music in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, which focused on the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of music rather than its functional utility as an accompaniment to other activities.25 Musical groups such as the Sydney Philharmonic Society and the Orpheus Society actively promoted these ideas in the 1880s. The 1889 centenary celebration and the move towards Federation focused attention on the debate within a
nationalistic context. Demonstrating an awareness of both sides of the
debate, in 1890, a Herald columnist succinctly described competing schools of thought: those who emphasised the “useful” and those who prioritised the “beautiful” in music.26 The author argued for something of a compromise between the two sides, suggesting the continuation of the utilitarian spirit
24 “Boondi” on “Music for the Masses”, Sunday Times, 15 May 1904, 2.
25 For a good discussion of these issues see: Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Revised edition, 2007, first published 1992); Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
but acknowledging a need to look towards more artistic discernment as Australia marched towards nationhood:
The utile has never been neglected in Australia; of that our material progress is always in evidence. The danger is rather that we may leave the light and shade and colour out of the national picture.27
The proposed compromise was not long-lived and debates about the role and function of music continued until well into the next century.
Those who promoted classical music’s higher aesthetic qualities were significantly buoyed by the Australian lecture-tour of the English clergyman and music moralist, the Reverend H. R. Haweis (1838-1901) in 1895 (Image 3.2). Haweis was the author of a very influential text, Music and Morals, and other books including Memories of a Musical Life (1909) and an analysis of Wagner’s opera Parsifal (1905)as well as assorted sermons and travelogues.
Music and Morals, initially published in 1871, went through seventy-nine editions and was distributed widely throughout England, the United States and other English speaking countries. Haweis’s ideas about music were very much in the tradition of literary critics—Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and Walter Pater—who had argued for the “civilising” potential of high culture.28
27SMH, 4 October 1890, 8–9.
28 Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a
National Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 277; Alan Trachtenberg and Eric Foner, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, American Century Series (New
Image 3.2: Image taken from H. R. Haweis, Travel and Talk.
My Hundred Thousand Miles of Travel through America, Australia, Tasmania, Canada, New Zealand, Ceylon and the Paradises of the Pacific, vol. 1 (1896) London, front piece.
The influence of these ideas in Australia has not been examined in any detail. Waterhouse claimed that Matthew Arnold had few adherents in Australia.29 However, with the search facility of Australian newspapers now available through the Australian National Library’s Trove service it is
evident that both Arnold and Haweis’s ideas were well known and widely discussed in the Australian press.30 Such a concern would be consistent with recent Australian historical research which suggests an increasing interest in
29 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 140. 30 This confirms an assertion in Peter Goodall, "High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate," (St.
Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 19 that Arnoldian views were very deeply held within Australian culture.
defining ethical behaviour from a secular perspective. This was not intended to replace church teachings although there is evidence to suggest the
influence of traditional religion in Australia was waning at that time.31 There was no actual exodus from the traditional church. Indeed, during the
Federation era, churches were at the “peak of their influence”32 with forty- five per cent of adults attending church on a regular basis in New South Wales.33 However, there was a marked interest in new ideas about
spirituality and a “startling variety” of religious practices being explored in addition to traditional church practices.34 Haweis’s 1895 Australian tour no doubt fed this interest in exploring spiritual ideas even while his
presentation as a clergyman offered the assurance that there was some compatibility with traditional Christian beliefs. Press reports about his visit would have enhanced the dissemination of his books which were in all likelihood readily available, both for purchase and for borrowing, through various libraries such as the Mechanics’ Institute libraries.35
31 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Carlton South, Vic.:
Melbourne University Press, 2001), 17; Gregory Melleuish, "Liberal Intellectuals in Early Twentieth Century Australia: Restoring the Religious Dimension," Australian Journal of Politics and History 35, no. 1 (1989): 1–12.
32 J. B. Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 44.
33 Roger C. Thompson, Religion in Australia: A History, Australian Retrospectives (Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
34 Hilary M. Carey, Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions (St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen &
Unwin, 1996), 99.
35 For instance, the Launceston Mechanics’ Institute current website details the Rev. Haweis’s visit in
September 1895, acknowledging that at that time the Institute’s library included at least fifteen of his books. The Mechanics’ Institute in Sydney undoubtedly also held several copies of his books. See: website accessed 4 August 2017,
Although Haweis’s Sydney lectures covered a range of religious and moral issues his particular interest in the relationship between music, emotions and morals received attention in two of his lectures. The summaries of his lectures published in local newspapers suggest that
Haweis enunciated the arguments set out more fully in his treatise Music and Morals. Haweis clearly differentiated between music that expressed what he saw as false, abused, frivolous or sentimental emotions and that which exhibited true, disciplined or sublime feeling.
It is quite impossible for any one, who has thoughtfully and sympathetically studied the different schools of music, not to feel that one style and conception of the art is nobler than another. That certain methods of using musical sound are affected, or extravagant, or fatiguing, or incoherent, while others are dignified, natural, or really pathetic, arranging and expressing the emotions in a true order, representing no vamped-up passion, but passion as it is, with its elations, depressions, intensities, velocities, varieties, and infinitely fine inflexions of form. Between the spirit of the musical
Sentimentalist and the musical Realist there is eternal war. 36 According to Haweis, music which inflamed the emotions should be
discouraged in favour of higher forms of music that engaged both emotions and the rational mind. Haweis was concerned with the health of society as a whole and his ideas had implications that fed the discourse on national character. He argued that “what is really morally healthful for the individual will be found, as a general rule, healthful to society at large”.37 That is,
Haweis promoted ideas later adopted by reformers to reform society
36 H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 57. 37 Haweis, vol. 1: 47.
through individual transformation. In Haweis’s view, it was therefore a matter of some urgency “to awaken in her [England], or force upon her, the appreciation of music as an art” for the sake of the nation as a whole.38
Haweis was very specific that German music was the highest form of musical art known to humankind. While Haweis argued that Italian music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had had a sacred character, he claimed that there had been a “degradation of Italian music” in the nineteenth century “when sound came to be understood as a most subtle and ravishing minister to pleasure” and became seen simply as “the slave of the senses.”39 Likewise, French music was denigrated as being too “frivolous and sentimental”.40 He placed German music in the first rank because it had “probed the humanities and sounded the depths of our nature—taught us how to bring the emotional region not only into the highest activity, but also under the highest control”.41 Because of this, according to Haweis, the mantle of higher forms of musical expression passed from Italy to Germany,
reaching a pinnacle in the music of Beethoven. He argued that in Beethoven’s music the expression of emotion was associated with the “analytical faculty”.42 This ensured that emotions were not “enervated” but the listener might be “conducted through a cycle of naturally progressive
38 Haweis, 4: 411.
39 Haweis, 1: 58. 40 Haweis, 61. 41 Haweis
feeling, which always ends by leaving the mind recreated, balanced and ennobled by the exercise.”43
Such a description suggested that for Haweis music had a deep spiritual role, facilitating a cathartic experience that could enable a person to transcend negative emotions and realise a higher self. In one of his Sydney lectures a newspaper article quotes him as saying that music was designed
to teach man, even in that materialistic age, the essential
spirituality of his nature, and to enable him to hear the footfalls beyond the threshold of the world around him.44
Such notions were a secularised version of a redemptive theology whereby music facilitated a process of spiritual atonement.45 They were consistent with new definitions of music emphasising its cathartic, transcendent spiritual properties, which had permeated Europe46 and the United States47 during the course of the nineteenth century. Such ideas were also consistent with the emerging practice of psychoanalysis48 and the “self-help” ethos of
43 Haweis.
44SMH, 12 April 1895, 6.
45 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971), 334–5 who claims that Arnold and his followers overtly conceptualised literature as a means of ensuring the survival of religious ideas within an increasingly secularised society. Haweis essentially secularises music within the same tradition.
46 Nicholas Cook and Nicola Dibben, "Emotion in Culture and History," in Handbook of Music and
Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik N Juslin and John A Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–8.
47 Daniel Cavicchi, "Fandom before ‘Fan’": Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences," Reception:
Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 6, no. 1 (2014): 58.
48 For a good discussion of the uptake of Freudian ideas in Australia see Joy Damousi, Freud in the
Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 3.
the twentieth century which encouraged a focus on the inner psychological life of the individual.
The American musicologist Michael Broyles has suggested that in the United States, it was but “a small step” to convert aesthetic values to social values.49 Perhaps, however, the reverse is true and middle class social values became converted to aesthetic values. Certainly, the values ascribed to
classical music by Haweis were in harmony with values which scholars have typically associated with the middle class. These included moral fortitude, an ability to keep emotions in check and an orderly conduct of business within a rationalised bureaucratic world unsullied by undue noise or emotional outbursts.50 Such views were also aligned closely with middle class conceptions of citizenship which focused on creating a harmonious society by promoting inner moral virtues of each citizen.”51 Many of these ideas became widespread in secular spheres. In particular, entertainment entrepreneurs often highlighted the higher aesthetic claims of classical music when promoting tours by celebrity artists.
49 Michael Broyles, "Bourgeois Appropriation of Music: Challenging Ethnicity, Class, and Gender," in
The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 236.
50 For a more detailed discussion of middle class values see Linda Young, Middle Class Culture in the
Nineteenth Century: America, Australia, and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 80–1 and Jürgen Kocka, "The European Pattern and the German Case," in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth–Century Europe, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell (Berg Publishers, 1993), 15.