House Music at Your House, Sydney Living Museums

 

In August 2020, Amy Moore was invited to be a part of the Sydney Living Museums House Music at your House project, a new musical experiment, bringing the music of the 19th century into the 21st century. Sydney Living Museums delved into the hundreds of popular songs that survive in the collection at Rouse Hill Estate in north-west Sydney to bring you the top 20 hits of the 1840s and 50s – songs played across NSW, Australia and overseas. Read More

‘Too Late! Too Late!’ by Robert Sidney Pratten (1824-1868)

Many of the songs in the Rouse Hill House collection have links between composers and lyricists who worked both in the opera houses and theatres of London. As Amy Moore says in her introduction this is very much a song of its time, particularly in its objectification of women, but it is interesting to trace the different instrumental and vocal styles and influences reflected in these popular songs. You might easily imagine a guitar (Pelzer) as easily as a piano in this song’s accompaniment, and also a flute (Pratten) taking the vocal line. Read more

‘The Ballad Singer’ by George Linley (1798–1865)

One of the many works by forgotten composers and lyricists that lie in the sheet music collection at Rouse Hill Estate is ‘The Ballad Singer’, by George Linley (1798–1865). What can only be described as a charming little ditty with a pretty coloured cover, published in 1854, is one of many songs by Linley to have survived in Australian collections. Born in Leeds, England, Linley was an insatiable wordsmith who composed song lyrics, hymns, ballads, musical arrangements of nursery rhymes, folksongs, and operatic works. Believed to have had no musical training, the often-sentimental lyrics of his several hundred songs contrast notably with his strongly worded attacks on the music critics of the day. Read more

‘The Postman’s Knock’ by W.T Wrighton (1816-1880)

The copy of ‘The Postman’s Knock’ at Rouse Hill Estate, composed by W.T Wrighton, was published in Sydney by Jeremiah Moore in 1856 and has a charming cover of a postman knocking on a door in town. This lithograph illustration by Archibald Alexander Park (1801-1863) is based on the cover of a London edition of the song published a year earlier. Read more

‘Home! Sweet Home!’ by Henry Rowley Bishop (1787–1856) and John Howard Payne (1791–1852)

One of the most popular songs in the English-speaking world in the 19th century, ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ is from the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan (first published in 1823). With words by American John Howard Payne (1791–1852) and music by Englishman Henry Rowley Bishop (1787–1856), this tune was heard drifting from homes and concert stages across Australia, Britain and the United States over many decades. Read more

 
Amy Moore