My first contribution to this journal was an article that explored the eighteenth-century musical connections between Europe and the Pacific Ocean (‘The Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe’, Eighteenth-Century Music 2/2 (2005), 205–229). Having been raised and schooled in southeast Queensland, and making my first scholarly forays into the study of early modern European music at the time, the writing of this piece seemed to be as much about finding a historical–cultural context for my own life and work as it was about critiquing the role of the Pacific in Enlightenment thought. However, there was a certain disconnect between British voyages to the Pacific in the 1770s – the so-called ‘Enlightened’ voyages of discovery, which were largely peaceful missions carrying naturalists and artists, and no soldiers or missionaries – and the colonizing mission that arrived in Australia the following decade. Sustained European presence on Australia's shores began on 26 January 1788 with the establishment of a penal colony at Sydney Cove. At the outset, the cultivation of European art music seems not to have been high on the agenda. As the pioneering and influential scholar of Australian music history Roger Covell puts it, ‘Mozart's composition of his final trio of symphonies in the summer of 1788 coincided with major concerns in the Sydney community for the straying of the colony's precious cattle well beyond the confines of the existing settlement’ (Roger Covell, and others, ‘Australia’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 2, 215). It is unsurprising, though, that early accounts of the settlement mention military music and convict songs in the fledgling colony of just under 1,500 people, of whom around 800 were convicts. The music of late eighteenth-century English parlours was also recreated in this antipodal setting: HMS Sirius, one of the eleven ships of the First Fleet, carried the surgeon George Bouchir Worgan (1757–1838) – son of John Worgan (1724–1790), an English publisher of Domenico Scarlatti's works – who brought with him a fortepiano (probably a square piano). When he returned to Britain two years later, the piano remained with Elizabeth Macarthur, the second free woman to arrive and one of the most influential and intellectual women in the early colony. The making of European music in this settlement during the 1790s was not restricted to domestic contexts: in 1796 William Shield's ballad opera The Poor Soldier was performed by convicts and other settlers; this work involved Irish melodies (some sourced by Shield from his librettist John O'Keeffe) which would have been attractive to convicts and soldiers of Irish origin. It must have also appealed broadly to the military preoccupations of British colonial societies, since it was also known in North America, South Africa and India before the end of the eighteenth century.
Historical musicological research into early modern European colonies has tended to privilege the presence of imported artefacts such as sheet music and instruments. However, a more ethnographically informed reading of ‘encounter texts’ can reveal much more complex webs of meaning. Musical performance acted as an important intercultural interface in late eighteenth-century encounters, as Vanessa Agnew has argued in her masterful book Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). She points out that Europeans often understood music from a neoplatonist perspective when they engaged with non-European cultures, especially in the Pacific Ocean, where musical performances mediated between Europeans and Pacific Islanders in initial encounters, cross-cultural observations, trade and diplomacy. In Australia, musical interactions with the indigenous population began with initial exchanges of dancing in early attempts to cultivate mutual friendship, as Inga Clendinnen has shown in Dancing with Strangers: The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians, 1788 (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).
When it comes to focusing on the history of Western art music in Australia, scholars of eighteenth-century music have only a couple of decades' worth of sparse source material to work with, even if they want to extend their study to the upper limits of the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Yet, as I see it, the crucial, and most fascinating, part of this early period in colonial music history is the question of initial musical encounters between indigenous peoples and the first generation of European colonialists – not only in the Sydney region but in each of the six colonies – as Clendinnen's trailblazing work has shown. Further research is being undertaken in this area: Paul Pickering and Catherine Bowan, for instance, in their project ‘Sounds of Empire: Popular Politics and Music in the Nineteenth Century’ (based at the Australian National University), are currently studying the role of music in the complex relationships between indigenous peoples and colonizers in several parts of the British Empire.
The reflexive turn in recent scholarship on the music of Australia and the Asia–Pacific region has given a distinctive shape to the Australian early music movement. Just as Australian-based scholars of eighteenth-century European music are often challenged by the apparent disjuncture between their subject of interest and the political emphasis on forging a postcolonial identity for the nation, so too do Australian early musicians face the challenge of creating meaningful cultural and historical contexts with which to frame their work. This is nothing new, of course; the search for such contexts and precedents for the study and performance of eighteenth-century music is increasingly mandatory for academics and performers in many New World societies, especially when funding is awarded through competitive systems that require applicants to demonstrate cultural ‘relevance’. One of the major reasons put forward for supporting eighteenth-century music studies in Australia is to maintain and support a level of scholarly excellence that is commensurate with the highest global standards. World-leading scholars of eighteenth-century music – including Samantha Owens, Janice Stockigt and David Tunley, amongst others – are based at Australian universities. Professional early music performers in Australia, many of whom have studied in leading conservatoires in Europe and North America, follow the same pattern of upholding global standards, and the talents of leading instrumentalists are showcased by ensembles including the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.
In urban Australian society, especially the cosmopolitan capital cities of each state, there cannot be said to be any particular sense of cultural disenfranchisement from the practice of European art music. However, the increasing diversity of Australia's population and the growing recognition of the country's indigenous heritage now necessitate some justification for continuing to cultivate art forms with Western European roots, at least where public funding is at stake. Strong support is given to the study and cultivation of indigenous performing arts, as well as to the music traditions of immigrant communities, some of which have been established in the country for many generations. Professionals in cultural and intellectual spheres alike are often obliged to search for aspects of local relevance in their work, and to be able to expound its positive impact on society.
Some early music groups in Australia have identified certain cultural contexts that underpin their philosophy of recreating baroque and classical repertoire for the local public; for instance, the Sirius Ensemble, founded in 1999 by Erin Helyard and Anna McDonald, was named after the ship that brought the first known keyboard instrument to Australia. Other groups have co-opted the names of local geographical features: the successful Sydney-based early opera company Pinchgut is named after a small fortified island in Sydney Harbour (now called Fort Denison), which gained its visceral sobriquet from its early use as a place for solitary confinement on bread-and-water rations. The group's website <www.pinchgutopera.com.au> states that the name serves as ‘a reminder of our tight budgets and humble beginnings’. The group is frequently accompanied by the Orchestra of the Antipodes, whose name reflects a kind of oppositional self-definition with respect to geography and culture (antipodal to what?), projecting pride in localization – and in cultural reproduction taking place within the context of geographical displacement – whilst implicitly affirming its links to the Old World. Meanwhile, certain stories of origin have provided significant local contexts for early music performance in Australia. It has recently been proposed, for example, that the first harpsichord on the continent arrived in 1804 with John Grant, a ‘gentleman convict’ (transported for shooting a lawyer in the buttock!). In 2004, the bicentennial of this arrival, the Melbourne-based harpsichordist Elizabeth Anderson devised an imaginative programme comprising a selection of repertoire that may have been known to Grant (published between 1791 and 1803 in London), interwoven with readings from this gentleman convict's diary and featuring a new composition by Ron Nagorcka (born 1948) for harpsichord, didgeridoo and ‘Australian bush sounds’. In these creative productions, a new kind of history bestows symbolic legitimacy on the practice of early music in Australia.
The nineteenth century, on the other hand, presents fewer problems for historical musicologists and performers, since the establishment of modern musical institutions in the Australian colonies (such as music schools, opera houses, eisteddfods and cathedral choirs) began a continuous musical tradition that is still clearly identifiable in Australia today. Thus scholars and performers of Australian art music (or ‘Australian colonial music’, as it is usually called) have most often emphasized the ‘long’ nineteenth century (and to an extent the early twentieth century), with many fine studies published and many dissertations completed at Australian universities. Older compositions that have re-emerged as a result of this research are gradually becoming better known; for example, a recent recording of Australia's first locally composed opera, Don John of Austria (1847), by Isaac Nathan (1790–1864), testifies to the quality of scholarship and performance in this field of Australian colonial music history (ABC Classics 476 4114, 2011). Isaac Nathan was, incidentally, a pupil of Domenico Corri (1746–1825), who was in turn a pupil of Nicola Porpora (1686–1768); these sorts of genealogies have been fashioned into scholarly narratives about how Australia fits into the history of Western art music. In the nineteenth century one finds many more direct links between Australia and famous and canonical composers based in Europe, while European composers became increasingly aware of the consumption of their works in the most distant colonies of the British Empire. Even Richard Wagner wrote to Melbourne in 1877, responding to a letter from an admirer who had informed him of a local production of Lohengrin. In his reply, Wagner encouraged Australian audiences to have his works performed in English so that they would be ‘understood intimately by the English-speaking public’; this is something that he also hoped would happen in London (see Jennifer Marshall, ‘Richard Wagner's Letter to Australia’, in The Richard Wagner Centenary in Australia, ed. Peter Dennison (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 1985), 153).
The great proliferation of Western art music in New World societies during the nineteenth century is indicative of increasingly standardized and industrialized methods of disseminating and reproducing cultural artefacts, not to mention the creation of institutions that framed and fostered these artefacts. Given the increased circulation of musical works in New World societies and the patterns of worldwide migration (especially from Europe), it is unsurprising that nineteenth-century music histories of certain endogamous New World societies can be studied along the same lines as those of the Old World. But if we return to the question of the interface between indigenous and immigrant cultures, we must note that, for practitioners of Western art music in many of the former settler colonies around the world, the story of the earliest transmission of European music is controversial in national music narratives, since it did not simply coexist with indigenous musics following its introduction: in many cases it supplanted or obliterated them. The Australian context, for instance, presents a stark contrast between old and new: Aboriginal music traditions had been cultivated continuously for more than 50,000 years before the arrival of European settlers in 1788, whose music culture was already being shaped by the Industrial Revolution. As Geoffrey Blainey points out, ‘the ways of life of these new and old peoples were much further apart than when the Spaniards confronted the Aztecs’ in the early sixteenth century (A Very Short History of the World (London: Penguin, 2004), 327). The initial exuberance of intercultural courtship between the indigenous Australians and the British soon gave way to mistrust, before the dancing stopped altogether, as Clendinnen has related.
Of course, early modern colonialism around the globe was by no means a monolithic cultural phenomenon, and local contexts varied greatly, as did the objectives of colonialists. In some cases, the introduction of Western music to other parts of the world was the result of the activity of individuals, such as the European missionaries at the imperial court of China, who swore an oath of loyalty to the emperor and promised never to leave the Middle Kingdom (and whose musical activities have been explored extensively by Joyce Lindorff and Peter Allsop). In other cases, Western music was embraced so whole-heartedly by non-Europeans that it entered into intergenerational patterns of cultivation and transmission – think of the Jesuit Reductions of the Guaraní, Chiquitos and Moxos nations, in what are now Paraguay and Bolivia (as studied by Piotr Nawrot, T. Frank Kennedy, Bernardo Illari and others), where European musical practices remained in vogue long after the expulsion of the Jesuits.
It is important to distinguish some less violent aspects of engagement and negotiation between cultures in the early modern period from the high imperialism of the nineteenth century and the distinctive types of hegemony that it imposed. In Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) I examined the role of music as a mediator between Spanish and Filipino cultures in their interactions (ranging from violent to peaceful) from 1565 to 1815. Initially, part of my rationale for pursuing this line of enquiry was to explore the ways in which European ‘baroque’ music was introduced and practised in a territory not far from Australia, since Australia did not have its own ‘baroque’ or ‘classical’ music history. However, this research took me in many new directions, and I soon found myself critiquing the processes of ethnography, transculturation and syncretism that characterized the transformation of mainstream Filipino music culture over several centuries into a form of expression that had more in common with Latin America than with other parts of Southeast Asia. Of course, as in other parts of the Spanish Empire, this was a history riven with conquest, conversion and subversion, not to mention conflict, collaboration and resistance. Since in the early modern period it was mainly the victors who wrote the histories (although there were some exceptions), I drew on Edward Said's technique of ‘contrapuntal analysis’ to tease out the submerged indigenous details from colonial historiography; I also proposed ‘enharmonic engagement’ as a hermeneutic model for understanding early modern intercultural contact, since each side in the relationship approached the practice of sound-art from different perspectives. After I added to this an analysis of the multifaceted music culture found in the cosmopolitan port city of Manila, the overall picture that emerged allowed the coining of certain maxims and aphorisms that seemed to apply to many other colonial societies – including Australia.
And yet the Australian colonial experience diverged fundamentally from that of the Hispanic world, not least because of confessional, philosophical and political differences. The dominant culture in the continent's colonial settler societies was largely Anglo-Saxon, although there were strong Celtic minorities. This apparent cultural veneer is perhaps what led the French musicologist Philippe Beaussant to write that Australia is ‘the country that is the least Latin, the most imbued with Anglo-Saxon reserve, [and] the most rebellious to linguistic excesses and to intemperance of expression’ (‘le pays le moins latin, le plus pénétré de réserve anglo-saxonne, le plus rebelle aux excès de langage et aux intempérances d'expression’) (Vous avez dit baroque? (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994), 31). Although Beaussant wrote of his time spent on the continent (where he searched for the ‘baroque’) in the 1960s and 1970s, this view might well be projected onto other times and places: there was for a long time a general despondency amongst historical musicologists about the type of colonial music-making that existed in the British colonial sphere at large, especially when national histories of music were being written in the postwar era. Colonial music did not seem to live up to the hallowed compositional standards that were codified in the Old World and reified in musicological literature. This lacklustre image also stemmed, I think, from disparaging views of English composition after the death of Henry Purcell, and the persistent view of Britain itself as das Land ohne Musik, although this is a stereotype that scholars such as Peter Holman and Stephen Banfield have long since shown to be a fallacy.
Since the 1990s a wealth of scholarship has revealed the many dimensions of music-making in Anglophone societies around the world. The series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, published by Ashgate since 2000, has spurred on this research, as has the establishment of the Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth (CHOMBEC) at the University of Bristol in 2006. Many ground-breaking doctoral dissertations are being written on music in nineteenth-century Anglophone societies. This trend has clearly been aided by the wider disciplinary shift towards the cultural study of musical practice and away from the analysis of musical works (which sometimes revealed certain disparities between the normative standards constructed in Europe and the normal compositional state of affairs in the colonies). The cultural turn in musicology necessarily leads to a critique of the social changes wrought by geographical displacement and of music's role in engaging and negotiating different cultures. Ian Woodfield, in particular, has demonstrated the rich variety of musical encounters that took place alongside trade, diplomacy and colonialism in his seminal and pioneering studies English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1995) and Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Woodfield's work has shown that one can apply sociological perspectives on early modern musical life to colonial societies, and analytical techniques to musical works that were created in the insterstices between cultures, such as the late eighteenth-century ‘Hindostannie Airs’ (Indian melodies transcribed in Bengal and arranged for European keyboard instruments).
This journal has done much to encourage scholars of eighteenth-century European music to embrace other parts of the world, especially the Americas. Enlightenment Europe's fascination with others did not just take place on the European stage; rather, it involved on-the-ground interaction between Europeans and the rest of the world's inhabitants. Music resonates through all the stories of these encounters and exchanges: not just European music, but musics from many different global traditions. The lesson that can be drawn from this observation is that, when studying extra-European music histories and narratives of encounter, historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists need to engage with each other in the same way that historians and anthropologists have for many decades now.
The focus of this journal is European art music, of course, and in this editorial I have deliberately kept the subject and vocabulary of my discussion consistent with this tradition, choosing to explore the connections between European music of the ‘long’ eighteenth century and parts of the world that were colonized by Europeans. But it is not just societies descended from European colonial empires that can claim a cultural connection with eighteenth-century Western art music in its various guises throughout the world. The past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley famously remarked, and anyone – from any cultural background – who is prepared to engage with the intellectual, artistic and critical apparatus for the study of eighteenth-century Western art music will find treasures to behold, just as ethnomusicologists from Western cultural backgrounds study the philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic systems of other musical traditions on their own terms. The historical study of eighteenth-century music is constantly expanding its horizons: just as the Pacific Ocean was in many ways the ‘final frontier’ for scholars of Enlightenment Europe, present-day scholars can find in eighteenth-century music a whole world of possibilities.
