ABSTRACT

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 specific 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 fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.

chapter 1|17 pages

Introduction

Music-making at the coalface of the empire

chapter 2|23 pages

The sights and sounds of the Coalopolis

chapter 3|16 pages

Aspirations and transposed traditions

chapter 4|26 pages

Music’s affordances in the settler context

Brass bands and the self, body and the social

chapter 5|18 pages

Choirs at the local and global

Community makers, vehicles of respectability and colonial connectivity

chapter 6|20 pages

Singing, eisteddfodau and identity

chapter |5 pages

Case study 2: Nostalgia

A transnational concert at Lambton

chapter 7|24 pages

The minstrel mask

Blackface miners at work and play

chapter 8|26 pages

Social inclusion

What township benefit concerts reveal about township values

chapter 9|6 pages

Final thoughts