Looking Forward, Listening Back: The Sonic History of Three Early Twentieth-Century Australian Violinists

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century Sydney saw a ‘boom’ in concert life. During these years violinists Cyril Monk, Patrick Moore MacMahon and Phyllis McDonald were well-known figures to Sydney’s concert-going public. Today, they are forgotten to the annals of Australian music history. Australian music histories have seldom focused on classical performers and performing practices. In particular, there is little scholarship on violin cultures in Australia, perhaps due to the very few surviving early Australian violin recordings.

This thesis offers a detailed study of the concert traditions and performing practices of these individual violinists from extant evidence from their musical lives. Rather than a comparative study, it is an exposé of unknown performing cultures and traditions, using sources discovered throughout the period of research. It provides evidence of characteristics of emotive performance typical of an earlier performance style including portamento, vibrato, tempo flexibility and sample concertographies, drawing on evidence from historical musical editions, annotated performance parts, newspaper articles, reviews, concert programs, photographs and historical recordings. Building on established methods of practice-based research, this thesis uses cyclical research processes of emulation, interpretation and implementation of research data to understand performance in an embodied and creative sense.

This thesis seeks to ‘hear’ music from this era, presenting a set of possible sound worlds that exhibit marked differences to our modern aesthetic, inviting a reimagining of Sydney’s musical past. The sonic histories of Monk, MacMahon and McDonald shed light on the shifting aesthetic priorities in these decades which were sensitive to the societal and cultural changes brought about by broadcasting, war and modernism.