Hearing the Music
of Early New South Wales
Amateur Concerts, 1826 and 1827
These pages detail two concert series begun in 1826 in the colonial towns of Sydney and Hobart. As a snapshot of music making in the Australian colonies, the concerts demonstrate a shift towards what historian Grace Karskens describes as ‘a more aesthetic, rectilinear, polite and self-conscious city’ (2009, p.61). They also reveal the repertoire circulating in the colonies, and who was performing it.
Many of the performers were members of military bands, and key concert venues were the seats of colonial power (rooms in the old and new court houses). This role of military bands and judicial systems in contributing to the shaping of music in colonial Sydney and Hobart reminds us that like all activities in the nascent towns, music making was underpinned by ongoing, violent conflict between those newly arrived and establishing settlements and Aboriginal people the settlements sought to displace. In our project’s engagement with these historic records, continuous engagement with these histories is led by Indigenous team members Jakelin Troy and Jacinta Tobin, whose work on historical records of Aboriginal songs is featured here.
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References:
Laura Case and Amanda Harris, ‘Cultivating European concert culture in early colonial towns’, in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, Amanda Harris & Clint Bracknell (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 93-110.
Grace Karskens, The Colony: a history of early Sydney (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009).
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Image Credit: James Gillray | Playing in Parts , 1801 | Library of Congress
SydneyÂ
The Sydney Concerts
Between June 1826 and January 1827, a small group of amateur musicians presented no fewer than twelve full concert programs, consisting of classical orchestral overtures, songs, glees, comic songs, and instrumental solos, duos and quartets.
Most of the Sydney concerts were held at the Old Court House on Castlereagh Street. Even at the time, the large room in which the concerts were held was known as 'the school room', and would later become the Sydney Girls' High School. The building was acquired by David Jones in the early 20th century and demolished to make way for a department store.
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Image Credit: Old Sydney Girls High School Castlereagh St, Sydney | Photograph | 1922 | New South Wales State Archives.
Concert Nine
Wednesday 25 October 1826
School Room, Old Court House, Castlereagh Street, Sydney
Hobart
The Hobart Concerts
The 1826 concert series in Hobart shared several common elements with the Sydney Amateur concerts. As well as occurring in the same year, the programs from these concerts evidence a circulation of key repertoire that confirms shared practices and marks them out as more than just idiosyncratic musical assemblages. The Court House building was the venue for the concerts in both Hobart and Sydney. Key musicians often arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and established performances there before relocating to Sydney. Finally, several key musicians would go on to collaborate with musicians in the Sydney concerts in subsequent years.
The Hobart Court House was built on the corner of Macquarie and Murray Streets in 1824. It was designed by William Hartley Williams, and was used for civil and criminal cases as well as public meetings, church services and the Hobart Town concert series in 1826 and 1827.
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Image Credit: Supreme Court & Post Office | Photograph | 1838 | Tasmanian State Archives, NS1013/1/1670.
In May 2021, the research team and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music's Early Music Ensemble reimagined the Sydney Amateur Concert series in a live concert held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The featured musical works were drawn from the programs of the concerts and were performed on instruments of the period in an historically informed manner. The music included orchestral and instrumental works by well-known European composers, such as Mozart and Corelli, as well as songs and glees by Samuel Webbe and William Shield. The concert also featured performances of two versions of an Aboriginal women's song of the Ngarigu people (Monaro plains): the first in the Westernised transcription for solo voice and piano as published by John Lhotsky as 'A Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe' (Sydney 1834, the earliest piece of sheet music published in NSW); and the second in a restored traditional version, 'Gundji gawalgu yuri' (Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy 2021), the performers including Ngarigu women singers. The full recording is below, and a program is available for download.