Though my Grandparents were in their upper years by the time they bought this house accepting that a walk in shower, shower seat and stair were necessary needs for persons of their years, they were determined to maintain a modern decor. They had just completely redone the bathroom a few years ago. The bath was removed and brand new wet wall panels, heater, sink, toilet and shower all went in giving the space a light grey marbled effect. There really wasn’t anything wrong with the bathroom except the multiple rails and seats which made it resemble a stylish bathroom in a caring facility rather than a home. Since it is very hard to disguise holes once they are cut into wet walls, I knew the panelling would all have to be replaced anyway, so this was an opportunity to do something we really wanted.
My husband and I had fallen in love with a wet room and rain shower during a visit to Rotter dam in 2015 and we had plans to convert the bathroom to a wet room in whatever house we got next. We did enquire about a wet room convertion but at £5000 for the floor remodelling alone it was just too far our of our price range at this stage. Instead, we settled for the rain shower and new panelling. I have to day with the walk-in shower it isn’t too far removed from a wet room anyway.
Now this was just too big a job to do ourselves so I posted an ad on My Builder and got a wonderful plumber/bathroom installer called Sean O’Brien. He really did a fabulous job and I couldn’t recommend him highly enough. Here is his website if you are in need: http://obwplumbingservices.co.uk
The panels are wood effect, which tie in with our overall theme throughout the house and the rain shower is exactly what we were looking for. Sean also took care of a minor plumbing hiccup where the bathroom had not been plumbed into the mains supply but instead was still plumbed into the old water tank. I was sure this was some Grandpa had asked to be changed over when the bathroom was originally done, but alas it never was. At least the job wasn’t too tricky to take care of and didn’t affect the time frame for the work overall.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take before shots but here it is after the work was carried out:
In the picture below the woof effect can just be made out. It is quite subtle.
I am approaching the end of my trip, but that doesn’t mean work is letting up! Oh no, quite the opposite. I knew when I came out here that my final days would be jam packed with presentations and singing but what I hadn’t quite accounted for was other opportunities presenting themselves that are very hard to pass up!
So the day began with a jaunt out to Elizabeth Bay House, a beautiful colonial home only 10 minutes walk from King’s Cross Station. I filmed a vlog while I was there, which I will be uploading very soon to my YouTube channel. This amazing house will be the setting for Sound Heritage Sydney! But for today I got to rehearse with Katrina Faulds for the upcoming concerts on Monday and Tuesday next week. I walked around the house as Katrina rehearsed on the piano at the bottom of the floating spiral staircase and I could hear the music in every room, which tells me it must have been designed so that musicians could play in that area and bring the whole house to life. Even singing in this spot is effortless and the sound simply floats up the stairs to the ceiling, reverberating in the oval hallway.
After this trip it was back to city centre and off to explore something very exciting indeed. An uncatalogued collection of music once owned by the Murray’s of Warrawang (originally from Dumfries) has turned up at the NSW State Library. Professor Ian Jack kindly gave me the catalogue and I knew from a quick glance that this was something I just had to see for myself and what has turned up is more than I could have ever imagined!
Books upon books of handwritten early 19th-century manuscripts all carefully named and dated. There is quite clearly 3 collections of music owned by Julia Murray, Minna (or Wilhelmina) Murray and Lynn Gardham. I have only had time to take photographs of everything I think will be helpful in developing another project and providing further context for this one, but even in the short time I have spent with the collection it is quite obvious there are many stories it will uncover.
In addition to the music, there are pages of letters and diaries, all of which hint at life in a relatively new colony. One such letter, is a series of verses written by a person who is clearly nervous about leaving their bonny homeland.
I am immediately drawn to Julia, as her collections seem to date from her youth and I see her juvenile hand develop into an enthusiastic and creative artist in all respects. I even came across a small sketch book with beautiful drawings of birds and scenery. The notebook is so small, I wonder how she was able to be so detailed especially when I know she would have been drawing by sun or candle light. I am not going to post these images yet, until I have had a more thorough look at what there is but I am pleased that Sydney is still turning up many more Scottish collections that are telling me more about travel, immigration and music at a time of great movement and change.
So yesterday I spent most of the morning writing up a report all about my journey, which will be sent to my funders. It may seem a little early to be writing when the research isn’t quite finished yet, but I wanted to have at least a draft to give to a very special person that I met today! (More on that in the next post!)
But, the most exciting part of yesterday was that another collection of Scottish music, known to have been brought out by a family from Dumfries in the early 19th century has turned up in the NSW State Library. The collection is uncatalogued and I will be one of the first researchers to take a peek. I was alerted to this lead by Professor Ian Jack when I visited him on Monday but we both thought that the collection would turn up long after I had departed for Scotland. To my surprise, the stars have aligned and I will be off to see the collection on Friday and Saturday. No doubt, more anon…
In the afternoon, I went to King’s Cross station (sadly no platform 9 3/4, though it did have an amazing fountain) to meet with a wonderful researcher Catherine Bishop who has been carrying out work on business women in colonial Australia. She had many fascinating stories about female music bookshop owners, performers and such the like but I was mainly coming to talk to her about Lucy Havens. Not only did Lucy marry well, but after her husbands death where she inherited much of his property, she rented out said property to other female tenants! This adds another piece to the puzzle that is the life of Lucy Havens. I am pleased to say that after this research is over, she will no longer be just Mrs Hyndes or Mrs Purves but a visible, influential woman in her own right!
As I approach the finish line, I find that my days and nights are gradually getting longer as the workload piles on. This isn’t a complaint, merely an observation (and perhaps a hope of some more hours in the day). It is exhilarating to know that so many opportunities are presenting themselves, but a little disappointing to be fully aware that I may not be able to say yes to them all…yet!
Enough on that!
Yesterday I was back at the NSW State Library to look at the Haven Family papers. These included the wills of Lucy, her first husband Thomas Hyndes and her second husband Rev William Purves. It would seem that Lucy did not have any of her own children despite their being a lot of inaccurate information in both legitimate and non-legitimate secondary sources! She did however, become the primary guardian of Hyndes *ah-hem* adopted daughter Amelia Ibbotson whose mother was his housekeeper. Unfortunately, the will did not turn up any information about further music-making activities, but I have been able to track down a probate package for Lucy at the Archives and Records office, which may have a contents list for the house.
In the afternoon, I headed to another museum called Susannah Place Museum. This is a set of four terrace houses built for working0class people in 1844. There were apparently residents still living in these houses until 1990 when it eventually became a museum. You can only visit the houses by joining a tour group and while it was interesting to see each house laid out in the stylings of a different era including 1844, 1901, 1950 and 1970 as well as hearing oral histories about the families who once lived there, I was quite put off by the guide.
I will preface this complaint by saying all the guides are volunteers so they are obviously giving up their spare time to do the tours. However, after making sure to tell us that she had a cold, she kept trying to thrust her disease-ridden ipad in our hands to look at pictures. Surely, if you know you have a cold and are constantly coughing and blowing your nose while touching a device that is supposed to be handed to guests, you would change up your practice to simply show the pictures and not give the ipad and your cold germs to the tour group? *grumble grumble*
A more serious observation was that she wasn’t quite as effective as Jan at Government House at setting the seen for the properties. It was obvious that she was trying to remember the information for each item of discussion and she did run over time by 10 minutes, which is irksome when you have places to be. I would have liked to have known more about the piano in the final room, but the museum was closing, a storm was literally brewing and I had to get back to The Mint to collect my bags. I did film a vlog about my visit, which I will be posting very soon so you can see the location of the museum for yourself!
Storm brewing in Sydney! Whoever said it was always sunny down under?
The museum is also situated on Cumberland Place, which was the street where Lucy and Thomas lived during their marriage. Cheshunt House, Cumberland Place was their residents and was passed to Lucy upon Thomas’s death. Unfortunately, it is no longer standing but I did find this sketch of what the house once looked like. It is a shame not to be able to see it physically, but it was nice to have been able to walk the streets of a person I have come to know quite well over the past few weeks.
Apologies for not posting this blog yesterday, but it means today you get two for the price of one!
Letter from Caroline Lamb to Isaac Nathan, MLMSS 6152/Item 2X , MLMSS 6152/Box 3, NSW State Library
So I spent yesterday at the NSW State Library, doing a little more digging around for information on Isaac Nathan (1790-1864). During my PhD I had tried to do a little research into Nathan, as he was said to have been apprenticed to Domenico Corri, fellow impresario and friend of Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810). If you don’t already know, my PhD was all about Rauzzini and his opera singing students, which is available online to read! Unfortunately, apart from a few bits of information and some published songs including his Hebrew Melodies – a collaboration between Nathan and Lord Byron – at the time, I didn’t find out any more detailed information. However, I did know that papers relating to Nathan and his family were in Sydney before I arrived, so I just had to take some time out to see what there was here.
There is indeed a wealth of material relating to the Nathan’s family, but the bulk of it is Charles Mackerras’ work into his family tree (Nathan was his great-great-great grandfather!) The family tree is very interesting, but it didn’t give me any real information about Nathan’s thoughts on music education or indeed the Academy of Music he was said to have established in Australia. There were a few letters, manuscripts and pieces of information that I am sure will be useful but nothing of real substance. Alas, this is a case where my expectations were not quite met. But that does not mean I have given up my interest in Nathan!
Story of Isaac Nathan from 1971! ‘Mackerras family correspondence and papers, ca. 1819-1984′, MLMSS 8390
He is known as the first person to pioneer music education in Australia – Western musical education of course – and seems to have been a master in self-marketing. Most of the early pieces he composed and published in Australia were connected to a large, notable event. But his main claim to fame is that he composed and performed the first opera in Australia ‘Don John of Austria’. Some of the manuscript can be found in the Mackerras family papers, though it is not complete. After a quick google search, there have been some modern performances with Mackerras’ orchestration since the original parts have since been lost. As for Nathan’s music, it all seems a little bland in comparison to what I know of early 19th-century tastes. If we look to his master, Corri went to great lengths to provide a detailed account of late 18th-century vocal styles by including notated ornamentation in his musical score. Nathan has opted not to do this, so one could assume that he expected singers to improvise their ornamentation, though there is no information as to how much or indeed what the ornamentation was. This is where more information about his academy of music would prove useful, to really find out what he was advising!
But another more pressing question is who was he teaching? Did they go onto teach or perform? What was his musical impact other than what we can see in his self marketing? Did he uphold the traditions typical of early 19th-century British polite society? Or did he come up with an alternative way of working to suit the diverse groups of people living in the NSW colony? Alas, these are questions that for the moment my go unanswered (that is until I find the time to really look at this in depth!)
During lunch, I took a jaunt over to the Hyde Park Barracks. I won’t go into too much detail about my experience at the museum in this blog, as I will be uploading a vlog video all about it very soon! Oh yes – that reminds me – I alluded to a little project I was undertaking in my previous blog post and that was my first venture as a vlogger! I have been wanting to do a vlog for a while, partly because I find them to be a much more dynamic way to show what I have been up to. The Sydney vlog series will focus mainly on my trips to the many museums this city has to offer (with some divergence into my research interests!) I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to film, edit and upload a vlog but I found the first experience really quite enjoyable, so I am planning to do a few more. Do check out my YouTube channel if you are interested.
Finally, I was invited to dinner at St Andrews College by Professor Ian Jacks, who is the senior archivist at the college. I had been in touch with Ian because of the connections between St Andrews College and William Purves, husband of Lucy Havens. I have already written a post all about Lucy’s music collection, but I have been doing more extensive research on her family and life in NSW. She is a fascinating character but more on that in the next post!
Just a short blog tonight, mainly because the weather was so dismal today I have very few pictures of my trip to Leura which is just outside the Blue Mountain National Park. Matt who is hosting me at the library invited me to come to lunch at his beautiful home. Despite the mist and rain, the trip up did have some stunning views of the mountains and valleys. It is just a shame I could capture them on camera very well!
We didn’t spend the whole day inside, but Matt and his partner Jamie kindly took me to a concert in Blackheath. The ensemble was Song Company who seem to be a specialist early music vocal group. The concert entitled ‘Sticks and Stones’ was a mix of Western early music works including pieces by Tallis, Purcell and Allegri mixed with Arabic songs sung by their guest artist Oday All Khatib and the choir. After seeing the programme I was quite inspired to hear how they brought these two very different musical traditions together and in a few places (such as the opening) they really pulled it off.
However, as the concert wore on I started picking up on little issues that were more a demonstration of the separation between the musical styles rather than an marriage. The choir are all Western classical singers, trained to stand and deliver in a very stoic manner. Anyone who has seen/sung in a typical British choir will know what I mean:
Dress in black
Stand tall with music in arm or on a stand
Fix your eyes on the conductor like he is a weeping angel! (For reference, please watch Dr Who).
Sing in an English accent
These are also other small choral singing nuances but I won’t get into that! I do all of these things too when I sing in a choir mainly because it is an ingrained way of being. My issue is that whenever this choir moved into singing the Arabic numbers all of sudden these ingrained behaviours were changed in a rather uncomfortable manner (I wonder if they had been told to act more free!) The typical English classical vocal technique kind of went out the window as I watched 7 classically trained singers awkwardly trying to act non-classical.
But why? Why did they have to change their behaviour for these songs in particular? Could they not have acted with the same freedom for all the songs, Tallis and Purcell included? Did the Arabic songs have less value and so was not worthy of the same approach as had been adopted for the Western music? Does the Western music have less value if it does not conform to typical performance expectations? These are complex questions and I am not posing a solution at this point, merely observing the oddities a concert such as this highlighted.
The programme notes also claimed an ‘authenticity’ particularly of the Allegri Misere that I just could not get behind, but perhaps that is my researcher brain working on overdrive! The group are a very good ensemble in any case and most of the concert was quite enjoyable.
It was then a trip back to catch the 2 hour train to the city. I am hoping the weather clears a little tomorrow so that I can do a more outdoor sightseeing!
Research Adventures 