This chapter investigates various strands of influence, seeking to understand the role of musical ‘domestication’ in canon formation in the early nineteenth-century Viennese home. Answers are sought to fundamental questions: how the performance of music in the home influenced the creation of an authoritative list of musical ‘works’ to be championed in public; which genres were thus canonised, and how opera, which dominated ‘domesticated’ music, fared in the developing canon; and who were the ‘authorities’ and ‘publics’ in Vienna around the time of the Congress (1814–15 and just afterwards). The chapter focuses on middle-class circles, especially the salons that Leopold von Sonnleithner held and attended. Thanks to middle-class agency, repertoires were perpetuated and recreated, rethought and re-evaluated through musical arrangement and domestic performance. So in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, concert life would develop in significant areas – repertoire, performance practices, and listeners’ behaviour, tastes, and values – all of which developed largely in the middle-class home.

Phrenology’s enduring interest in defining national types coincided with a growing nineteenth century preoccupation with nationhood, with Australia’s Federation in 1901 seen as a move towards membership of a white imperial community. In line with debates about nationhood, some phrenologists with political or reformist leanings considered both the white Australian type and social organisation. During the mid nineteenth century, William David Cavanough offered massed nationalist head readings. In the 1880s and 1890s, phrenology appeared alongside lessons about physical fitness and therapies such as the water cure, aligning with medical interest in hygiene and population health. Phrenologist Joseph Fraser outlined utopian visions in a science-fiction novel, and American celebrity Jessie Fowler visited to offer insights about health and national type. And at the Phrenological and Health Institute of Australasia, established in early twentieth-century Melbourne, reformers shared ideas for cultivating the white Australian race in a magazine rich with metaphors of buds and seeds.