Hearing the music of early New South Wales
A new website documents an exciting partnership between Museums of History NSW and the University of Sydney in an exploration of Indigenous song and European settler vocal and instrumental music in early colonial NSW.
In early 2021, the Australian Research Council awarded funding for a three-year discovery project titled ‘Hearing the Music of Early NSW, 1788–1860’. Proposed by researchers at the University of Sydney, and with Museums of History NSW as partner investigator, the project aimed to develop new creative research methodologies applicable to the study, teaching and understanding of musical interactions in the early colony. The project also proposed ways to transform how we talk about and understand the sound worlds of Indigenous and settler musical cultures. As well as assisting students of historical music performance, the study will prove beneficial for institutions and individuals interpreting historic houses, historic sites, and collections with music scores and historical musical instruments.
By making the recorded outcomes and documentary materials available on a dedicated website, the project has shared new knowledge of past musical soundscapes. The website, Hearing the Music of Early NSW, reveals approaches to Aboriginal song renewal as well as historical sources that include Australia’s earliest surviving settler music scores, and evidence of early concerts and popular song making as found in newspaper reports and other contemporary accounts. It also contains reimagined musical performances, new publications and presentations, and a web version of MHNSW’s Songs of Home exhibition, originally shown at the Museum of Sydney in 2019.
The project proposed ways to transform how we talk about and understand the sound worlds of Indigenous and settler musical cultures.
A decade of historical music discovery at MHNSW
MHNSW has collaborated with scholars, professional performers and young musicians for more than a decade as we uncover the musical contexts of our historic houses. Working closely with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney, and the Sound Heritage network, University of Southampton, we have brought to life a previously little-known musical soundscape in NSW. Projects have included the Sound Heritage Sydney symposium; the Songs of Home exhibition; new music works commissioned by Ngarra‑burria First Peoples Composers; tertiary student training in The Dowling Project; the publication Sound Heritage: Making music matter in historic houses; the online project House Music at Your House, specially created during the COVID lockdowns; and numerous music videos, such as the Sydney Children’s Choir’s performance of a forgotten Irish song that was discovered at Rouse Hill Estate.
Taking a deeper look at the website
Since 2021, the Hearing the Music of Early NSW project has created seven concerts, more than 30 video performances and an online symposium of 27 presentations – including the session ‘Discovering the intangible spirit of place through musical performance in historic spaces’, which touches on MHNSW’s many collaborations as we explore early music making through our collections and museums. The new website documents over 90 musical works re-created by more than 70 performers. Numerous publications and presentations have been produced during the study and offer further information to researchers. MHNSW’s Songs of Home exhibition webpage, which explores music making in NSW in the first 70 years after European settlement, includes an additional 54 audio/video soundtracks and 24 digitised music scores.
Two of the great benefits of the project have been the depth of engagement with First Nations communities through music, and the introduction of new historical repertoire to young musicians and audiences in a variety of contexts.
Aboriginal songlines
Over the past three years, the research team has worked with community members to renew and regenerate song practices; examples of this process can be found in the section on Aboriginal song renewal. These are not presented as definitive versions, but rather as creative interpretations that may inspire others to develop their own interpretations into the future.
Historical sources
Music historian Graeme Skinner has advised MHNSW extensively on its large sheet music collection for over a decade. He has also compiled an exhaustive online resource listing documentary evidence of music in the earliest Australian colonial records in Australharmony. The project has used these resources as the starting point for reimagined performances based on an 1826 concert series in Sydney and Hobart. The project team has historically reconstructed performances from the Dowling Songbook, discovered at Rouse Hill Estate, and reinvented contemporary versions of songs sung to folk and operatic tunes. All these resources are available in the section on historic sources.
Reimagined musical performances
In a series of concerts at historic sites, the project has delved into the historical record to stage musical events drawing on evidence of historical performance practice to evoke the sounds of colonial concerts and popular music making. MHNSW has provided some of the rarest music scores from our collections for the concerts, as well as opening our historic houses Elizabeth Bay House and Vaucluse House as inspiration and venues. Some of the concerts were staged on Gadigal Country at sites of first contact around what became Sydney Harbour – Warrane / Sydney Cove, Woccanmagully / Farm Cove and Tubowgule / Bennelong Point. The team explored the Country and the historic buildings constructed on it – the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (formerly the Government House stables), Elizabeth Bay House and Government House. The final concert reimagined Dharug and settler music from the early 19th century at the Macquarie Arms Hotel, Windsor, with a focus on song and instrumental music that was performed around Dyarubbin / the Hawkesbury.
Songs of Home exhibition online
Before the current project, the largest exploration of historical music making in NSW in exhibition format had been the Songs of Home exhibition displayed in 2019 at the Museum of Sydney. Visitors were immersed within this little-known musical world across two galleries of rare objects and through the personalised delivery of 60 music tracks. Some of the research team working on the Hearing the Music of Early NSW project had previously collaborated on the Songs of Home exhibition, and this new website has given us the opportunity to share much of the exhibition content online for the first time.
Through the Hearing the Music of Early NSW website, concerts, publications and presentations, the project team has worked towards developing a newly inclusive understanding of colonial music history across genres, interrogating adaptive musical change, cross-cultural influences and entangled cultural histories. We hope that it presents a way of thinking that will inspire people not only in NSW, but across Australia and internationally as well.
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Dr Matthew Stephens
Research Librarian
Matthew Stephens is research librarian at the Caroline Simpson Library & Collection. He is particularly fascinated by early book, musical instrument and sheet music collections in NSW and the stories they tell. Addicted to the historical research process, Matthew has reframed the biography of the eighteenth-century British cross-dressing soldier, Hannah Snell, rediscovered the lost library of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, and completed a PhD on the early history of the Australian Museum Library and the origins and use of scientific literature in nineteenth-century New South Wales. More recently, Matthew has led the interpretation of the history of domestic music in MHNSW house museums. Since 2015 he has been MHNSW’s representative in the Sound Heritage network (UK) and is co-author and co-editor of Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses (Routledge, 2022). In 2019, Matthew curated the Songs of Home exhibition at the Museum of Sydney, which examined the musical landscape of NSW during the first 70 years of European settlement. He has collaborated with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, on numerous projects including as Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Hearing the Music of Early NSW, 1788-1860’ (2021-23). Two research projects led by Matthew on the reinstatement of part of the dispersed Macleay family library at Elizabeth Bay House and the Dowling Songbook Project have received National Trust Heritage Awards.
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