The homepage
and
weblog of
Graeme Skinner
and
Austral Harmony
Australian colonial music at Austral Harmony ...
A chronological checklist of colonial
Australian musical compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions:
- Checklist
1788-1840
- Checklist 1841-50
- Checklist 1851-55
- Checklist 1856-60
- Checklist 1861-65
- Checklist 1866-70 (currently
being built ... now up to mid 1866)
AND A bibliography
of Australian music and musicians of the colonial era
(always
under construction, as any good and useful bibliography should be ...)
NEW Readings in Australian music history (under construction)
Links to A biographical register of colonial Australian musicians (gradually also, being joined by some later colonial musicians) in left column ... entries on, to date, over 2000 individuals
And the latest (alas, also running late) program posts from the 1888 Centennial Exhibition Orchestral Series ... click here
POST 24 APRIL 2013
Dullrazor's Yowyang ...
Early "colonial production" in the arts and letters was as prodigious as, today, it is overlooked. A case in point is the satirical Yowyang, a poem in seven cantos, by Janus N. Dullrazor (the N for Nicodemus), of Launceston, Tasmania, which appeared in 1859. Trove not only brings up letters from the author, and extracts reproduced in the press, but also 2 still extant copies of the first and only printed edition great work ...
POST 14 APRIL 2013
Some supportive feedback ...
Email ...
Hello, I am finding the work you are doing on early Australian music very interesting. It is wonderful that is freely available for people to view. Below is an article that has Mr. Martin as bandmaster of the 99th Regiment in 1852. I hope it is of use to you. Thanks, Fiona Hickie (30 April 2013) http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2958244
Notice in the journal literature from Robyn Holmes (Senior Curator, National Library of Australia) ...
Exemplifying use of this new research tool [TROVE], musicologist Graeme Skinner has written a definitive history of Australian colonial music, cross-checking all known holdings with citations and advertisements of Australian compositions in colonial newspapers and other sources. He has identified a comprehensive and accurately-dated list of 410 known Australian works composed between 1788 and 1860, of which Australian libraries hold 73% or 297 works. Of these, 204 are held at the National Library. His index is enabling the Library to update both catalogue records and authority records, as well as to add or modify biographical records of Australian composers or performers in Music Australia/Trove (each with a unique people or ‘party’ identifier that links the people to the works they created). The Library also now has an improved desiderata list that may yet elicit rare surviving copies from around the world.
References: Robyn Holmes, “Music at the National Library of Australia”, Fontes artis musicae 58/3 (July-September 2011), 212-226; this extract 218: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/159542983
POST 2 APRIL 2013
NLA's new iPad app FORTE
The National Library of Australia's new iPad app, FORTE, was released last week and is now available as a free download in the iTunes app store. It allows easy pad viewing of the NLA's entire digitised sheet music archive (over 13,000 items) ... just sit you pad on the music stand and get singing and playing ... watch the NLA's demonstration video to see FORTE in action
POST 21 DECEMBER 2012
Colonial Christmas ...
 |
Christmas 1852 |
For Christmas 1863, Ernesto Spagnoletti junior
composed Our Australian
Christmas Song:
We welcome thee, old Christmas,
To this happy land of ours,
We welcome thee with sunshine,
We’ll strew thy path with flowers.
Our beauteous birds shall greet thee,
Glad welcome shall they sing
And wild flowers’ fragrance meet thee,
Borne on the Zephyr’s wing.
We have no wreath of holly,
No branch of mistletoe,
But we’ve a bush for Christmas,
And smiling lips below,
No fireside cheer we offer,
No yule log blazing high,
But the sunny smile of heaven
Beams in our summer sky.
If this deathless attempt at placing Christmas geographically here seems familiar, remember it was written 75 years before William G. James’s popular Australian Christmas Carols !
SEASON'S GREETINGS or BAH HUMBUG ... whichever you prefer
POST 30 NOVEMBER 2012
Centennial Exhibition Orchestral Series
Melbourne
August 1888-January 1889
Over the past four months I have posted, 124 years to the day, details of the extraordinary concert series which began in Melbourne on 1 August 1888, and which eloquently demonstrated the musical progress and achievements of this settler colonial culture. The concert series of the Centennial International Exhibition, marking the centenary of British settlement, was a musical point of arrival, and also of closure of the incipient nation's musical nineteenth century. Now I have just two more months of concerts to post until the close of the Exhibition at the end of January 1889. I hope to post the last program, 124 years to the day, at the end of January 2013. Links to the relevant post will be loaded onto this page ...
For AUGUST 1888 concerts
... click here
For SEPTEMBER 1888 concerts
... click here
For OCTOBER 1888 concerts
... click here
For NOVEMBER 1888 concerts ...
click here
For DECEMBER 1888 concerts ...
click here
For JANUARY 1889 concerts ... to be posted January 2013