Hearing the Music of Early NSW

Music of the 1840s at Warrane and Government House Sydney

6pm Tuesday 31st October 2023

Directed by Dr Neal Peres Da Costa

This evening’s concert is created by the research team on the project ‘Hearing the Music of Early NSW, 1788-1860’ funded by the Australian Research Council. In this project, we are working with historical records of music making and hearing the music anew – in historic venues and places like the one we gather in tonight. Our aim is to retell this history of music in the state now known as NSW by combining distinct approaches to revitalising Indigenous knowledges with rediscovery of historical non-Indigenous performance.

In Sydney in the 1830s and 1840s, music lovers and newspaper critics frequently engaged in a war of words over the relative merits of Italian and English songs. Some listeners took the aural beauties of Italian arias by Mozart or Rossini for granted, whether or not they could understand the words. Others questioned how anyone could properly appreciate the sentiments of a song in a language they could not understand. They granted that foreign music was “scientific” – by which they meant “learned”, expertly put together, and abstractly musical; but, compared with the “straightforwardness” of English songs, many tended to think that French, German, and Italian music lacked the genuine depth of feeling that a British song inspired. At one extreme sat the agile, ornamented Italian vocalism of operatic pieces like Rossini’s Una voce poco fa, regularly performed by lady singers at the theatre and in Sydney concerts in the later 1830s and 1840s.

Program notes by Graeme Skinner, Amanda Harris, Jacinta Tobin and Toby Martin