The University of Sydney - Australharmony

This page contains links to further documentation for my 2015 journal article of the same title:

Graeme Skinner(University of Sydney), "The invention of Australian music", Musicology Australia 37/2 (December 2015), 289-306

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2015.1076594 (PAYWALL)

ONSITE PDF (FREE DOWNLOAD)

Abstract

This review essay discusses a selection of key musical artefacts (works) of the early colonial era in Australia - a brief history in 9 (or so) musical objects, composed, devised, improvised, or merely imagined works, identified as Australian, in a variety of ways, by ownership or location. Treated roughly sequentially, there are complete and partial survivals and records of lost works; some Indigenous, some settler; some gentry, some working class, musicians' music and some non-musicians' music, most by men, but finally - when the documentary record admits them - quite a few by women. Not the entire story, they are useful paradigms for parsing later materials in the process of inventing Australian music from 1770 to roughly the mid 1840s. They invite us to re-engage with "the muddy issues of Australianness", and suggest that acts of cultural naming, claiming, and owning are not necessarily so superficial, problematic, or inappropriate as they are sometimes taken to be.

More on the music ...

For fuller documentation on the 9 main musical examples discussed in the journal article, find the corresponding main entry in Australharmony by clicking below:

1  Song (5 May 1770)

2  Song at Botany Bay (December 1790)

3  A New-South-Wales Song (c.1802)

4  Miming a reel at Moreton Bay (1799)

5  Nuptial serenade at The Rocks (May 1803)

6  A Hawkesbury Irishman in Sydney (1810)

7  Reichenberg's Australian quadrilles revisited (1825)

8  Cavendish's Australian quadrilles (1833)

9  Mary Hely's The parting (1835)

SCULTHORPE ON AUSTRALIAN MUSIC (1979)

Hush 1979, 33

Further reading . . .

See especially Readings in early colonial music

© Graeme Skinner 2014 - 2024