Music by the Few for the Many
Chamber Music in Colonial Queensland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2012.21Keywords:
Queensland musical culture, chamber music, colonial era, cultural self-worthAbstract
The early development of Queensland's musical culture has only been partly documented. Despite a number of general surveys and a few specialist publications in recent decades, the largest body of research, dating mostly from the 1970s and 1980s in the form of academic dissertations, remains unpublished. As I demonstrated in a recent article for this journal, the narrative of Queensland's music can be traced in various ways, including focusing either on a specific organisation or ‘cause’ – phenomena that in turn interface with the efforts of countless individuals. An alternative strategy is to survey a specific genre of music-making, where likewise a diverse range of performers, repertoire, venues and events are part of the mix. This article endeavours to trace the development of chamber music in colonial Queensland as an important subset of an active concert life that included numerous popular entertainers, touring artists and musical-theatrical troupes. Support of chamber music, a so-called ‘high-class’ genre, was also viewed by some colonists as an emblem or barometer of increasing cultural self-worth, particularly in the two decades leading up to Federation.
References
For example, McKay, Belinda, ‘A state of harmony? Music in the deep north’, Queensland Review 5.1 (1998), 1–16. I have identified at least fourteen theses on aspects of Queensland's local musical history that were completed during the 1970s and 1980s at the University of Queensland alone.
Roennfeldt, Peter, ‘The power of persistence: Musical advocates north of the Tweed’, Queensland Review 18.1 (2011), 42–53.
Brisbane Courier [hereafter cited as BC], 28 October 1867, 1.
For the purposes of this discussion, chamber music denotes works composed usually in three or four movements, both for smaller combinations including duo sonatas and trios with piano, as well as larger ensembles from quartets, quintets to octets for either strings alone or with piano and/or wind instruments.
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