Music and World-Building in the Colonial City

Helen J. English is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has a strong interest in music communities, past and present, and in capturing ways music is at work in the everyday and the out-of-the-ordinary day.

In this meticulously researched local study Helen English demonstrates the critically important role that popular music played in determining a sense of community and identity amongst working class immigrants in Victorian Australia. This is an exemplary case study of the complicated processes of cultural transmission in shaping a colonial Australian mentalite.Emeritus Professor Richard Waterhouse FAHA FASSASchool of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry,University of Sydney, NSW AustraliaHelen English presents a ground-breaking study of the musical activities of migrant miners in nineteenth-century Australia, showing how vitally important music was to the making of new communities, their social values and colonial identity. In this absorbing, historically informed and persuasively theorized study of Newcastle and outlying townships, the author constantly surprises the reader with examples of how people were able to recreate musical practices from Eisteddfodau and brass band concerts to blackface minstrel shows, despite their lack of infrastructure and resources.Derek B. ScottProfessor of Critical MusicologyUniversity of Leeds

• Chapter 1 (Introduction): Music Making at the CoalfaceChapter 2: The Sights and Sounds of the Coalopolis, 1860-1880Chapter 3: Aspirations and Transposed TraditionsChapter 4: Music’s Affordances in the Settler Context: Brass Bands and the Self, Body and the Social.Case Study 1: Brass Bands as the Apotheosis of World-Building: The Miners’ Demonstration of 1874Chapter 5: Choirs Local and Global: Community makers, Vehicles of Respectability and Colonial ConnectivityChapter 6: Singing, Eisteddfodau and IdentityCase Study 2: Nostalgia: A Transnational Concert at LambtonChapter 7: The Minstrel Mask: Blackface Miners at Work and PlayChapter 8: Social Inclusion: What Township Benefit Concerts reveal about Township ValuesPostlude: Conclusions