ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of the traditions and musical practices recreated by settlers and their link to migrants’ aspirations. These aspirations are evident as wider horizons of hope even when ‘home’ was a bark hut in a small pit village in the New South Wales bush. In the early settler years (1840s–1860s), before the construction of any significant infrastructure, music-making was part of everyday life, as folk songs, colliers’ rants, hymns and camp songs. However, in a century when music of the ‘right kind’ (art music) came to be linked to power, status and legitimacy, aspirational individuals and communities saw the potential of acquiring the skills and knowledge to allow their participation in such legitimate music-making, a process often referred to as an ‘elevation of taste’. This chapter investigates the music-making that migrants brought with them, the ways in which it was recreated and the sounding of respectability through audible rehearsals and performances.
