City in Australia, capital of New South Wales and the site of the first European settlement in Australia. As well as being Australia's most populous city, it is the headquarters of many of its musical organizations, including the federal directorate of music in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the principal Australian chamber music organization (Musica Viva Australia), Opera Australia and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It is also home to the Australia Council, whose music fund is the main source of federal governmental subsidy for a broad range of musical activities. The Australian Music Centre, the principal agency for the dissemination of information about Australian composers and their works, is housed in the city's historic Rocks area. Sydney is the most substantial supporter among Australian cities of concerts and opera through subscription series and ticket sales.
The first named piece of music known to have been played within the boundaries of the original settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788 was a lilting air known as The Rogue's March, traditionally played at the drumming-out of servicemen found guilty of failing in their duty. Its use on 9 February of that year was for the public disgrace of a sailor found in the tents of the women convicts. Military music, including the marking of significant stages of the day's routine by heavy drumming, was an appropriate signature of a settlement begun under military discipline and initially numbering far more convicts than free settlers among its population. The one certain link between metropolitan musical styles in Europe (among which Viennese Classicism was reaching its apogee at this time) and the rough exigencies of daily life in the new colony, with its struggle to survive inappropriate methods of cultivating the soil and herding cattle, was the transportation of a fortepiano in the first fleet's flagship, the Sirius, by its surgeon, George Bouchir Worgan. Worgan, a member of an accomplished London musical family, gave instruction on this instrument to Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of a man often seen in retrospect as one of the principal architects of the Australian wool industry, and left it with her when he returned to England. It is said still to exist in private hands.
Military and naval bandsmen, sometimes doubling on wind and string instruments in the early 19th century, provided music for civic and military ceremonies, church services, dances and theatrical performances and gave instruction in performance. Theatre music was available on a regular basis after Barnett Levey's opening of his Theatre Royal in 1833 and continued in the large Royal Victoria Theatre (opened in 1838). The Currency Lass, by a convict author, Edward Geoghegan, was the earliest Australian musical play (with 14 songs fitted to pre-existing tunes) and appeared at the Royal Victoria Theatre in 1844. Bandsmen arranged opera and ballet melodies and popular songs as sets of quadrilles and other dances and wrote marches in celebration of institutions, anniversaries, buildings, racehorses, newspapers and imperial military adventures. Private music teachers advertised in the colonial press. Choral societies typically began their activities with a performance of Handel, Haydn or Mendelssohn or some lesser composer of oratorios or cantatas. Touring opera (see Australia, §II) became popular and important. Music regularly appeared in print under local imprints from the 1830s, although Isaac Nathan felt he had to set as well as compose his own music. At least one piano built in Sydney in the mid-1830s still survives. The firm of Beale & Co, established in Annandale, Sydney, in 1893, claimed by the 1920s to be the largest piano factory in the then British Empire.
In the earlier part of the 20th century Sydney's musical life was enriched by a network of music clubs which engaged instrumentalists and singers for annual series of locally presented recitals. Some of these clubs continue to function. Many of them have disappeared or declined, however, as a result of the competition for leisure time of major musical and theatrical subscription series and an erosion of local loyalties. The clubs offered younger musicians a means of developing their skills as soloists which has not been replaced so far by any other network.
A body of instrumentalists calling itself the Sydney Symphony Orchestra came into existence in 1908 but never matched in significance parallel developments in Melbourne. The ABC began serious professional maintenance and development of an orchestra in Sydney in 1932 as part of its broadcasting charter; this orchestra acquired the permanent name Sydney SO in 1946. Orchestral playing of distinction had flourished briefly under the Belgian Henri Verbrugghen, who became first director of the New South Wales Conservatorium in 1915 and vigorously formed and directed a NSW State Orchestra until 1922, soon after its funding ran out as a result of a change of NSW state government. The appointment of Eugene Goossens to the joint positions of principal conductor of the Sydney SO and director of the NSW Conservatorium in 1947 was part of a determined upgrading of the orchestra's size and quality and the city's musical ambitions. The Goossens era was an important formative period in establishing the city's postwar musical self-confidence; and it was Goossens, in his de facto capacity as principal musical adviser to the state government, who suggested the building of a Sydney Opera House (along the dual opera–concert lines then obtaining at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House) on Bennelong Point, then occupied by a tram depot. The eventual building of the opera house (opened in 1973), to a design by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, and the fierce political and architectural controversies it inspired, helped Sydney to acquire an enhanced profile as a centre of musical performance (see fig.1).
The arrival in Sydney before, during and after World War II of Europeans fleeing from religious and political persecution had, as one of its results, the formation in 1945 of the Musica Viva Society of Australia (now Musica Viva Australia) by Richard Goldner, a former Viennese-based musician and inventor who had contributed through his inventions to the Allied war effort. The organization now offers touring networks of exceptional size and stability to leading international and Australian-based chamber groups and vocal ensembles and manages a successful large-scale programme of school music visits by touring groups of young musicians.
In the wake of a report by a committee headed by K.W. Tribe recommending progressive disestablishment of the capital city orchestras from ABC control while retaining membership of a cooperative network, the Sydney SO, the largest of the Australian orchestras, has been constituted as a separate entity, with its own board and managing director, and was singled out, under the ‘Creative Nation’ programme put forward by a former Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, as the orchestra which should be regarded as the pace-setter of Australian orchestral practice. Partly as a result of this, the Sydney SO has been in the vanguard of developments designed to promote orchestral independence, size and quality and to supplement governmental funding with major private sponsorship. In 1999 it was nearing its objective of having a membership of 110 players, with improved provision for rotation and relief of principals, and dramatically improved salary levels and other conditions of employment, aiding its policy of recruiting local and international players at a high level. Its musical and artistic director, the Dutch conductor Edo de Waart, renewed his contract in 1998 to run to 2002. He has earned respect as a vigorous exponent of orchestra building and as a musician concerned for the general welfare as well as the artistic achievement of the orchestra's players. The Sydney SO's schedule includes on average nine series of subscription concerts (some of them with up to four parallel programmes) and a number of other special appearances. The subscription schedule includes two series of concerts orientated towards a predominantly young audience. Most of the concerts are given in the main auditorium, the concert hall, of Sydney Opera House (seating about 2750; fig.2). The opera house has replaced the town hall as the principal site of major Sydney concerts. The Sydney-based Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra is, as its name suggests, the opera house pit orchestra for Opera Australia and Australian Ballet performances in Sydney; it also occasionally gives concerts in its own right.
Opera Australia (formerly known as the Australian Opera and, before that, as the Elizabethan Trust Opera) celebrated 40 years of activity in 1996. In Sydney, its home base, it performs in the second and smaller of the two main auditoriums, the opera theatre, of Sydney Opera House, a circumstance resulting from a politically motivated power struggle which caused the largest auditorium to be allocated primarily to concerts and to be deprived of the stage machinery originally designed for it. Opera Australia continues to appear regularly in Melbourne, where it has absorbed the former Victorian State Opera, and occasionally in other capital cities. Its winter (June–October) and summer (January–March) seasons in Sydney have offered the city approximately eight months of opera, with an annual repertory ranging between 15 and more than 20 works (and leaving most of the other third of the year for occupancy of the Opera Theatre by the Australian Ballet).
Although Opera Australia began its history in 1956, with effective musical leadership from Joseph Post, and appointed Karl Rankl as a musical director early in its career, its destinies have tended to be guided by theatrical producers acting as artistic directors (Stefan Haag and, from 1984 to 1999, Moffatt Oxenbould), with the notable exception of the period from 1975 to 1986 when the Australian conductor Richard Bonynge was musical director and established unusual and interesting seasons reflecting his own fondness for Italian bel canto and French 19th-century opera, taking advantage of the dazzling abilities of his wife, Dame Joan Sutherland. The Oxenbould regime can be credited with a fairly well-balanced and standard international repertory, including such works as Janáček's Jenůfa, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Handel's Giulio Cesare. The company's caution in producing new Australian works conforms to professional operatic policy in most centres. One of its novelties, Alan John's The Eighth Wonder (1995), deserves mention as being an operatic dramatization of the events and ideals that went into the turbulent history of the building of Sydney Opera House, the building in which the work was presented. Exploratory programming in new or neglected opera in Sydney was largely the work of University of New South Wales Opera from 1968 and, more recently, Sydney Music Theatre. Rockdale Municipal Opera was a sustained example of suburban enterprise in standard works.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), founded in 1975, was originally intended for gifted young players who might prefer a more musically self-reliant alternative to joining the Sydney SO. It was under the tutelage of Robert Pikler and John Painter in its early years, making only a fitful impact under various leaders and guest directors until the arrival of Richard Tognetti as leader and, eventually, musical director. His direction has helped win this core orchestra of strings (with regularly recruited wind players as supplementary members) a loyal following in Australia and an international reputation. The heavy touring schedule of the ACO, including successive subscription concerts in most, sometimes all, of the state capital cities, tends to ensure that its membership remains predominantly young. The Australia Ensemble, resident at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is a group of seven players that has been regarded since its formation in 1980 as the finest chamber ensemble in the country and has also won wide praise for its international and inter-state touring, and for its recordings of new Australian and standard repertory. Its four string players formed the Goldner String Quartet, which has earned a position of similar pre-eminence in its repertory. Part-time or ad hoc instrumental groups based in Sydney include the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra (using period instruments), the Sydney Wind Soloists, Synergy (percussion group), the Seymour Group (contemporary music), the Sydney Alpha Ensemble and the Renaissance Players (director-founder, Winsome Evans).
The Sydney Philharmonia choirs, which are the regular choral associates of the Sydney SO, include a large choir for oratorio, major cantatas and symphonic works and a motet choir for smaller-scale works and for performances of unaccompanied polyphony. Australia's only surviving professional vocal ensemble, the Song Company, also has its base in Sydney. It tours nationally and internationally.
Recent ventures include the establishment at Angel Place of a large-sized chamber music hall seating about 1200 and other smaller, supplementary halls. The inadequacy of the pit of the Sydney Opera House's opera theatre has caused entrepreneurs to look at reconstituted older theatres, notably the Capitol Theatre, as sites for orchestrally expansive operas, such as those of Wagner and Richard Strauss. Sydney's jazz community continues to use informal sites (pubs, restaurants, clubs) for its performances. Local pop is largely pub-based. Large-scale touring pop has mostly deserted the Sydney Entertainment Centre, once considered its appropriate venue, in favour of the largest possible open-air sites.
The city's principal training institution for musical performance is the Sydney (formerly New South Wales) Conservatorium, established in 1917 and now incorporated into the University of Sydney. Musicologically orientated departments of music, with provision for performance and compositional studies within music degree courses, operate at Sydney University, the University of New South Wales and the University of Western Sydney. Private teaching institutions with staff equipped to integrate practical and theoretical studies include the Australian Institute of Music, which offers a BMus degree.
W.A. Orchard: The Distant View (Sydney, 1943)
E. Pownall: Mary of Maranoa: Tales of Australian Pioneer Women (Sydney, 1959, 3/1964)
R. Covell: Australia's Music (Melbourne, 1967)
E. Duek-Cohen: Utzon and the Sydney Opera House (Sydney, 1967)
E. Lea-Scarlett: ‘Music-Making in Early Sydney’, MMA, v (1970), 26–57
R. Covell, ed.: E. Geoghegan: The Currency Lass (Sydney, 1976)
P. Sametz: Play On! 60 Years of Music-Making with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (Sydney, 1992)
For further bibliography see Australia, §II.
ROGER COVELL