Major Choral Organizations in Late Nineteenth-Century Melbourne

Abstract

Australian musical life was founded and sustained for over 150 years by a particular class of displaced British and European professional musicians, mostly men, who brought with them what is now known as Western art music. At the time of Australia's foundation, a number of British musicians (many of them composers at the rudimentary level expected of musicians of the day), unable to find work where Italians and Germans were preferred, opted for migration to the colonies in the hope of trading their way out of a difficult situation. Some took ship to avoid the law (the debt-ridden composer Isaac Nathan for example), some came as farmers or joined the gold rushes, only to fail and have to turn to their musical skills again to earn a living (William Vincent Wallace, composer of one of the nineteenth century's most popular operas, Maritana, comes to mind).