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Abstract
This paper looks at the role of ‘miscellany’ in concert programmes. In The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, William Weber identifies the use of miscellany as an inclusive organizing principle for eighteenth-century European concert programmes. He goes on to discuss the shift that took place in the nineteenth century to more homogeneous and exclusive programmes. This paper investigates the ways in which the miscellany principle might be observed in community concert programmes in a colonial city. This study focuses on Newcastle, NSW, during a period of rapid immigration—the 1870s. Through archival research, community concert programmes, newspaper reports and reviews from 1870 to 1879 are analyzed from the perspective of programme structure, repertoire, performers and function. In particular, there is a focus on the use of Weber's miscellany concept and its potential for building community through inclusivity. This was important for a transplanted community whose origins were a class-structured society that linked taste in music to social standing. This paper will show how, by using the older framework of miscellany and its inherent potential for compromise, collegiality and collaboration, the community could promote itself as thriving, respectable and democratic.
Notes
1 William Weber, ‘Miscellany vs Homogeneity: Concert Programmes at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in the 1880s’, in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914, ed. Christina Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), 299–320.
2 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008).
3 See, for example, Suzanne Cole, ‘As Much by Force of Circumstances as by Ambition: The Programming Practices of the Melbourne Liedertafel Societies, 1880–1905’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 2 (2005), 107–32.
4 Notably Deborah Crisp, ‘Amateurs and Professionals: A Snapshot of Musical Life in a Country Town, 1860–1865’, Australasian Music Research 1 (1997), 103–140; and Anne Doggett ‘“And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long”: Musical Life in Ballarat, 1851–71’ (PhD thesis, University of Ballarat, 2006).
5 Of these six newspapers, only the Maitland Mercury was digitized when researching this article. The other five newspapers are held in microfiche form in the University of Newcastle library, NSW, Australia.
6 Weber, The Great Transformation, 1.
7 Graeme Skinner, ‘Towards a General History of Australian Musical Composition: First National Music, 1788–c.1860’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2011), 69–72.
8 Roger Covell and Gordon Kerry, ‘Australia: II Western Art Music’, in Grove Music Online, ed. Deane L. Root (Accessed 4 August 2012), http://0www.oxfordmusiconline.com.library.newcastle.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/music/40021
9 For the establishment of town bands, see John Whiteoak, ‘“Pity the Bandless Towns”: Brass Banding in Australian Rural Communities before World War Two’, Rural Society 13 (2003), 287–311.
10 Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville (Kensington: UNSW Press 1990), 28; and John Whiteoak, ‘Popular Music’, in Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, ed. Aline Scott-Maxwell and John Whiteoak (Sydney: Currency Press 2003), 529.
11 This occurred in Newcastle when the first professional theatre, the Victoria, Perkins St., was built in 1876, complete with pit, stalls, boxes and dress circle.
12 Doggett, ‘And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long’, 11.
13 Maurice Daly, The Growth of Newcastle and its Suburbs (Newcastle, NSW: Hunter Valley Research Foundation 1966), 6.
14 James Docherty, Newcastle (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger 1983), 14.
15 Ellen McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District of New South Wales, 1860–1900’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 1979), 13.
16 Docherty, Newcastle, 15.
17 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 16. Table is drawn from ibid., 12–13.
18 Docherty, Newcastle, 21.
19 See Tracey Banivanua and Penny Edmonds (eds.), ‘Introduction: Making Space in the Settler Colony’, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 4.
20 Cited in Elizabeth Lucas, ‘Hear my Song’, in Riverchange: Six New Histories of the Hunter, ed. Cynthia Hunter (Newcastle: Newcastle Region Public Library 1998), 155.
21 For more on music and the creation of social space, see Martin Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music (Oxford: Berg Publishers 1994), 1–27.
22 The Newcastle Philharmonic Society first appears in print in 1845 and is reported in the Maitland Mercury (11 July 1846), 2; and Maitland Mercury (12 August 1846), 2. It then disappears, resurfacing briefly between 1858 and 1859, then in late 1879 in Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (8 December 1879), 3.
23 Brass bands were formed early in Newcastle's history and are noted in the newspapers from the 1860s.
24 Bob James, ‘Changing the Record: 19th Century Origins of the Labour Movement’, in Riverchange, ed. Cynthia Hunter (Newcastle: Newcastle Region Library 1998), 95–7.
25 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 76–7.
26 For example, in 1876 the Victoria Theatre, Perkins St., the Wallsend School of Arts and Newcastle and Wallsend Protestant Halls were built. For more on the new buildings and their implication for the local entertainment industry, see: Helen English and Stephen Wye, ‘Musical Entertainment in Newcastle, 1876’, in A World of Popular Entertainments: An Edited Volume of Critical Essays, ed. Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar's Press 2012), 207–20.
27 ‘Waratah’, Newcastle Chronicle (22 June 1875), 3.
28 Doggett, ‘And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long’, 152–80.
29 ‘Review of Newcastle, prepared expressly for the Newcastle Chronicle’, Newcastle Chronicle (7 August 1875), 3.
30 This also happened in Ballarat. See Doggett ‘And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long’, 283–4.
31 ‘New Public School Wallsend’, Newcastle Chronicle (1 July 1871), 3. See also ‘Hanbury Public School, School Building fund’, Newcastle Chronicle (4 February 1871), 1 and ‘Grand Piano Recital … in aid of the Newcastle Hospital’, Newcastle Chronicle (4 September 1873), 1.
32 ‘Review of Newcastle’, 3.
33 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 159.
34Ibid., 149.
35Ibid., 162.
36Ibid., 164–5.
37 See Herr Becker's recital at the School of Arts, West Maitland, to raise finds for the Ladies Benevolent Society: Newcastle Chronicle (8 May 1873), 1.
38 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 166.
39 See advertisement: ‘A Concert Will Be Held’, Morpeth Herald (12 March 1870), 7.
40 From the early nineteenth century a group of philosophers and critics including W. H. Wackenroder, Jean Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann argued that only instrumental music could embody an ideal of musical purity. This was countered by a group that included Richard Wagner and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that music was enhanced by the addition of text.
41 William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992); and William Weber, Music and the Middle Classes: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004).
42 Weber, The Great Transformation.
43Ibid., 13–14.
44Ibid., 14.
45Ibid., 26–9.
46Ibid., 60–1.
47Ibid., 41.
48 Weber, Music and the Middle Classes, xx–xxi.
49 Examples of these idealists were Robert Schumann in Germany, François-Joseph Fétis in France and J.W. Davison in Britain; see Weber, Music and the Middle Classes, xxi.
50 For more on taste and class, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1984), 1–16.
51 Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1997), 18.
52 See, for example, ‘Melbourne Philharmonic Society’, The Argus (25 March 1875), 6 (Accessed 1 June 2013), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11514314
53 ‘Herr Becker's Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (22 May 1875), 6.
54Miners' Advocate (2 February 1876), 4.
55 See Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class and Surveillance (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin 1993), 16; and Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage 1997), 5.
56 Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 3.
57 Finch, The Classing Gaze, 36; and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge 1995), 46.
58 Russell, Popular Music in England, 24; and Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class In Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978), 35.
59 See McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 265–6
60 See Weber, The Great Transformation, Illustration 13.
61 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press 1992). Weber alludes briefly to Habermas, when discussing public life in eighteenth-century England; Weber, The Great Transformation, 18.
62 The Miners' Advocate and Northumberland Recorder ran from 1873 to 1876, when it was superseded by the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate.
63 Examples are to be found in: Miners' Advocate (4 March 1876), 3; Newcastle Morning Herald (23 May 1876), 3; Newcastle Morning Herald (2 June 1876), 3; Newcastle Morning Herald (7 June, 1876), 3; and Newcastle Morning Herald (1 July 1876), 3.
64 Weber, Music and the Middle Classes, 37.
65Newcastle Morning Herald (18 December 1879), 3.
66 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 15–16.
67 Daly, The Growth of Newcastle, 14–15.
68Newcastle Chronicle (10 June 1871), 2.
69 Atkinson Alfred Tighe, police magistrate at Waratah, and John Young Neilson, colliery manager at Wallsend, both regularly chaired community benefit concerts. Tighe also performed as a reciter.
70 Editorial: ‘A Daily Paper’, Miners' Advocate (25 March 1876), 8: ‘Local items and paragraphic records of occurrences which are now too often considered beneath the notice of journalists, will find a place in this journal, and reports of all meetings in the City and District will be zealously looked after and collected’.
71 See ‘Wallsend Harmonic Society’, Newcastle Chronicle (20 June 1872), 1.
72 See, for example, ‘Grand Sacred Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (4 March 1871), 1; and ‘A Grand Sacred and Secular Concert’, Newcastle Morning Herald (6 July 1876) 3.
73 ‘Grand Concert’, Miners' Advocate (4 March 1876), 3. See ‘The Famous Welsh Singer, Mrs Parker’ and ‘Brown Street Mutual Improvement Association’, Newcastle Chronicle (29 July 1871), 2: ‘… and when we add that Mrs Harvey presided at the piano, success was certain to be effected’.
74 See Weber, The Great Transformation, Illustrations 13, 20 and 21.
75Ibid., 40–1; and Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 101.
76 This musical collection is available online, http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn2341558. No date is given but numbers 1–7 are advertised in Western Australian Times, Perth (18 September 1877), 1.
77Newcastle Chronicle (14 January 1873), 1; and Newcastle Chronicle (31 January 1874), 5.
78 ‘Moonlight Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (23 March 1872), 5.
79 See, for example, Newcastle Chronicle (14 February 1871), 1; Newcastle Chronicle (6 June 1872), 1; and Newcastle Chronicle (11 April 1872), 1.
80 ‘Mrs Cunninghame's Grand Instrumental and Vocal Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (2 March 1871), 1; and ‘Grand Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (8 May 1873), 1.
81 McEwen, ‘The Newcastle Coalmining District’, 174.
82Ibid., 216–17.
83Ibid., 180.
84 ‘A Grand Amateur Entertainment’, Newcastle Morning Herald (2 May 1878), 3.
85 This occurred frequently in Wallsend, where Mr. J.Y. Neilson, Chairman of the local Board, colliery manager and President of the Wallsend Harmonic Society, was a keen supporter of community events; see Newcastle Chronicle (1 July 1871), 3; Newcastle Chronicle (12 October 1872), 5; and Newcastle Chronicle (27 February 1875), 6.
86 Works by local composers included ‘Love's Philosophy’ by Franz Becker, given its premiere on 11 February 1870 (Newcastle Chronicle [10 February 1870], 1) and ‘Little Tom's Polka’ by Mr. Prince, played at the benefit concert for his widow (Newcastle Chronicle [9 May 1872], 1).
87 For example, selections from Verdi's Erani (Newcastle Morning Herald [11 December 1879], 3) and Donizetti's Favorita (Newcastle Chronicle [2 March 1871], 1), Overture from Rossini's Tancredi arranged for piano violin (Newcastle Morning Herald [10 July 1876], 3), Variations on ‘Home Sweet Home’ for violin (Newcastle Morning Herald [15 April 1876], 3) and Fantasy on themes from Rigoletto for piano (Newcastle Chronicle [4 September 1873], 1).
88Newcastle Chronicle (1 July 1871), 3.
89 ‘Grand Concert’, Miners' Advocate (4 March 1876), 3.
90 See ‘City Hall, Newcastle’, Newcastle Chronicle (10 February 1870), 1. In this concert, Franz Becker performs six times with local amateurs.
91Miners' Advocate (8 March 1876), 3.
92Newcastle Chronicle (24 April 1875), 3.
93Newcastle Chronicle (17 September 1870), 3.
94 ‘Herr Becker's Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (22 May 1875), 3.
95Newcastle Chronicle (19 June 1875), 6.
96Miners' Advocate (2 February 1876), 4.
97 See, for example, ‘The Tunnel Has Worked One Half Day This Week To Date’, ‘Waratah’, Miners' Advocate (8 March 1876), 3.
98 ‘Concert’, Newcastle Chronicle (25 November 1875), 4.
99Newcastle Chronicle (15 September 1870), 2.
100Newcastle Morning Herald (25 September 1879), 3.
101 Examples of inter-community support were: the Lambton Band and Choir performing at the Newcastle School of Arts to raise money for a memorial stone (Newcastle Chronicle [23 September 1871], 5; the Wallsend Choir performing in aid of Hanbury Public School Newcastle Chronicle [4 February 1871]), the Lambton Choral Union and various performers from Lambton and Wallsend at Greta Mechanics' Institute (Newcastle Morning Herald [22 September 1877], 1), and the Wallsend Amateur Minstrels in aid of the Lambton Fire Brigade (Newcastle Morning Herald [6 October 1876], 3).
102 ‘Concert at the City Hall’, Newcastle Chronicle (4 December 1875), 4.
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Notes on contributors
Helen English
Helen English is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Newcastle where her current research is on colonial music making, with a focus on mining communities of the Hunter Valley.
Email: [email protected]