Memories of Musical Lives: Music and Dance in Personal Music Collections from Australia and New Zealand (as a downloadable pdf)
Edited by Rosemary Richards and Julja Szuster, this collection of nine essays looks at music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes.
Music-lovers from Australia and New Zealand have collected and bound sheet music and handwritten music since the earliest years of settlement. In these nine essays, the authors discuss music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes, explaining what these cherished artefacts reveal about the owners, their emotional life and their musical practice. Beautifully illustrated, and with suggestions for how these collections might be further explored or disseminated, this is a landmark book in the history of music in private life.
“This multifaceted collection uses the material traces of music making—the music books that were treasured by their makers and owners and oftenhanded down through families over generations—as a springboard to explorethe vibrant musical cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australiaand New Zealand. Providing fascinating insights into patterns of migration,sociability, gender roles, professionalism and more, the authors make aconvincing case for why these books should still matter to us today”.
—Jeanice Brooks, editor of Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses (2022).
Image: Mary Morton Allport (1806–95). Girl Reading Music, c. 1840. Painting: watercolour on ivory; 7.5 × 5.4 cm.
FA47, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart.
ISBN: 9780734038005 (ebook: pdf) | ISSN: 1325 5266