Rare Book Exhibitions - Music and Monash

Credits

Exhibition and catalogue devised by Georgina Binns, Music and Multimedia Librarian, Monash University Library.
Cover design by Kerin Bryant. Select catalogue entries by Dr. Reis Flora, Dr. Joel Crotty, Annette Bowie, and Bronia Kornhauser. An electronic version of this catalogue, with additional illustrations, is available at the Monash University Library website.

Thanks

Thanks to Prof. Kartomi AM, FAHA, Dr. Phil, School of Music-Conservatorium, Monash University, for opening the exhibition; Cathrine Harboe-Ree, University Librarian; Christine Cooze, Director, Client Services; Richard Overell, Rare Books Librarian; and for their contribution to the catalogue - Kerin Bryant, Iris Carydias, Dr. Reis Flora, Dr. Joel Crotty, Annette Bowie, Bronia Kornhauser; and for their ongoing support Dr. Le Tuan Hung, Dr. Aline Scott- Maxwell, and the staff of the Music and Multimedia and Rare Books Collections.

Introduction

'Music at Monash' is a celebration of the diversity and scope of the Monash University Library music collections and the Monash Music Archives in the School of Music-Conservatorium. Prepared to coincide with the Symposium of the International Musicological Society 2004, the items in the exhibition have been selected expressly to indicate not only the Australian materials in the collections, but also the fascinating ethnomusicological materials found in the Music Archives. This Archive has been built up over the past three decades, indicating the strength of ethnomusicology teaching and research in the then Department of Music and current School of Music, especially in Southeast Asian music and Indian items. More recent research foci in the Faculty of Arts have included Korean and Japanese Music and the development of the Australian Archive of Jewish Music, aligned with the Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilization.

An exhibition such as this provides a medium for alerting people to the richness and depth of the library collections. Students, academic staff and independent scholars are exposed to materials normally housed in closed access and archive boxes, only accessible by catalogue entries. Displaying covers, and selected 'insides', I have tried to provide a colourful and textural diversity of materials, pulling together like and unlike, drawing threads through the catalogue descriptions and highlighting other possibilities for research. The sixty or so items only touch the surface of a rich collection waiting to be examined. The multidimensional nature of music-scores (manuscript and published), sound recordings, images, instruments, books, pamphlets, and programs enhance this richness. The collections have been enhanced in recent years by acquisition and donations of unique Australian composer archives of manuscripts, and accompanying ephemera including scrapbooks, programs and recordings. The sheet music collection has expanded and is waiting for keen researchers to exploit the images, the diverse subject material portrayed in the music and words, and the social mores expressed through the music and its time.

In contrast to the sheer physicality of an exhibition such as this, the library offers research access through a large number of digital resources. Access to online indexes, full text journals and books, the internet, digital audio delivery and digital scanning are changing the way we research, but the joy of handling a 200-year-old dictionary which influenced the way we define and think of music can never be surpassed.

In the preparation of this exhibition I have enjoyed the collaboration with my colleagues in the School of Music-Conservatorium, and their willingness to share their knowledge of the Music Archives and contributing to the catalogue. Thank you to Richard Overell, Rare Books Librarian for the opportunity of preparing this exhibition and Prof. Kartomi for opening the exhibition.

E.W. Cole - Music at the Cole's Book Arcade

1. Cristabel (composer, editor and arranger) Cole's Music of the Bells (2nd series). (Melbourne: E. W. Cole, c.1898)

2. E.W. Cole (written and compiled). Cole's funny picture book. No. 1. 71st ed. (Melbourne: E.W. Cole [1970])

3. E.W. Cole (Editor). Music. (Melbourne: E.W. Cole, 1918)

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Edward William Cole (1832-1918) was 'the most amazing bookseller in the history of Australian publishing'. Arriving in 1852 as a gold rush immigrant he worked along the Murray River, eventually opening a bookshop in the Eastern Market, Melbourne, in 1865. In 1873 he opened the first Cole's Book Arcade and eventually moved in 1883 to its Bourke Street home. It was a very successful business, not only offering books for sale, but operating as an amusement arcade encouraging customers to spend time browsing and amusing themselves.

The Arcade extended from Bourke Street to Collins Street. Brass bands and musicians performed throughout the store. Music was heard in the tea rooms and the fernery, which became a popular resting place for Melburnians taking a break from their shopping. Early in 1889, after the closure of the Centennial Exhibition, Cole met Charles Bassett, an Englishman, experienced in the music business. Bassett came to Melbourne to support commercial interests at the Exhibition and decided to stay. He believed he could develop an enlarged music department to enhance the Arcade. He set out to build the music department with printed music, instruments and accessories to become a complete music shop and enhanced publications. Entertainers from minstrel shows and theatre were employed to perform concerts from 3 to 5pm and 7 to 9pm each day. They also played the music that people were considering purchasing. The publishing component of this exercise was very successful. A large range of music was published by E.W. Cole and the bright covers were an attractive feature, and unusual for this period. Albums such as Cole's Music of the Bells contained both Australian and European composed material, of popular appeal to the pianists and singers for performance in the in the drawing rooms of Melbourne and beyond.

Cole's most well known title, Cole's Funny Picture Book, found a well loved and well-thumbed place in the homes of most Victorians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The seventy-first edition on display, indicates the popularity of this work, still in print today. Probably the piece of music most associated with E.W. Cole, and included in Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1, was the 'Song of the Book Arcade' sung by:

In addition to sheet music, books were a popular line. A series of gift books, entitled 'Cream of Human Thought' or 'Much-in-Little Library' were to contain a thousand books on a thousand subjects-an ambitious project! Edited by E.W. Cole and successors, they were described as 'the best that has been wisely and concisely said on that subject . . . containing choice extracts from the authors of all times'. Published titles in the series included Love, Home, Mother, War, Happifying Gardening Hobby, Happiness, Sleep, and Truth. They consisted of compilations and pot pourri of popular extracts. They were produced in different cloth bindings with decorative gold blocking. It appears that the projected 1,000 titles as advertised were never all published.

Sources: William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, & Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. 2nd ed. (Melbourne : Oxford University Press, 1994); Cole Turnley, Cole of the Book Arcade: a pictorial biography of E.W. Cole, (Hawthorn, Vic.: Cole Publications, 1974.)

Australian Folk music

6. Edwards, Ron, The Overlander Songbook. 1st ed. (Ferntree Gully [Vic.]: Rams Skull Press, 1956)

7. J.S. Manifold, The violin, the banjo & the bones : an essay on the instruments of bush music, decorations by Ron Edwards. (Ferntree Gully [Vic.]: Rams Skull Press, 1957). The Black Bull Chapbooks; no. 6.

The Rams Skull Press was established by Ron Edwards, song collector, folklorist and artist in Ferntree Gully, in outer Melbourne, in the early 1950s and amongst its first publications were the pioneering series of broadsheets, 'Bandicoot Ballads', a collaboration between Edwards and J. S. Manifold. Manifold and Edwards played a pioneering role in ensuring that Australian bush songs were collected and published. Manifold's publications The Penguin Australia Songbook (1964) and Who Wrote the Ballads? (1964) are still considered major works in the study of Australian folksong.

Hugh Anderson is described as 'one of the seminal figures in the study of Australian folksong and ballad'. Since the early 1950s he has been involved in the writing, editing and collaboration of over 60 publications on Australian folksong, ballad, folklore, biography and criticism. The Colonial Ballads when first published in 1955 contained 'the largest selection of Australian traditional songs with music ever published' and with its 72 songs was and still is considered to be a standard work of Australian folk song. A second edition in 1962 published by F.W. Cheshire expanded to 85 songs.

The Black Bull Chapbooks were published by the Rams Skull Press (between 1954 and 1957), most with music and notes researched and written by Anderson and illustrations by fellow folk musician Ron Edwards. Edwards, now based in Cairns, Queensland, continues to collect and publish songs from northern Australia, including indigenous song, as well as continuing to collect, draw, paint and publish Australian folklore.

Source: Gwenda Beed Davey & Graham Seal (editors), The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Australian Aboriginal Music

8. Taplin, Rev. G. (editor), The folklore, manners, customs, and languages of the South Australian Aborigines: Gathered from enquiries made by authority of the South Australian Government. (Adelaide: Government Printer, 1879)

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9. Alice M. Moyle, Tasmanian music, an impasse?; edited by W.F. Ellis.
(Launceston, Tas.]: Museum Committee, Launceston City Council, 1968)

10. Herb Patten, How to play the gumleaf, introduced by Robin Ryan; illustrated by Jenny Gibson. (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999)

Most Aboriginal music is considered to be a direct communication from the Ancestors and handed down through the generations. From European settlement in the late eighteenth century to contemporary researchers, amateur and professional scientists, anthropologists and musicologists have attempted to record this music by notation and subsequently audio recordings and film. This exhibition highlights some of this work in the published songs of Isaac Nathan and then later espoused in the early twentieth century by Henry Tate, as being inspirational for the development of an Australian music. The Rev. G. Taplin established a mission on the shores of Lake Alexandrina, South Australia (now known as Port McLeay), ministering to the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri) tribes. He was very interested in their culture and society, learning their language and publishing anthropological studies which were considered to be fine contributions to the study of South Australian Aboriginals. His notation of corroboree songs and allied observations are a significant contribution to the study of aboriginal music. Other collectors and researchers of note include Baldwin Spencer, T.G.H. Strehlow, E. Harold Davies, Percy Grainger, A.P. Elkin, Richard Waterman, Trevor Jones (Foundation Professor of Music at Monash University) and Catherine Ellis.

Alice Moyle (b. 1908), musicologist of Aboriginal music, was awarded the first PhD in Australia relating to Aboriginal music. Titled North Australian music: a taxonomic approach to the study of Aboriginal song performances, it was completed at Monash University in 1974. She was a research fellow in the then Department of Music
1965-73, after study at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney. She was an original member of the Musicology Society of Australia and was a major contributor to the development of research into Indigenous music and wider musicological studies in Australia. Her research was comprehensive, covering research into Aboriginal instruments, and the history of music and dance through the use of films, field recordings, and meticulous recording and cataloguing of data. Her investigation into Tasmanian Aboriginal music identified two styles of song, dissimilar to styles of songs sung on the mainland.

Sources: G.K. Jenkin, 'George Taplin', Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6. (Carlton, Vic.: MUP, 1976); John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell (general editors), Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, (Sydney: Currency Press, 2003); Warren Bebbington, The Oxford Companion to Australian Music, (Melbourne: OUP, 1997).

Esther Rofe (1904-2000)

12. Maurice Fowler, Sea Ballet Designs for costumes [pencil sketches, including fabric swatches, n.d.]

14. Miscellaneous fliers and press clippings relating to performances of Sea Legend

15. Photograph-Monash Australian Composer Series: Esther Rofe and John Tallis (August 1995)

16. Norman MacGeorge, Borovansky Ballet in Australia and New Zealand. (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1947)

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During her long life Esther Rofe witnessed her music go from being accepted in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, to rejected for being old fashioned in the 1960s and '70s, and resurrected for musical and historical reasons in the 1980s and '90s.

Rofe was born in Melbourne and studied composition, violin and piano privately with the leading teachers of the day, including Fritz Hart and Alberto Zelman, jnr. Like so many of her peers she travelled to London to study composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music in the early to mid-1930s.

Blessed with perfect pitch and uncanny ability to be write a catchy tune or arrange an existing melody for all sorts of instrumental combinations, Rofe soon found paid employment in the commercial world of radio in Sydney. But it was ballet music that captured her imagination. Sea Legend (originally entitled Sea Ballet), Terra Australis and Mathinna were some of the scores that placed her at the forefront of Australia's theatre composers. Her scores were choreographed by some of Australia's leading dancers including Edouard Borovansky and Laurel Martyn, and Sea Legend was given a season in London.

Even though ballet music was her first love she did not shy away from writing songs, chamber pieces and other orchestral works. With the exploration of experimentalism in the 1960s and '70s, Rofe's conservatively crafted music was side lined, and she soon became discouraged. Such experimentalism diminished in its fervour during the 1980s and in its place there developed a more broad-minded compositional base that welcomed a plurality of voices. Many composers, generations younger than Rofe, now embraced diatonicism and this had a hand in bring her music back into focus. At the same time Australian musicologists were interested in studying Australia's music heritage. Composers and performers from yesteryear were interviewed, concerts organised and articles written. Esther Rofe became a mandatory interviewee for anyone interested in Australia's musical past and in the 1990s her music featured prominently in a number of concerts. In 1993 she was Monash University's honoured composer.

Buoyed by the interest in her music, she began to compose again. The lengthy quasi-cantata, Somebody ask for baritone and piano was composed when she was in her 90s and was subsequently released on CD through the Australian Music Centre's own label, Vox Australis. Rofe's music is available through the Australian Music Centre. Her archive of music manuscripts, press clippings and other ephemera is located in the Rare Books Collection, Monash University Library.

Henry Tate (1873-1926)

18. Henry Tate, Australian musical resources : some suggestions. (Melbourne and Sydney: J. Endacott, 1917)

19. Henry Tate, Australian musical possibilities; with an introduction by Bernard O'Dowd. (Melbourne: Edward A. Vidler, [1924?])

Henry Tate (1873-1926) was a composer, poet and journalist, spending most of his life in Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium with G.W.L. Marshall-Hall (piano and composition) and Franklin Peterson (analysis and counterpoint). He did not purse a full-time music career, working for most of his life in real estate and insurance. In the last few years of his life he was music critic for the Melbourne Age and also contributed a chess column.
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He belonged to a group of writers and artists called the Australian Institute of Arts and Literature, which included the artist David Davies (1862-1939) and the poet Bernard O'Dowd (1866-1953), who wrote the introduction for Australian Musical Possibilities. They pursued a nationalistic ideal with links between the land and its people. In Australian Musical Resources, Tate outlined his theory of an Australian musical scale based on bird calls- a deflected scale with flattened second, major third and minor sixth, representing the call of a butcher bird. His treatise encouraged other composers to capture this unused natural resource, and at the same time utilise conventional instruments to recreate natural sounds. The titles of his works evoke these thoughts. Some examples of his works include Dawn: an Australian rhapsody for full orchestra, Bush Miniatures for orchestra, The Australian -a piano cycle 'reflecting the life of an Australia from his birth to his death at Gallipoli'; The Voice of the Never Never; Bass Strait Rollers; and a sonata for violin and piano-Birds of the South.

Australian Musical Possibilities urges composers to explore the themes of bush rhythms, melody, harmony and orchestration and includes a supplement of two works Morning in the Gully for piano and The Australian Thrush-a song. A chapter on 'Aboriginal music' provides an overview of the European collectors activities of notating and recording aboriginal music. He highlights especially the work of Sir Baldwin Spencer in recording music of the aboriginals. Tate wrote, after hearing the recordings at a lecture given by Dr. A.E. Floyd at the Melbourne Public Library in 1922, where Spencer's recording were played, 'the extraordinary vivacity and vitality of utterance that are the outward evidence of a spirit within that might well inspire a composer who could respond to that mystic element which eludes description as effectually as it stimulates creative thought'. Australian composers John Antill, Clive Douglas, Mirrie Hill and James Penberthy were to use aboriginal music as inspiration in their works of the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and continue to be inspiration in the work of Peter Sculthorpe.

Papers relating to Tate's musical life are held at the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne.

Sources: John Carmody. 'Henry Tate', Australian Dictionary of Biography, (Carlton, Vic, MUP, 1996); John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell (general editors), Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, (Sydney: Currency Press, 2003); Warren Bebbington (ed.), Oxford Companion to Australian Music, (Melbourne: OUP, 1997)

Isaac Nathan (1790?-1864)

20. Nathan, Isaac (editor), The Southern Euphrosyne and Australian Miscellany: containing oriental moral tales, original anecdote, poetry and music, an historical sketch with examples of native aboriginal melodies put into modern rhythm and harmonized as solos, quartettes, &c. together with several other original vocal pieces, arranged to a piano-forte accompaniment by the editor and sole proprietor, I Nathan. (Sydney: Nathan, 1849)

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21. Byron, George Gordon, A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern with appropriate Symphonies & Accompaniments by I. [i.e. J.] Braham & I. Nathan, the poetry written expressly for the work by . . .Lord Byron (London: Nathan, [1815])

22. Bertie, Charles H. Isaac Nathan, Australia's First Composer (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1922). [Portrait illustration from this work]

Isaac Nathan (born Canterbury, England 1790? - died Sydney, Australia 1864), was a composer, singer and teacher. He arrived in Australia in 1841 with a well-established reputation, as author of a respected book on vocal technique Musurgia Vocalis (1823), composer of A Selection of Hebrew Melodies ... (1815-16) and leaving behind significant debts. Nathan made his mark in colonial Sydney as a church choir director, composer, conductor and critic. His opera Don John of Austria was performed in 1847 in Sydney and was described as the 'first opera wholly performed in Australia'. He also undertook pioneering work with settings of music of the Australian Aborigines.

A Selection of Hebrew Melodies was produced as a result of a collaboration between and Nathan and Lord Byron. The young Jewish composer, Nathan, had gathered religious and secular music from the synagogues and Jewish communities in Canterbury and London. In search for a lyricist, he approached Sir Walter Scott (who turned him down) and then Lord Byron. Byron produced a sample of poems which Nathan duly set. Performances of these works at Drury Lane by the singer John Braham encouraged the collaboration and Byron produced twenty-nine songs in total. Two volumes of the melodies were published. The music has been studied by musicologists and much conjecture has been (and still is) made about the authenticity of the Jewish melodies. The works as a whole are of significant interest being the product of a unique collaboration between this Jewish composer and a distinguished poet in early-nineteenth-century England.

The Southern Euphrosyne was named after the Greek goddess, Euphrosyne, daughter of Zeus, considered to be one of the Graces, and hand maiden of Aphrodite. Its sub-title accurately describes the sometimes curious juxtaposition of material, including both musical components and embittered details of Nathan's personal affairs, affidavits from supporters and stories of his Jewish heritage. The most significant aspect of this book is the publication of his Aboriginal transcriptions with annotations. In adding harmonies and rhythmic strictures and the 'versifying' of the words, the original music has been obscured, so that the result is a set of songs representative of the typical nineteenth-century song genre, perhaps reflecting the colonial attitudes to the original inhabitants of Australia through this transformation. Nathan was not the first composer to incorporate Aboriginal music into a European tradition. In the 1830s, Czech naturalist John Lhotsky collected women's songs on the Monaro high plains in New South Wales. These were then arranged for voice and piano by Lhotsky and George Sippe and others, and published, contributing to the legacy of notated aboriginal music into a European style of presentation.

Sources: John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell (general editors), Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, (Sydney: Currency Press, 2003); Warren Bebbington, Oxford Companion to Australian Music, (Melbourne: OUP, 1997)

Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre

The Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre (Lyre-Bird Press), was founded by Australian, Louise Hanson-Dyer, in Paris in the 1930s. Born in Melbourne in 1884, Hanson-Dyer became a patron of the arts, founded the British Music Society, encouraged young musicians and poets, and was involved with the Alliance Française and its cultural activities. In 1927, she and her husband left for England, later moving to Paris. Here she thrived, becoming involved in the cultural life of the city and encouraging musicians, composers and writers. Her interest in French music was indicated in the first publication of the Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre-the complete works of François Couperin, a twelve-volume set. Many other publications followed. These included early music (including Blow, Purcell, Byrd and works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) prompting an early music revival in Europe and twentieth century works by Canteloube, Koechlin and Milhaud. A number of Australian composers were promoted by the press including Margaret Sutherland and Peggy Glanville-Hicks. A complementary recording company was set up and many of the editions were recorded by leading musicians of Europe. The press moved to Monaco after the Second World War and still continues to publish and contribute scholarly publications which are studied and performed by musicians all over the world. Louise Hanson-Dyer died in Monaco in 1962.

This was the first publication of the Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre. It was published to celebrate the tercentenary of Couperin. The work includes the first use of the trademark end papers, depicting stylised lyre-bird feathers which were used in future publications of Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre. Described as 'Smart Art Deco design, with a green curve in Cotswald green advancing upon a ground of light cream; a further green stripe ... down the right-hand side.'

The Montpellier Codex, the original housed in the Faculty of Medicine at the Montpellier University in southern France, is the largest remaining collection of thirteenth century music. It was described in the Oiseau-Lyre advertising flyer as representing French music at 'the zenith of its brilliance and purity'. The provenance of the collection of 345 items in the codex is unknown before the eighteenth century, although it is known that the music was collated in the fourteenth century. The collection largely consists of motets, both sacred and secular. The musicologist Yvonne Rokseth, undertook the editing and transcribing of the work. The set was to win the first medal for French Antiquities awarded by the Institut de France.

This copy is one of a limited edition of 100 copies bound in Australian Blackwood. Although not noted in the volumes, this Australian inspired binding was publisher, Louise Hanson-Dyer's contribution to celebrating the centenary of European settlement in Melbourne in 1934. In the process of importing the veneered wood into France, Hanson-Dyer had to deal with difficult French custom officials, high shipping costs and binders who complained that the wood was too heavy and difficult to work.

25. The Melbourne Centenary Music Book: Australian Composers Piper''s Music. (Paris: Éditions de l'Oiseau Lyre, 1934)

The pipe playing movement began in 1926. Founded by an English woman, Margaret James, at a small school in London, she endeavoured to bring music to children who may not have had the chance to do so.

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Making pipes out of bamboo, based on an old Sicilian pipe she found in her attic, she was able to provide an answer to what she saw 'for the materialism of this age is slowly transferring music making for the people to the exclusively rich and exclusively talented'. The movement gained many followers and was adopted by many teachers, children and the adult community. A Piper's Guild was formed and a journal Panpipes was published. Vaughan-Williams wrote a Suite for Pipes (1939) dedicating it to 'The Piper's Guild Quartet'. The pipe was adopted in France after a presentation at the 1933 conference of La Nouvelle Education.

Editions de l'Oiseau Lyre was actively involved in promoting pipe playing, as indicated by the many publications issued during the peak of pipe popularity in the 30s. 1934 publications included Motets to play on the pipe, Pipeaux, The Dancing Schoole: Five pieces for bamboo pipes, and then later in 1935-36, How to make pipes: With tunes for pipers and small percussion band and Song of Contentment, both by Margaret Sutherland.

The Melbourne Centenary Music Book had a dedication 'To The Children of Australia: Let your song be delicate, The flowers can hear' quoting poet John Shaw-Neilson, engraved in what is likely Louise Dyer's own hand. It includes pieces by Australian composers, Arthur Benjamin, Esther Rofe, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and John Tallis, It has an unusual binding for the time, with an inbuilt handle, for ease of use by children. The whole of the first edition of this work-1000 copies-was gifted to the British Music Society in Melbourne, during a visit to Melbourne by Dyer in 1934.

26. Margaret Sutherland. They Called her Fair. Words by Esther Levy. (Paris: Éditions de l'Oiseau Lyre, 1935)

27. Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Be still you little leaves. Poem by Mary Webb. (Paris: Editions de L'Oiseau Lyre, c1938)

Louise Hanson-Dyer and composer, Margaret Sutherland met while studying at the Albert Street Conservatorium in Melbourne. They worked together on a number of projects in Melbourne including recitals of Sutherland's music and publishing projects. She published Sutherland's best-known work, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, a number of songs with settings by John Shaw-Neilson and Esther Levy, and small works for pipes. Dyer also promoted and published the works of another colleague, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, whom she had also met at the Albert Street Conservatorium, who was to later make her home and successful composing career in America.

Sources: Davison, Jim. Lyrebird Rising. (Carlton, Vic: Miegunyah Press, 1994); Carol Williams, '"To the children of Australia, let your song be delicate": a Pandean pipe dream' Aflame With Music: 100 Years of Music at the University of Melbourne, (Carlton, Vic.: Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, 1996) 297-303.

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)

28. Percy Grainger, Photos of Rose Grainger and of three short accounts of her life, in her own handwriting reproduced for her kin and friends by her adoring son Percy Grainger; also table of dates and summary of cultural tastes (White Plains, New York, Grainger, [1923])

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29. Percy Grainger, Music, a commonsense view of all types : a synopsis of lectures delivered for the Australian Broadcasting Commission ([Sydney]: A.B.C., 1934)

30. Grainger Museum, Archives Department, University of Melbourne. Percy Grainger & the arts of the Pacific: catalogue (Melbourne: F. D. Atkinson, Government Printer, [1979])

31. Male order : addressing menswear. (Parkville, Vic.: Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, c.1999)

32. Percy Grainger, Bridal Lullaby (1916). Edited by Ronald Stevenson. (Cleveland, USA: Bardic Edition, 1989)

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an Australian-born composer, pianist, and collector and arranger of folk music, amongst many other accomplishments. His life has been described by Grainger scholar, Kay Dreyfus, as 'a virtuosi performance, rich in imagination and energy, spanning many lands'. Grainger made his first public piano performance at the age of 10 in Melbourne and in 1895, left Australia with his mother, Rose, to study in Germany. Later Grainger lived in London, performing as a concert pianist throughout Britain, Scandinavia, central Europe, with returns to Australia and New Zealand. During 1932-33 he became head of the school of music at the New York University. He presented a lecture course of 'The Manifold Nature of Music' during this time, which then became the basis of his twelve radio lectures Music, a commonsense view of all types presented on ABC radio in 1934-35. They were considered to be quite radical of their time, including lecture-recital style presentations including one with a short demonstration of his Free Music for four Theremins or strings, written on graph paper. During this time, Grainger established his Museum at the University of Melbourne. In 1914 he moved to New York, acquiring American citizenship in 1918 and eventually settling in White Plains in 1921. The following year his mother, Rose committed suicide.

Rose Grainger and three short accounts of her life ... was 'reproduced for kin and friends by her adoring son' and includes 'dates of important events and movements' and a summary of 'cultural tastes'. She was estranged from her husband, John Grainger (principally known for his work as engineer of Princes Bridge, Melbourne and other public buildings in Australia and New Zealand) when Percy was about ten, Rose undertook to support herself and her son through teaching music and English wherever they lived. Percy and Rose had a close relationship and this memorial book is not only for her 'kin and friends' but also for those interested in the life and influences of Percy Grainger.

Grainger had an interest in Asian-Pacific cultures describing his music as reflecting the 'soft and yielding Pacific Ocean attitude towards life' in contrast to the colder Atlantic view of the northern hemisphere. He actively collected textiles from the region, contributing to his growing collection of European textiles, now housed in the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne. He and his wife Ella, designed and wore clothes made from practical towelling. In 1999 a successful exhibition Male Order at the Melbourne University Art Gallery explored male clothing design inspired by Grainger's creative fashion ideas, drawing in yet another group of creative artists into his expansive circle of cultural creativity. This is what he wanted his Museum to be- a place not just for music, but a place where his own interests and passions could be shared.

Bridal Lullaby (composed 1916) for piano was dedicated to Grainger's Danish sweetheart, Karen Holten, who was to marry Dr Asger Kellerman in 1916. Grainger wrote on a sketch of the work that 'I felt sad all that summer, weighed down with the thought of losing Karen (inevitable, of course), yet very glad, too, that she should have a real full satisfying life of her own ahead, & wishing her ever so well all thru life. In this mood of loving sentimental sorrow ... yet tender resignation the "Bryllup-vuggevise" was born.'

In Colonial Song 'the composer has wished to express feelings aroused by thoughts of the scenery and people of his native land, Australia'. Grainger did not use any folk or traditional themes in this work, but expressed his own responses 'to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general'. From amongst the music he had heard on this travels, he had observed a difference in Australian musical performances- 'almost Italian-like musical tendencies in brass band performances and ways of singing in Australia (such as a preference for richness and intensity of tone and soulful breadth of phrasing over more subtly and sensitively varied delicacies of expression) . . . which are also reflected [in this work].'

Australian Music Periodicals

*35. Tempo : The Australian musical news-magazine : Dance bands, dancing, radio, films, brass bands, symphony, theatre. (Sydney: 1937-56)*
*36. Australian Jazz Quarterly,* nos. 1-24 (Melbourne: W.H., Miller, 1946-54)**
*37. Jazz Notes, nos. 39-59 (Melbourne: City Service Press, 1944-45; nos. 61-113. (Adelaide: John W. Rippin, 1946-62)*

40. Continuo: Journal of the International Association of Music Libraries, Documentation Centres and Archives (Australian Branch) (1971-)

The Australian Musical News (also published as Music and Dramatic News, Australian Music and Dramatic News and Music and Dance), provides an unprecedented coverage of Australian musical life during its period of publication, from 1911 to 1963. It was published by the Melbourne music firm, Allans.

Despite the importance of this journal to the documentation of Australian music life, it is believed that there is no complete set extant. In order to gain a complete coverage of the journals researchers have had to go from library to library to seek total coverage. This was remedied in 1991 when it was planned that an Australian music course be introduced in the Monash University Department of Music. Seeding funding was sought to support the introduction of this new course and to provide resources for the academics and students to utilise in their study and research. The then Music Librarian, Helen Goring, undertook to piece together a complete set of the Australian Musical News from collections and libraries around Australia in order to make a master microfilm copy.

The complete run of the Australian Musical News is now available in microfilm or microfiche for purchase, enabling researchers and libraries, archives and museums to access a source that was once a logistical nightmare for researchers, and is now an invaluable resource for Australian music history. (Enquiries regarding the purchase of the Australian Musical News can be made to the Music and Multimedia Librarian, Monash University Library.)

A valuable Index to the Australian Musical News 1911-1963 was compiled and published by Lina Marsi in 1990. It has provided access to a wealth of information about performers, composers, events, organisations and is a valuable tool for historians and researchers of the performing arts in Australia and has also provided a source for many genealogists.

Tempo: The Australian musical news-magazine: Dance bands, dancing, radio, films, brass bands, symphony, theatre, was a Sydney based magazine that ran from 1937-60. It was one of the few magazines that, as can be seen by its subtitle, covered a wide range of musical activities both classical and popular.

Australian Jazz Quarterly, (no.1, 1946- no. 24, 1954) was purchased by the Music Library in 1995. Described as 'a magazine for the Connoisseur of Hot Music' it was 'devoted purely to jazz essays, criticism, biographies and similar features . . . and catered particularly for Australian fans'. It ran until 1965. AJQ was edited and published by William H. Miller, a Melbourne lawyer. Miller went to Oxford in 1933 and frequented the rhythm clubs and record shops in London until his return to Australia in 1938. With a library of about six hundred jazz records, he began broadcasting on 3UZ in a weekly spot called 'Jazz Night' and became influential in his support of traditional jazz which was making a revival in Australia after the Second World War. Contributors included active performers Graeme and Roger Bell.

AJQ eventually incorporated Jazz Notes, the organ of the 3UZ Jazz Lovers Club, which was originally edited by Miller and later by C. Ian Turner. It also began to incorporate the official program of the Australia Jazz Convention, which had begun in 1946. AJQ and Jazz Notes provide insight into the traditional jazz movement in Australia and particular Melbourne after the Second World War.

Canon (1947-66), a Sydney-based journal, was edited by the critic and composer, Franz Holford. It was considered to be the most influential forum for classical music criticism in Australia at the time, and was considered scholarly enough to be indexed in Music Index during the 1950s. (Music Index (1949- ) is an American-published index that was the only scholarly music index available during this period). It contained extensive articles on both Australian and overseas subject matter, as well as critical reviews of concerts occurring around the country. In 1964, Volume 17, number 3 was published as a special issue, containing the first issue of Musicology, which later became Musicology Australia, the scholarly journal of the Musicological Society of Australia.

Continuo: Journal of the International Association of Music Libraries, Documentation Centres and Archives (Australian Branch) (1971- ) began as the journal of the joint IAML Australian and New Zealand Branch, but soon developed its own identity representing the Australian music library profession, when a separate branch was inaugurated in 1982. With currently over 60 individual and institutional members, IAML (Australia) is actively involved in bringing music librarians and archivists together through a regular newsletter Intermezzo, the annual journal Continuo, a biennial conference, state meetings, a website and active participation in the international organization. In 2007 IAML (Australia) will be hosting its first international conference in Sydney, only the second time it has been held in the Southern Hemisphere. See www.iamlaust.org for further details.

Sources: John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell (general editors), Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, Sydney, Currency Press, 2003; Warren Bebbington, The Oxford Companion to Australian Music, Melbourne, OUP, 1997;and Andrew Bisset, Black Roots White Flowers: A History of Jazz in Australia, Sydney, Golden Press, 1979.

Musical Dictionaries

41. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Dictionnaire de musique / par J.J. Rousseau . . . (Paris: Chez le Veuve Duchesne, 1768)

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42. Brossard, Sâebastien de, A musical dictionary: containing a full explanation of all the terms made use of in . . .. music: also explanations of the doctrines of ancient music, and . . . inquiries into the nature of sound . . . together with a full description of all the various kinds of musical instruments. . .. abstracted from the best authors in the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and English languages, by James Grassineau . . . New ed., to which is added an Appendix, selected from the Dictionnaire de musique of M. Rousseau . . .. (London: J. Robson, 1769)

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Music lexicography began with the publication of French priest, theorist, composer, lexicographer and bibliophile, Sebastien de Brossard's Dictionaire des termes grecs, latins et italiens (1701), the first large scale dictionary of musical terms.

The first edition of James Grassineau's terminological A Musical Dictionary (London, 1740) is considered to be almost a direct translation of Brossard. Grassineau said, 'I have follow'd a French author in many points'. When J. Robson reissued the dictionary in 1769, an addendum of definitions from Rousseau's recently published Dictionnaire (1768) was added.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Swiss philosopher, theorist and composer.
He wrote a number of operas, vocal and instrumental music, but his most significant contibution are his writings on music. His Dictionnaire de musique, is considered an important reference work. It contains over 900 entries. Based on the more wide ranging form of Diderot's Encyclopédie or Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers (which commence publication in the 1750s), it was a significant move away from the Brossard style with.its definition-directed framework. 'Its main object was to deal with terms relating to knowledge and technique, not only providing definitions but also, and above all, furnishing explanations and showing the relationships of concepts. His work covers ideas relating to acoustics, music theory, composition, performance, interpretation, the poetics of musical and operatic genres (partly incorporating choreography), general musical aesthetics, the history of music and its geographical variation.'

Source: 'Dictionaries and encyclopedias of music', Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (7 July 2004), http://www.grovemusic.com

Australian Musical Albums

43. W.J. Banks The Australian Musical Album 1894 (Sydney: W.J. Banks, 1894)

44. The Colonial Musical Cabinet. (Melbourne: W.H. Glen & Co., [19--?])

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45. The Australian Music Books: Operatic Gems No. 55 (Melbourne: Allan and Co. Ltd, n.d.)

46. Nicholson's Australian Musical Magazine Xmas No. 45 (Melbourne: E.W.Cole, n.d.)

These four albums of songs and works for piano are indicative of the style of music that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With interesting covers, often with Australian scenes depicted on the front, they were designed for giving and sending back to the 'home' country - to promote the colonies with examples of up-to-date musical styles and artistic representations of the sophisticated buildings and gardens. The Australian Music Books were very popular and were produced with songs, works for piano solo and violin and piano, in a number of series. Along with the trademark fern trees, they depicted scenes of different colonial cities. This example depicts Melbourne's Princes Bridge and Cathedral, looking up Swanston Street. Banks' Australian Musical Album depicts a view of Sydney Harbour, looking over the Botanic Gardens to Farm Cove, by Albert Fullwood. This particular issue contains works by many of the musicians practicing in Sydney at the time, including August Wiegand, Henri Kowalski, Albert Wentzel, Horace Poussard, Hugo Alpen, Alice Charbonnet-Kellermann, Esther Kahn and Reene Less.

Cantor Abraham Adler and his circle (1916-2003)

47. Abraham Adler - Cantoralishe Recitativen (2 vols) (Vienna: University of Vienna, 1885; Vol 2, University of Vienna, 1991)

50. Photo-taken late 1950s, of Leo Rosner playing the double bass in one of Denis Farrington's bands

Cantor Adler migrated to Australia in 1956, initially settling in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. He was born in Rumania and like most of the Jewish immigrants who came to Australia after World War II, he was a Holocaust survivor. As a result, he had a strong experiential and emotional rapport with many members of the congregations that he served. Through his inspirational and heartfelt cantorial interpretations of Jewish liturgy, he helped reaffirm group identity, continuing the unbroken chain of cultural tradition that would gradually help heal the traumas of the immediate past.

After a 2-year stint at Carlton United Hebrew Congregation, Adler was invited to be the Cantor at Elwood Hebrew Congregation and there he stayed till 1975 when he accepted an invitation to hold office as Chief Cantor of the Great Synagogue in Vienna. During his years in Melbourne, he achieved great acclaim as a spiritual leader and a gifted and accomplished singer not only in religious services but in community events and concert performances. On a number of occasions during the years 1960 to 1966, he took part in broadcasts featuring Jewish music on Radio 3DB. These were hosted by socialite and businesswoman Stephanie Deste. He also produced acetate recordings of cantorial masterpieces.

Cantor Adler's accompanists have included musicians such as Felix Werder, Leo Rosner and Miriam Rochlin, each of whom has also made a significant individual contribution to Jewish musical culture in Australia. Adler's singing belongs to the Ashkenazi cantorial tradition, Eastern European in origin and quasi-operatic in style. Felix Werder, commenting on the quality of Adler's voice, recalls the versatility, colour and energy of his singing. Also legendary was Adler's ornamental and improvisational ability coupled with an instinct for the right depth and placement of emotion in his renditions of liturgical text. Besides the legacy of his recordings, Adler published a two volume manuscript of cantorial pieces-Cantoralishe Recitativen- which is used as a text for the teaching of Jewish liturgical music. His contribution to Jewish music in Australia is an enduring heritage for future generations.

The Australian Archive of Jewish Music

The Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation and the School of Music-Conservatorium at Monash University established the Australian Archive of Jewish Music (AAJM) in December 1994, to collect sound, visual and bibliographic materials on the musical cultures of the Jewish people, especially as related to Australia and South, East & Southeast Asia. Although there are Jewish music archives in other parts of the world, the AAJM is unique because of this Australian and Asian focus. Examples of unique materials include field recordings of liturgical music in traditional Babylonian-Sephardi style from Singapore, music from the now defunct Shepparton Jewish community in Victoria, and music from the discontinued Australian Chassidic Song Festivals. The AAJM has presented talks, lecture demonstrations and performances for interested members of the Jewish and wider community and has evolved to become a major resource centre for Jewish music in Australia.

The Australian Archive of Jewish Music is located in the School of Music-Conservatorium, Performing Arts Building, Clayton Campus.

Indian Music

51. Tagore, Sourindro Mohun, A few lyrics of Owen Meredith [pseud.] set to Hindu music by Sourindro Mohun Tagore . . . (Calcutta: printed by I.C. Bose & Co. and pub. by Punchanan Mukerjee at Pathuriaghata, 1877)
*52. Tagore, Sourindro Mohun, Fifty tunes. (Calcutta: the author, 1878)* Click images to see enlarged views

53. Day, C. R. (Charles Russell), The music and musical instruments of southern India and the Deccan, With an introd. by A. J. Hipkins, plates drawn by Edith J. Hipkins and William Gibb. (London: Novello, Ewer, 1891)

In 1973 the then Department of Music, Monash University, decided to expand its course offerings in ethnomusicology to include-in addition to research methods and subject units on the music of Aboriginal Australia and Oceania, and Southeast Asia- subject units on the music of South Asia, East Asia (China, Korea and Japan) and sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, in addition to the remarkable collection of sound recordings and print publications that the Department had already established in the Main Library and the departmental library in both Western and non-Western music studies, efforts were made to add to the collection in the three new areas. Thus, the collection at Monash, carefully established over the years, is very possibly without equal in Australia in both the extent and significance of its ethnomusicological holdings. Some of the highlights from this collection appear in this exhibition. The section on South Asia relates to the research interests of a member of staff.

Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840-1914) of Calcutta, an elder relative of the well-known author and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913) Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), fulfilled in his own right an important role in the exchange of cultural information between East and West. In the last decades of the nineteenth century Sourindro Mohun Tagore became an important conduit for inter-cultural communication in colonial Bengal. He served as one of the hosts for the visit of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales in 1875, and also became known in Europe as early as the late 1870s. S. M. Tagore sent his publications and collections of musical instruments to members of royalty and learned institutions, and contributed (in absentia) to the deliberations of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Congresses of Orientalists, respectively held in Florence (1879), Berlin (1881) and Leyden (1883). Sourindro Mohun Tagore also has a legacy in Melbourne.

In April 1878 S. M. Tagore sent a parcel of books and pamphlets on 'Hindu' music to the Music Academy in Melbourne. As the Music Academy was a theatre venue and not a music institution, the Postmaster General forwarded the collection to the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, whose president at the time was Sir George Frederic Verdon. Verdon (1834-1896) was a high profile politician, banker and patron of the arts in Victoria. Verdon wrote to Tagore, acknowledging receipt of the materials and thanking him for his contribution to the library of the society. Thereupon, it seems, Sourindro Mohun Tagore sent at least two books to George Verdon, personally inscribed to him and dated 'Calcutta, 12/11/78'.

The first of these two books, A few lyrics of Owen Meredith set to Hindu music (1877), uses Western staff notation and sets twenty-seven poems to twenty-seven Indian rags. Owen Meredith is the nom de plume of Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, first Earl of Lytton, Viscount Knebworth (1831-1891), the Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880. Though his reputation rests on certain reforms in administration, such as abolishing inland customs, and on famine relief and reserving civil service posts for Indians, as well as on his aggressive policy in Afghanistan to counter Russian influence in the region, he was perhaps better known in those days as a poet and man of letters, the only son of the well-known English novelist, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton (1803-1873). This publication of musical settings in Indian rags of poems by Owen Meredith was offered to the Viceroy of India in December 1877 in celebration of the assumption by Queen Victoria of the title Empress of India, which the Viceroy had proclaimed on January 1st that year at a great darbar in Delhi.

Sourindro Mohun Tagore composed the tunes. Though one assumes that Western staff notation was consciously used to facilitate Tagore's desire to inform Westerners about Indian music, Tagore nonetheless clearly knew the limitations of Western notation for such a task. His reservation is eloquently noted in the Preface to the second book on display, Fifty tunes, composed and set to music (1878).

This book does not contain any poems, the tunes here being intended instead as instrumental music, as Tagore notes. A preliminary page contains additional interesting information: 'To the Hon'ble Sir Ashley Eden, K.C.S.I., Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, this book is most respectively dedicated by his most grateful and obliged servant, the author' (p. iii). The two final 'additional' pages in this book, as shown in the exhibition, document an interesting development in nineteenth-century Bengal. They note the use of an ensemble of Indian musicians to accompany, with Indian music, experimental theatrical presentations that combined Indian themes and stories with the techniques of Western theatrical presentation. One can again discern a marked sensitivity to and desire for inter-cultural communication among the intelligentsia of Bengal Indian society.

These two sources and other S. M. Tagore publications are quite valuable, and contain much data relevant for the history of musicology in India and abroad. They are also of interest from the point of view of the history of publishing and printing in Calcutta.

The two different pastel colours of the covers here, the printing of Western staff notation, the borders on the pages, and the multi-coloured presentation on selected pages, together with a plethora of fonts on title pages and pages of dedication, call attention to this relatively unknown data among the numerous publications of the composer, musician, musicologist and educator, Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore. In total his bibliography comprises some sixty-eight titles.

The book by Charles Russell Day (1860-1900), The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891), is a classic in the history of ethnomusicology. Known equally for the quality of the information in its seven chapters and for its sumptuous colour illustrations in seventeen plates and the associated commentary, its black-and-white drawings of the bridge of a vina, and of musicians and musical ensembles, also provide valuable historic evidence.

This copy is personally inscribed to Edith Hipkins, 'with the best wishes' of the author. The artist Edith J. Hipkins (fl.1880-1940), the daughter of Alfred James Hipkins, F.S.A. (1826-1903), contributed three plates in this lavish publication- Plates II, III and IV. The artist has noted in her own handwriting that the illustration of the South Indian vina shown in Plate II, which also shows an early sitar, was based on an instrument '200 years old in 1888'.

Alfred J. Hipkins, Edith's father, is known as a musicologist from his research on tunings, temperaments and the history of musical instruments, which takes note of extra-European traditions. He contributed the Introduction to this monograph. Cyril Ehrlich has noted in his entry about A. J. Hipkins in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.), that the Introduction by A. J. Hipkins to Day's monograph 'has been acclaimed by Ki Mantle Hood as a landmark in ethnomusicology'. In the Introduction A. J. Hipkins discusses the importance of establishing a world-wide perspective and simultaneously being sensitive to the great diversity of the musical and cultural particularities of local traditions.

Alfred J. Hipkins also was a friend and colleague of Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), and helped the latter scholar with research that contributed to the famous, stimulating and seminal paper of 1885 by A. J. Ellis, 'On the Musical Scales of Various Nations' (Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 33, pp. 485-527, 1102-11), another key early publication in the history of ethnomusicology. A. J. Hipkins is the author of a rare book in the exhibition, Musical Instruments: Historic, Rare and Unique (1888, repr. 1921).

Monash University is fortunate to have this copy of the important monograph by Charles Russell Day in its collection, not only for the notable value of any copy per se, but all the more so because of the personal connection in evidence here between the author and the first owner, Edith J. Hipkins, an artist and daughter of A. J. Hipkins, the author of its remarkable Introduction.

Music Instruments from India

Musical instruments from S. M. Tagore were on display at the Melbourne International Exhibition, 1880-81. It is not clear whether Tagore sent these instruments to the Melbourne Philharmonic Society at a slightly earlier date, or whether the Commissioners for India for the Exhibition requisitioned the instruments from Tagore. However that may be, remnants from the display of Indian musical instruments became deposited in the National Gallery of Victoria, and for some years have been on loan to Monash University.

Leading up to SIMS1988 in Melbourne, students in an ethnomusicological research methods subject investigated these instruments and data relating to them. Dr Adrian McNeil, a graduate of Monash University and a scholar and professional performer on the sarod, who is highly regarded in Australia and India, brought this work together then in a very effective way for an extensive display mounted in the Short Courses Centre, Monash University. Two of these instruments are on display here.

The stringed instrument, technically known as a chordophone in organology or the study of musical instruments, and the drum, technically known as a membranophone, respectively illustrate instruments belonging to the first two categories of hierarchy or rank among musical instruments in Indian tradition. The third and fourth ranks respectively consist of idiophones, instruments made of solid material such as cymbals, and wind instruments, or aerophones. In Indian tradition these four families are considered second in importance to the voice.

The stringed instrument is named bin. Though the instrument on display clearly is not a professional instrument, it nonetheless shows the basic elements of the bin of North India. This type is depicted in many miniature paintings from the sixteenth century onward. In showing the basic features of the bin, the crux of the instrument consists of a long hollow tube, to which two large gourd resonators are attached, one at each end. Another important feature is the wide, slightly curved Indian bridge. Each of the nineteen frets on this bin is secured to the tube by a string fastened around the back. Though this manner of attaching frets is used on the sitar, on a professional bin the frets are permanently set in wax. This instrument appears to be a hybrid in its structure. More realistic is the rather complicated bridge arrangement at the lower end of the instrument. The main bridge is mounted onto the back of a piece of wood carved as the chest and head of a bird, often a peacock. The main melody strings cross over this bridge. Similar but smaller bridges on each side, imitating the wings of the bird, serve the three additional strings. They are used for reinforcing the drone pitch, and for rhythmic punctuation. All three bridges have the gently arched surface common in the South Asian tradition, which provides a distinctively rich tone quality. Historically the bin is associated with Mughal court music in North India, especially the majestic dhrupad style of performance. Though the bin is not as much in vogue these days as earlier, its tradition is still maintained and supported by dedicated musicians and connoisseurs.

The pakhavaj of North India is a double-headed drum and has composite heads, with a tuning paste permanently attached to the right drumhead. Solid spools inserted beneath the lacing assist in determining the pitch of the instrument. The pakhavaj may be viewed as the northern version of the South Indian mridangam. In recent centuries the pakhavaj appears in miniature paintings accompanying a singer who is usually entertaining a royal patron. Today a highly skilled musician playing the pakhavaj accompanies vocalists who sing in the dhrupad genre.

The purpose of Sourindro Mohun Tagore in sending musical instruments and books about Indian music to Melbourne and to individuals and institutions in Europe and North America was to disperse information about what to him was Hindu music. These activities were part of the larger picture of the Bengal renaissance of the nineteenth century and have left a rich legacy in places far distant from Calcutta.

The Gamelan Digul

56. Margaret J. Kartomi. The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It: An Australian Link with the Indonesian Revolution. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002)

The gamelan Digul is named for the notorious Dutch East Indies prison camp at Tanah Merah in Upper (Boven) Digul (in Irian Jaya), where it was made. Its creator, the Indonesian musician and political activist Pontjopangrawit, was interned at Boven Digul between 1927 and 1932. Pontjopangrawit was allowed to return home to Surakarta in 1932, but the gamelan remained in Boven Digul, where it was played regularly and is known to have soothed the hearts of the exiles throughout the 1930s. In the 1940s, the gamelan was transported to Australia, where the Dutch and their prisoners took refuge from the Japanese. At first interned at Cowra, New South Wales, as enemy aliens, the ex-Digulists were finally released. Cultural activities within the Australian Indonesian community-often involving the gamelan Digul-served to create sympathy and interest for Indonesian independence, which was granted in 1945. Following the end of the War, the ex-Digulists were repatriated to Indonesia, sometimes in quite brutal circumstances. This time, the gamelan was left behind. Australia sympathisers donated it to the Museum of Victoria in 1946. In 1977 it came to the Department of Music at Monash University, where it is now housed in the Sumatran Music Archive. Carefully restored in a special conservation project in 1998, the gamelan is treasured as a rare antique, which preserves our knowledge of Surakarta iron gamelans made in the 1920s.

To observers accustomed to the beauty of the traditional Javanese court gamelans, the appearance of the gamelan Digul is rather strange. The best Javanese gamelan sets usually consist of over fifty beautiful-looking instruments made of polished bronze with elaborately carved wooden bodies. However, many gamelan sets, especially in the poorer villages, have a more rustic appearance than the courtly, government-owned and best privately owned gamelans, and are made mainly of iron and wood, or even bamboo. Pontjopangrawit made the gamelan Digul entirely from materials found in the prison camp, including pans, eating utensils, scrap metal, unused doors (some of them with hinges still on them) and wooden packing crates. Out of such materials he fashioned 19 instruments, 15 of which made their way to Monash University: four irama-related instruments and eleven lagu-related instruments in two complementarily tuned sets of sléndro and pélog.

The instrument displayed here has not been identified with certainty: Bp Al Suwardi grouped it with another instrument as kethuk-kempyang (a small boxed horizontal gong). Pontjopangrawit has made the gong kettles out of thick, treated iron rantang (portable food bowls), gently and patiently beating the metal base of each rantang with a metal hammer to produce the desired pélog or sléndro pitches. The court gamelans of the Hadiningrat palace in Surakarta (where Pontjopangrawit became a court musician) are traditionally painted red and gold while those of the Mankunegaran palace are painted pale (young rice-field) green and gold. The gamelan Digul is painted green and yellow. Cross-sectional paint pigment analysis indicates that the gamelan was first painted light green, probably by Pontjopangrawit and other inmates at Tanah Merah. It was probably repainted on its arrival in Cowra POW camp.

58. Photo image - The Australian connection
The Roemah Indonesia at the Hotel Metropole, Melbourne, 'home' to many ex-Digulists and other Indonesians, 1943-1945. (Photo: Penjoeloeh, 9 July, 1943).

In December 1943, the Australian Government obliged the Dutch to release the ex-Digulists - who were then, such is the irony of their history, welcomed by the Dutch into their insufficiently large workforce in Australia and housed at Dutch expense in hotels or hostels. Indonesians gained valuable experience working for the Netherlands East Indies government in exile in Australia.

59. Photo image - Creator of the Gamelan Digul
Pontjopangrawit playing a rebab in a class at Kokar in the 1950s. (Photo from the SMK8 Archive, Surakarta, by courtesy of Bp Walidi).

Some of his former students say they preferred to study with Pontjopangrawit partly because he sat in front of them and taught rebab backwards, bowing with his left hand (although he was right-handed) so that they could more easily imitate his physical playing movements.

Source: Margaret J. Kartomi. The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It: An Australian Link with the Indonesian Revolution. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002)

Click to view diagram of surviving instruments of the GAMELAN DIGUL arranged in Playing Position

Korean Music

From the 1960s Western style composition has flourished in South Korea. A large and diverse range of compositions have appeared, covering all mediums from orchestral works to music for film, television and popular culture. In addition, there has been a drive to promote traditional music through the revival of folk and court music genres suppressed during the period of Japanese colonialization (1910-45). As well, compositions for traditional instruments exploiting their potential through new playing techniques have further increased the sonic possibilities available to current Korean composers.

Two such composers, noted for their ability to combine successfully materials from both Western and Eastern cultures are Chan-hae Lee, Hi Kyung Kim

60. Chan-hae Lee (b. 1945, Seoul) - The current chairperson of the Korean Society of Women Composers, Chan-hae Lee studied composition at Yonsei University and at the Catholic University of America. She is a Professor of Composition at Yonsei University. 'Her works are typically contrapuntal and favour progressive structural developments over strict forms. In music that is simple and direct Lee chooses subjects that reflect her Christianity and her interest in music education.'

Lee's works cover a range of genres, they include compositions for solo and orchestral works using both Western and Korean traditional instruments, chamber music, a large number of solo vocal and choral works, musicals and an opera Back to the Origin (2003).

In Sorickil (Sound of Life Journey) for Solo Daegeum (2000), Lee has successfully combined her contemporary style of composition with this instrument of ancient origin. Here she has taken advantage of the Daegeum's tonal range and sound qualities through the use of ornamental figurations, varied dynamics and a variety of performance techniques including flutter tonguing, vibrato, microtonal shading and verbal sounds through the instrument. The work is generally atonal in character, however short tonal motifs appear occasionally, an example-the middle section piu mosso begins with a rhythmic G minor pattern. No time signatures are indicated and tempo rubato allows the performer a degree of flexibility. Two elements which imply a Korean spirit are the use of varying degrees of vibrato and microtonal inflection on sustained notes, and the final B flat fading from pp to ppp, eventually decaying to ppppp. The ending is reminiscent of Korean court music, with diminishing dynamics and the concept of youm, where the sound after the note is of heightened significance. This work, with Hi-kyung Kim's Riteul III is to be presented at the 'Korean Music Today' concert on 14 July 2004 as part of the SIMS program at the Victorian College of the Arts.

An active member of several organizations, as well as Chairperson of the KSWL, Prof Lee is currently Secretary-General of the Asian Composers League (ACL), vice-chair ACL Korea Division and Vice-President Korean Women's Association for Culture and Arts. She has worked tirelessly in promoting Korean music, particularly the role of women in composition, education and the arts. Lee has been the recipient of several awards including the 1998 Korean National Composition Prize, 2000 Universal Medal, in 2001 from the American Biography Institute USA, Outstanding Woman of the 20th Century and the 2002 International Rome Choral Music Award.

The Daegeum or Chottae is a transverse bamboo flute, approximately 80 centimetres in length, with six finger holes, a blowing hole and a membrane covered hole. The relatively large mouth-hole allows for gradation of pitch. A opening covered by a thin reed membrane is placed between the mouth-hole and the first-finger hole, this creates its distinctive buzzing sound. To play the instrument the performer must rest the extension of the blowing hole on his left shoulder and bend the wrist sharply back to reach the finger holes. The Daegeum, a popular instrument since the period of Unified Shilla (668-935), is used in both traditional Korean court and folk music.

The premiere performance of the work was given at the 'International Festival of Women in Music Today', April 2003 in Seoul. A further two performances were given in March, 2004 as part of the Launching of the Seoul Contemporary Opera Company.

The opera 'Back to the Origin,' was indirectly the result of the catastrophe of 11 September, 2001 in New York. Lee's son, a resident in a New York hospital had been involved in treating many victims of the disaster. This became the catalyst for her composition which is based on the theme 'love as the foundation of our existence'. Lee, who also wrote the libretto, has treated the story allegorically by symbolically linking events of the ancient past and present. Six characters represent good and evil; three are in pursuit of truth in different ways, two after worldly success and another in attaining power at all costs.

Click image to see an enlarged view

Source: Keith Howard, 'Chan Hae Lee' The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, eds: J. A. Sadie and R. Samuel, Macmillan, London, 1994, 135 & 272.

61. Hi Kyung Kim (b. 1954, Seoul) - American composer of Korean birth. Kim studied at Seoul National University and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at IRCAM and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. A member of the music department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she founded the Pacific Rim Festival of Contemporary Music there in 1996. Kim's extensive research on Elliott Carter and traditional Korean music is reflected in her compositions. Rhythmic complexity and formal intricacy underlie even her most accessible works, and many of her structural and timbral ideas owe something to Korean folk music. She has been the recipient of a number of awards including: The Walter Hinrichsen award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Fellowships from the Tanglewood Music Centre, the MacDowell Colony, the Charles Dodge Foundation and Meet the Composer.

Rituel I (2001) was written to commemorate two friends whom she had lost to illness. Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean was a Korean-American poet and a Buddhist whereas Marnie Dilling was a Catholic sister and an ethnomusicologist specializing in Korean music. The piece paraphrases a shamanistic ceremony and employs a Korean dancer-percussionist who performs a spiritual ritual. Besides the Korean percussion instruments played by the dancer, an ensemble of classical instruments accompany the ritual and in the last section of the piece, a Christian hymn appears to reflect the composer's own faith.

The success of Rituel I brought forth an expanded work Rituel II (2002) which was dedicated to the victims of September 11. The Korean instrumental section of the ensemble was significantly augmented for both the American and Korean performances. It incorporated chanting by a Buddhist monk, and the American premiere featured Sun-Ock Lee, a Zen dancer. As in Rituel I, both versions included tunes derived from hymns.

Sources: Joshua Kosman, 'Hi Kyung Kim,' Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 4/1/02) http://www.grovemusic.com; Personal communication, Jinmi Huh Davidson, June 2003.

62. Isang Yun (1917-1995)-was the first Korean born composer to achieve widespread international recognition and success. In 1956 he attended the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1957 moved to the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin to continue his studies in the techniques and music of the Second Viennese School. It was there that he began to develop his own distinctive style; incorporating East Asian philosophy and musical elements within the framework of contemporary Western composition.

Yun's fundamental aim as a composer was to develop Korean music through Western means, combining East-Asian performing practice with European instruments, and expressing an Asian imagination in contemporary Western musical terms.

In 1967, ostensibly because of communistic leanings, Yun and his wife were kidnapped by the South Korea CIA and forcibly returned to Seoul where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, after considerable international pressure he was released and returned to Germany; where he taught firstly in Hanover and from 1970 at the Hochschule fur Musik Berlin, being appointed Professor of Composition there in 1973. In 1971 he became a German citizen and remained in Germany for the rest of his life.

Source: Kunz, H 'Isang Yun' New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie, vol. 20 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 696.

Korean Musical Instruments

A double headed hour-glass shaped drum with a long history of use in Korea, is found in most genres of Korean music. Traditionally the skin heads varied in thickness, thin on the right and thicker on the left. Originally horse-skin was used, nowadays the right head is covered in either dog-skin or sheep-skin and the left with cowhide. In most forms of music the left side is struck with the palm of the hand, producing a low soft sound, on the right with a slim bamboo stick, a hard crisp sound. For nongak (farmers' music), usually performed out-of-doors, the performer uses a bamboo mallet with a wood ball on the top, and hits both right and left heads; in the right hand a sturdy bamboo stick strikes the centre of the right head with virtuosic technique. The main purpose of the instrument is to present structured rhythmic patterns as an accompaniment to vocal and instrumental performances. However, in nongak, there is a considerable solo repertoire.

Source: Suzanne Crowder Han, Notes on Things Korean, N.J/Seoul: Hollym, Elizabeth, , 1995, p110.

A small end-blown bamboo notched flute, approximately 40cm in length, four front finger-holes and a thumbhole on the back. Used mainly in chamber music ensembles, it is a popular instrument with a pure and delicate tone.

Source: Suzanne Crowder Han, Notes on Things Korean, N.J/Seoul: Hollym, Elizabeth, , 1995, p135.

Japanese Music Archive

Source: Alison Tokita. The Japanese Music Archive: Catalogue. (Clayton, Vic.: Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University, 1995). Available from the Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University.

Nineteenth Century Lithography

66. Charles d'Albert, The Persian Polka. (London: Chappell and Co.[c. 1858])

The front cover of this handsome music sheet is a chromolithograph by John Brandard (1812-1863). Lithographic techniques were first used to illustrate sheet music in Britain from the 1820s. These early covers were often hand coloured until the introduction of colour lithography, which allowed mass production of coloured sheet music covers. John Brandard was a prolific artist, illustrating dozens of waltzes, polkas and other dances for the London conductor Louis Jullien from 1844. He was considered one of the finest illustrators of this form in his day. The printer of this piece, M. and N. Hanhart, were one of the best-known lithographic printing firms in this field. Composer Charles d'Albert wrote many popular dance pieces which were played at balls and dance gatherings in Victorian England.

Source: A. Hyatt King, Four hundred years of music printing, (London: British Library, 1979); Ronald Pearsall, Victorian Sheet Music Covers. (Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles, 1972)

Australian Patriotic and Nationalistic Songs

Music used to express national pride is sometimes written specifically for the purpose, and sometimes adopted as patriotic, by virtue of its associations or performance environment. In Australia, especially during the nineteenth century when a significant proportion of the population was of British origin, patriotic devotion was as often felt for the 'mother country' Britain, as for the newly adopted colony. Patriotic music provided a link to the stability and familiarity of Britain, as opposed to the pioneering and often harsh way of life in the new land. As Australia progressed from its colonial phase its participation in foreign wars, Federation, the influx of migrants from non-British backgrounds and its growing identity as a nation among Pacific and Asian counties, the patriotic music genre shifted to reflect an independent Australian rather than a series of British colonies. The selection of sheet music on display reflects these various periods in Australian history. Federation, the South African War, World Wars One and Two, the America's Cup and the many competitions held in the search for a national anthem or song. Native fauna and flora also feature heavily in the inspiration for not only the music but the cover illustrations as well. This music exposes a rich seam of Australian culture, reflecting our history and our hopes.

Source: Georgina Binns. John Bull Jnr. vs. Blinky Bill: Music for an Australian Republic in Aflame with music: 100 years of music at the University of Melbourne / edited by Brenton Broadstock [et al.],(Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Studies in Australian Music, University of Melbourne, 1996: 289-296; Georgina Binns, 'Patriotic song' in Warren Bebbington, Oxford Companion to Australian Music, (Melbourne: OUP, 1997).

Australian Location Songs

Australian's sense of place is reflected in the many songs utilising place names in their titles. Pride and perhaps a hint of competitiveness (which is still experienced today!) have propelled this art form forward especially during the twentieth century. Towns named with multi-syllable Aboriginal names lend themselves well to a popular style of lyrics. Jack O'Hagan is probably the most famous composer of these songs, including On the Road to Gundagai and Where the dog sits on the Tuckerbox (Five miles from Gundagai) amongst his most popular. Generic song titles were also employed, allowing the performer to interpolate their own particular town or place to their liking. Songs such as the Sun-raysed Waltz by Reginald A.A. Stoneham, perform two roles-promoting awareness of a particular town, but also advertising a product.

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Songs from Music Theatre

Music theatre, musicals, pantomimes, operettas and other forms of theatrical music entertainment have been part of the Australian musical landscape from the earliest days of European settlement. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the musical productions were largely British in origin, but later, pantomimes were adapted to include relevant Australian content. Company's including W.S. Lyster's Opera Company, J.C. Williamson, George Musgrove, and J. & N. Tait have been prominent in importing companies and popular overseas productions, as well as assisting in the development of Australian musicals. Recent research has unburied information relating to over 600 Australian musicals-an untapped area of research to explore and expose. The selection of sheet music in this display is largely from Australian produced productions in the twentieth century. Their colourful and dramatic graphics appeal to a public who were regularly attending performances in an era lacking television and other digital entertainments. The inclusion of photographs of performers has a commercial imperative, but also indicates the cult of personality that evolved around productions, much as it does today in the selling and branding of new musicals.

Music at Monash

Introduction

E.W. Cole - Music at the Cole's Book Arcade

Australian Folk music

Australian Aboriginal Music

Esther Rofe (1904-2000)

Henry Tate (1873-1926)

Isaac Nathan (1790?-1864)

Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)

Australian Music Periodicals

Musical Dictionaries

Australian Musical Albums

Cantor Abraham Adler and his circle (1916-2003)

The Australian Archive of Jewish Music

Indian Music

Music Instruments from India

The Gamelan Digul

Korean Music

Korean Musical Instruments

Japanese Music Archive

Nineteenth Century Lithography

Australian Patriotic and Nationalistic Songs

Australian Location Songs

Songs from Music Theatre