Gendered and Endangered Musical Artefacts: Owner-bound Popular Sheet-music Albums in Jazz-age Australasia

Abstract

The article considers owner-bound albums of popular songs as gendered cultural artefacts within the context of 1920s modernity and music technology, focusing on two women's albums from New Zealand. Such albums, which continued a tradition from the previous century, arguably represent a somewhat different engagement by women with popular music in this era than that represented by the archetypal jazz-age flapper. The individualized selection of songs in the albums demonstrates their importance as a site for identity construction that maintained a social place for popular music away from the jazz palais, the dance band and the gramophone. The albums also foreground the significance of an ‘Australasian’ connection in popular music and entertainment as part of a wider global Anglo-American sphere of popular culture.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Rosemary Richards for providing access to her bound albums, directing me to important secondary sources and for her comments on my 2013 paper (see note 1), and to Richard Overell (Rare Books Collection, Monash University Library) and Evelyn Portek, Christine Webster and Jennifer Hill (Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library, University of Melbourne) for assistance in accessing the bound albums in their collections.

Notes

¹ This article is an extended version of a conference paper: Aline Scott-Maxwell, ‘Interrogating the Jazz-age Australasian Sheet-music Album: Technology, Gender and Identity’, in Shifting Sounds, Musical Flow: a Collection of Papers from the 2012 IASPM Australia/New Zealand Conference, ed. Oli Wilson and Sarah Attfield (Dunedin, New Zealand: IASPM Australia/New Zealand, 2013), 159–69.

² Owner-bound albums are referred to as ‘binder's volumes’ in American secondary sources.

³ Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

⁴ See for example: Tony Mitchell and John Whiteoak, ‘New Zealanders in Music’, in Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia, ed. John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell (Sydney: Currency House, 2003): 455–8; Aleisha Ward, ‘Fascinating Rhythm: Australian and American Influences on Swing in New Zealand’, in Wilson and Attfield (eds.), Shifting Sounds, Musical Flow, 187–97; and John Whiteoak, ‘Across The Big Pond: Mapping Early “Jazz” Activity in New Zealand through Australian Jazz Historiography and Sources’, in Jazz Aotearoa: Notes Towards a New Zealand History, ed. Richard Hardie and Allan Thomas (Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand: Steel Roberts, 2009), 14–40.

⁵ Barbara Cameron, ‘From Charleston to Cha Cha: the Dancing Years of Olive Rowe’, in Double Time: Women in Victoria—150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1985), 333.

⁶ Whiteoak, ‘Across the Big Pond’, 25; and Chris Bourke, Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964 (Auckland University Press, 2010), 20.

⁷ Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925, Vol. 6: The Twenties (London: Charles Scribner's, 1935), 493.

⁸ Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005), 115 and 16.

⁹ Bruce Johnson, The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2000), 66.

¹⁰Sydney Morning Herald (1 April 1926), 5.

¹¹ Johnson, The Inaudible Music, 68–9.

¹² John Whiteoak, ‘Australian Women in Performance-Time Composition: 1880–1925’, in Repercussions: Australian Composing Women's Festival and Conference 1994, ed. Thérèse Radic (National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, 1995), 21–4; John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia, 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 61–9, 149 and 184; and Bourke, Blue Smoke, 8ff.

¹³ John Whiteoak, ‘Popular Music, Militarism, Women, and the Early “Brass Band” in Australia’, Australasian Music Research 6 (2001), 27–48.

¹⁴ Kay Dreyfus, Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of Australia's All-girl Bands and Orchestras to the End of the Second World War (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 44 ff. Published sources on New Zealand indicate that the situation there was comparable with Australia. See, for example, references to women in Bourke, who also notes that women dance band musicians were more common in rural areas. Bourke, Blue Smoke, 60.

¹⁵ Peter Game, The Music Sellers (Melbourne: The Hawthorn Press, 1976), 170.

¹⁶ Ross Laird, Sound Beginnings: The Early Record Industry in Australia (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 32; and Music Trader (31 October 1925), 5.

¹⁷ ‘Present Favourite Jazz Songs’, Graphic of Australia (16 August 1923), 13.

¹⁸The Land (N.S.W) (27 October 1911), 14.

¹⁹The Sydney Morning Herald (7 April 1920), 8.

²⁰Sydney Mail (9 June 1926), 27.

²¹The Argus (30 May 1912), 9.

²² A 1921 illustrated advertisement reproduced in Laird, Sound Beginnings, 30.

²³Australian Musical News (1 March 1922), iii.

²⁴ Johnson, The Inaudible Music, 9.

²⁵ Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59.

²⁶ Game, The Music Sellers, 212.

²⁷ E.M. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song (Springfield, Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1916), 5, xviii and 4.

²⁸ ‘In a Music Shop’, The Advertiser (Adelaide) (17 January 1914), 22.

²⁹ ‘Present Favourite Jazz Songs’.

³⁰ For example, see Ruth Solie, ‘“Girling” at the Parlor Piano’, in Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Candace Bailey, ‘The Antebellum “Piano Girl” in the American South’, Performance Practice Review 13/1 (2008) (Accessed 25 January 2013), http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol13/iss1/1; see also Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (London: Gollancz, 1955).

³¹ Deborah Crisp, ‘The Piano in Australia, 1770 to 1900: Some Literary Sources’, Musicology Australia 18 (1995), 26ff; Roger Covell, Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967), 20–2; and Thérèse Radic, ‘Women and Music’, Luna 4/1 (1979), 24.

³² John MacGibbon, Pianos in the Parlour: When the Piano was New Zealand's Home Entertainment Centre (Wellington: Ngaio Press, 2007).

³³ Petra Meyer Frazier, ‘American Women's Roles in Domestic Music Making as Revealed in Parlor Song Collections: 1820–1870’ (PhD thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1999), 175; and Jeanice Brooks, ‘Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection, and Display at Tatton Park’, Music and Letters 91/4 (2010), 515 and 523.

³⁴ They comprise forty-four albums in Monash University Library's Rare Books Collection, eleven in my own collection and eight in the personal collection of Rosemary Richards. In most cases, binding dates for albums can only be estimated from the most recent copyright-dated sheet music in their contents. Twenty-two albums out of a very large, only partly-catalogued collection held in the University of Melbourne Library were also examined. A study of 193 owner-bound American albums found the practice peaked in 1840–1860. Frazier, ‘American Women's Roles, 16. In Australia, the apparent preponderance of albums made in the latter part of the nineteenth century may reflect population growth, urbanization and social consolidation in that period in a country which had been settled comparatively recently. The main scholarship on owner-bound albums has focused on their early period (the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries). See Jeanice Brooks, ‘Les Collections féminines d'albums de partitions dans l'Angleterre du début du XIXe siècle’, in ‘La la la Maistre Henri …’: Mélanges de Musicologie Offerts à Henri Vanhulst, ed. Christine Ballman and Valérie Dufour (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 371–85; Rosemary Richards, ‘Frae the friends and land I love’: The ‘McCrae Homestead Music Book’ (Box Hill North: Rosemary Richards, 2005); Brooks, ‘Musical Monuments’, 513–35; Candace Bailey, ‘Sarah Cunningham's Music Book: A Manuscript Collection of Music for a Young Girl of Scottish Descent in Savannah, ca. 1840’, Early Keyboard Journal 25–6 (2010), 7–27; Mark Slobin et al (eds), Emily's Songbook: Music in 1850s Albany (Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 2011); Frazier, ‘American Women's Roles in Domestic Music Making’; and David Cavicchi, ‘Site-Reading: The History of the Book and American Sheet Music, 1840–1870’ (Accessed 25 January 2013), http://www.academia.edu/1689134/Site-Reading_The_History_of_the_Book_and_American_Sheet_Music_1840-1870

³⁵ Owner identification was not possible in around fifty per cent of the albums in the sample, in some cases because they contain multiple names.

³⁶ Some individuals owned more than one album, sometimes with piano music and songs bound separately in different albums. Contrasting strongly with my sample, there was only one male-owned album amongst Frazier's sample of 193. Frazier, ‘American Women's Roles’, 20.

³⁷ Regarding use of the terms ‘parlour song’, ‘popular song’ and ‘drawing-room song’ for this repertoire in the nineteenth century, see: Derek Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001), viii–ix.

³⁸ I purchased Hazel's album from a second-hand shop in Rotorua in 2005.

³⁹ The copyright date range of the song sheets in the albums is 1913–1922 and 1913–1927 respectively. Seventy-five per cent of the songs in Gerty's album have copyright dates 1919–1922. Forty-one per cent of Hazel's are copyrighted 1926–1927 and twenty per cent 1924–1925. Copyright dates only provide evidence of the earliest known date for a song. The time difference between American and Australasian publication would have been only a matter of months for the latest jazz-age hits.

⁴⁰ This pattern represents continuity with the early period of album-making, with Brooks stating that it was a system of collection-creation common to women's collections. Brooks, ‘Musical monuments’, 523.

⁴¹ The only biographical detail located so far is Hazel's participation in a Rongotea School tableau in 1915. ‘Rongotea's Queen’, Feilding Star (4 August 1915), 2.

⁴² Sydney: Albert & Son, c.1919.

⁴³ Regarding the profound but often unbalanced Australasian connection in popular music and musical entertainment, in which major entertainment circuits embraced both countries but Australia often generated the musical literature and other music products consumed by New Zealanders, see John Whiteoak, ‘Across the Big Pond’.

⁴⁴ Sydney, Melbourne & Wellington: Albert & Son, c.1925.

⁴⁵ For similar observations regarding early nineteenth century albums, see Frazier, ‘American Women's Roles’, 188.

⁴⁶ Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: Norton, 1979), 294 and 379.

⁴⁷ Sydney, Melbourne & Wellington: Albert & Son 1922; Sydney, Melbourne & Wellington: Albert & Son, 1925; Sydney, Melbourne & Wellington: Albert & Son, 1925; and Melbourne: Allan & Co., 1927.

⁴⁸ ‘No, No, Nanette’, Evening Post (Wellington) (14 April 1927), 5.

⁴⁹ Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 263.

⁵⁰ The cover of one of these, Collette, is missing from Hazel's album, but another copy of the same printing has the band on the cover.

⁵¹ Melbourne: E.W. Cole, c.1927.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aline Scott-Maxwell

Aline Scott-Maxwell is an ethnomusicologist and popular music studies scholar with specializations in the music of Australia and Indonesia. Her current research focuses on Australia's musical engagement with Asia and the music of Australian migration, especially popular music of the Italian and Indonesian communities. Her many publications include the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia (as co-general editor). She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University. Email: [email protected]