5 CUMPLIMIENTO DEL CTE
5.2. CTE SUA SEGURIDAD DE UTILIZACIÓN Y ACCESIBILIDAD
54SMH 11 February 1889, 5.
55SMH, 13 February 1889, 6–7. 56SMH, 11 February 1889, 5. 57SMH, 12 February 1889, 8.
Image 2.3: Advertisement for Cowen orchestral concerts, SMH,5 February 1889, 2. Effusive reviews and newspaper reports attested to the “soul
stirring”59 music that completely “absorbed the attention of all present”.60
59SMH, 11 February 1889, 5. 60EN, 7 February 1889, 5.
The editor of the Sydney Mail enthused about the sensual pleasure that the audience derived from a high quality and large ensemble:
The wood wind … is very far ahead of any to which our ears have become attuned; the presence of two bassoons and a harp is phenomenal; the horns are splendid; the roll of the drums as the National Anthem is played sets all one’s pulses in motion; the castanets and tambourine made perfect the ballet music; whilst the clash of cymbals and the full blare of the brass instruments have contributed important and telling features in the grand ensemble.61
The effect, according to another reviewer, was to obliterate the individual, “merging his personality … into the sensuous body of humanity”.62
The Cowen concert series, with twelve concerts performed in just over a week, had an instant and almost immediate effect that profoundly affected Sydney’s engagement with classical music. The orchestra aroused
considerable enthusiasm among Sydney audiences and stimulated many to imagine the potential such music had to promote national traits desirable for an emerging country. An editorial piece in the Herald discussing initiatives to establish a standing orchestra in Sydney following the success of Cowan’s visit stated:
We are a music-loving people, and a taste this way is already remarked as a probable distinguishing characteristic of the Australian social order of the future … The better music we hear the better will be our appreciation.63
61(M & A), 9 February 1889, 273. 62SMH, 6 February 1889, 4.
In the rhetoric surrounding the Cowen concerts, it was apparent that music had become a symbolic yardstick against which Australia should henceforth assess its status against other countries. In February 1889 a strongly worded and emotional editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald
insisted on the need for “national recognition of music”, which, like the visual arts, should receive government funding.64 The article made an
interesting comparison between Australia and Honolulu, “once known as the Cannibal Islands”, suggesting that great shame would accrue if Australia did not provide at least the same level of support that the Hawaiian
Government provided for a high quality band with a German conductor.65
Interestingly the author of the Herald editorial indicated that a good quality brass band or a fine orchestra would be equally worthy of
government support. This suggested that the tradition of ceremonial, military music was still strong and that there was some fluidity in what might be considered aesthetically superior forms of music. The author did, however, lean towards “an orchestral concert of a distinctly classical nature”,66 suggesting that classical music, as represented by Cowen’s
orchestra, had symbolically become a bulwark against barbarism and a signifier of national progress. In this way, music was emerging as a potential means of unifying a growing and somewhat chaotic city. As such it began to
64SMH, 13 February 1889, 6–7 65SMH, 13 February 1889, 6-7. 66SMH, 13 February 1889, 6–7.
excite new ambitions for the nation as a whole and a proposition that classical music was worthy of government support began to gain
momentum. A precedent for significant government investment in music had already been established in the design and building of Centennial Hall within the Town Hall complex which was opened, belatedly, on
27 November 1889.67 Despite the delay of twelve months, the civic fathers
declared a public holiday to celebrate the event and a grand concert ushered in the new era for Sydney’s musical life with a combined choir of 400 and a 57-strong orchestra.68
The Town Hall’s opening was an important symbol that Sydney had come of age and that Sydney was equal to, if not better than, any other city in the empire. Centennial Hall was larger than almost all of the great concert auditoriums within the British empire, including those of Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow. It was second only to the Royal Albert Hall in size.69
But even the Albert Hall could not match the magnificent organ included in the Town Hall. In a move designed to draw international attention, the City Councillors planned a technological tour de force by building what was then the largest organ in the world at what many considered to be the exorbitant
67 Margo Beasley, Sydney Town Hall: A Social History (Marrickville: Hale & Iremonger, 1998), 16. 68 Robert Ampt, The Sydney Town Hall Organ (Woodford: Birralee Publishing, 1999), 1.
cost of £15 00070 or $12 million in today’s terms.71 In his speech at the opening
of the Town Hall, the Lord Mayor roundly chastised those who had complained about the Town Hall’s cost.
As a city we occupy the third position among the cities of Great Britain, and it is, I think, a proper ambition for us to have the largest town hall in the world. We have been ridiculed, too, as a council for obtaining the largest organ in the world; but here again, I say, with our rapidly-increasing population and revenue, and the knowledge that our city must become the London of the Southern seas, the ambition is a laudable one.72
70 The organ had 5 manuals and a pedal keyboard with 128 stops (59 speaking stops) which was approximately double the size of the Melbourne Town Hall organ and some 14 stops more than the Royal Albert Hall when built.
71 Diane Hutchinson and Florian Ploeckl, "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of Australian Amounts, 1828 to the Present " MeasuringWorth, Accessed 1 May 2017 ,
www.measuringworth.com/australiacompare. Note that Hutchinson and Ploeckl convincingly argue there are multiple ways to measure what the monetary value in the past is “worth” today. They suggests that a crude CPI measure does not indicate affordability which is best expressed in terms of GDP per capita. Accordingly this is how I have calculated the cost of the Sydney Town Hall organ in this thesis.
Image 2.4: Centennial Hall and organ, circa 1894/5.
Picture: Charles H. Kerry. Source NLA, Charles Kerry collection of NSW views. Bib ID 6100580.
A world-wide search ensued to find the best organist to give this stupendous instrument an appropriate christening. After exhaustive
enquiries, the aptly named W.T. Best from Liverpool was duly engaged and came to Australia to provide an opening series of twelve concerts to
celebrate the installation of the organ in 1890. As the concerts approached, anticipation grew. Everyone wanted to hear the new organ, “the people’s organ”73 as some termed it. Sydneysiders were so excited about hearing their
new organ that some described the anticipation of the organ’s opening concerts as “organ recital fever”.74
Attempts to make these concerts an exclusive event by setting high entry fees were met with outrage. The Sydney City Council backed down and allowed “popular prices”. Attendance grew with each concert. It was estimated that approximately 7 000 people managed to cram into the Town Hall for the eleventh concert. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
even the corridors and the vestibule were accepted as part of the auditorium, while the number of those who went away disappointed of gaining admittance of any kind was beyond computation – though estimated by one of the officials as “a couple of thousand or so”.75
The average attendance was calculated at 3 300 people per recital and the Council was able to accrue a profit of £845 after payment of expenses.76
Following this success the Council committed themselves to further music subsidies by appointing a City organist. Best had been the Council’s first choice, but he had declined. After a world-wide search, the eminent Belgian organist Auguste Wiegand was appointed in 1891 from a field of 105 applicants.77 For the Evening News, his appointment marked “the natural
culmination of a probationary period through which we have passed” and “the day upon which we attained our majority”. Henceforth, “we may
74 Ampt, Organ, 29.
75SMH, Monday 1 September 1890, 7. 76SMH, 31 December 1890, 11. 77 Ampt, Organ, 37.
account ourselves a musical people duly clothed in the outward garb of artistic manhood”.78 Such an investment in classical musical culture was
clearly a coming of age event.
One of Wiegand’s first acts was to inaugurate regular bi-weekly organ recitals. According to the Herald these recitals represented:
the mind of the city in joy and sorrow, in gravity and lightness; and while the new Post Office bells speak tunefully out
overhead, from their windy turrets, the great organ will respond under the deft fingers of the city musician to the popular sentiment in all its varying moods. With these things about us, and our new Town Hall, we begin to feel that the corporate sense of the city is being adequately bodied forth at last.79
Typically such concerts included a range of virtuosic organ works including the great classical works by J.S. Bach, Josef Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven80
and Felix Mendelssohn, as well as more contemporary works by his French and Belgian contemporaries including Auguste Dupont, Édouard Batiste, Charles Gounod, Alexandre Guilmant and Jules Grison. In addition Wiegand often performed his own compositions, improvisations and transcriptions, particularly of operatic works or excerpts. Sydney now aspired to be a leading musical centre where concerts should be open and affordable to all, ensuring that the whole population might share the benefits. As an article in the Sydney Mail expressed it, orchestral music
78EN, 20 July 1891, 5. 79SMH, 25 July 1891, 5.
promised to exert a “powerful influence” on the “family, social and national life of a civilised community” by stimulating “heroism, loyalty and
devotion”.81 It was therefore worthy of government support.
Although the Council was now prepared to provide funds for an organist and regular concerts it was clearly not its intention that music should be elitist or exclusively classical. The Councillors continued to understand music as a means of bringing the community together and of promoting a shared sense of community purpose and civic pride. With the opening of the Centennial Hall and its organ Sydney residents found what William Weber has described as:
a lusting for identification with the mass of the population, a desire to celebrate the emerging urban-industrial civilization with a grand thronging together in public places.82
DiMaggio and Mullen have described such musical events as “civic rituals” by which collectivities consciously or unconsciously created emotional commitment which constituted a component structure of collective life.83
Such an interpretation might be aptly applied to Town Hall concerts in Sydney which could likewise affirm social hierarchies, define community boundaries, and incorporate problematic groups into a larger polity.84
Classical music was a necessary inclusion in such concerts, but not at the
81M & A, 18 January 1890, 125.
82 William Weber, "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770–1870," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 8, no. 1 (1977): 15.
83 Paul DiMaggio and Ann L Mullen, "Enacting Community in Progressive America: Civic Rituals in National Music Week, 1924," Poetics 27, no. 2–3 (2000): 136.
exclusion of other forms of music. Such concerts provided a means of promoting collective civic bonds that might transcend familial bonds and unite a growing city.