Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemExhibiting music: music and international exhibitions in the British Empire, 1879-1890( 2018)Between 1879 and 1890 there was barely a year in which an international exhibition was not held somewhere within the British Empire. These monumental events were intended to demonstrate, through comparative and competitive displays, the development of every branch of human endeavour: from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. They were also a massive and literal manifestation of the Victorian obsession with collecting, ordering, and classifying the world and its material contents. Though often considered in scholarly terms of grandiosity—of Victorian monumentalism and Benjamin-esque phantasmagoria—exhibitions were also social events, attended by individual members of the public for both education and entertainment. Music, as a fundamental part of cultural life in the societies that held such events, was prominent at all these exhibitions. This thesis interrogates the role of music at the international exhibitions held in the British Empire during the 1880s, arguing that the musical aspects of these events demonstrate, in microcosm, the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Further, it argues that music in all its forms—whether in performance or displays of related objects, and whether deliberately or inadvertently—was codified, ordered, and all-round ‘exhibited’ within the exhibition-sphere in multiple ways. Exploring thirteen exhibitions held in England, Scotland, Australia and India it traces ideas and trends relating to music and the idea of ‘display’ across the imperial cultural network. This thesis begins with an historical survey of music and exhibitions in London from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the 1880s, analysed through the lens of contemporary discourses around music and concepts of display, and recent museological scholarship on the presentation of musical art in physical space. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, several broad concepts relating to music at the 1880s exhibitions are then examined. These include a discussion of musical instruments as spectacularised commodities within the phantasmagoric exhibition space, music as both an educational device and a means of entertainment and leisure in line with contemporary theories of rational recreation, and the ways exhibitions created forums for engagement for Western audiences with non-Western musics.
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ItemEssential and inevitable ideas: a musico-dramatic analysis of Fritz Hart's 1919 opera "The Fantasticks" op. 35( 2010)The aim of this thesis is to examine musico-dramatic development and motivic organisation in Fritz Bennicke Hart's seventh opera, "The Fantasticks" op. 35. It examines and comments on Hart's approach to the correlation between musical procedures, and dramatic and textural elements. It argues that Hart created and manipulated motifs that are effective and appropriate to the accompaniment and illustration of dramatic events, character elucidation, interpretation of emotional response, and generation of form. This thesis accompanies critical editions of the full score, piano/vocal score, and orchestra parts, and included a critical commentary. It also accompanies a premiere concert performance of the opera with full orchestra.