur and semi-amateur music making can also have a profound effect on the development of musical life. We are fortunate that such a significant quantity of archival material has survived in Melbourne to enable us to reconstruct that life.

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