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Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows:
people's relationships to music within speci¿c contexts;
how music-making intersects with class, gender and ethnic background;
identity through music.
Situated within a wider discourse on music and identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an authoritative study of historical communities and their relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the ¿elds of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.
List of contents
Chapter 1 (Introduction): Music Making at the Coalface
Chapter 2: The Sights and Sounds of the Coalopolis, 1860-1880
Chapter 3: Aspirations and Transposed Traditions
Chapter 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 1874
Chapter 5: Choirs Local and Global: Community makers, Vehicles of Respectability and Colonial Connectivity
Chapter 6: Singing, Eisteddfodau and Identity
Case Study 2: Nostalgia: A Transnational Concert at Lambton
Chapter 7: The Minstrel Mask: Blackface Miners at Work and Play
Chapter 8: Social Inclusion: What Township Benefit Concerts reveal about Township Values
Postlude: Conclusions
About the author
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.
Summary
Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia especially coal-mining regions of New South Wales used music as a resource for world-building. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.
