Thesis
The contributions of the Melbourne Festival of Organ and Harpsichord and its successors: 1971-2010
(2017)
Abstract
The Melbourne Festival of Organ and Harpsichord (MIFOH) and its successors ran from 1971 to 2010 under various other names. MIFOH is used as shorthand term covering the whole period including the names: Melbourne Autumn Festival of Organ and Harpsichord, Melbourne Autumn Festival and finally Spring Autumn Early Music Festival. It hosted ~1000 different performers at all stages of their careers. It fulfilled for many a complete arc from enabling students to perform and attend master classes with major international figures in a collegiate mode to becoming the pre- eminent Australian early music festival.
The present thesis is both an examination of this largely lost legacy to musical Melbourne and Australia, and also a work of eScholarship on the substantial physical and digital music lost prior to this work. It covers the requirements for the creation of a digital archive to house the material recovered from magnetic media from the 1970’s onwards, and the recovery of analog media. There are substantial Intellectual Property barriers to assembling such large collections of original historic performances, if they are to become accessible through an Open Music Repository. This task is complicated by almost all now being classified as Orphan Works. The evolution of MIFOH matched the evolution of the absorption and professionalization of early music in Melbourne, and to further a critical mass of performers who went on to teach new generations.
Organ and Harpsichord, choral and modern composition, and early music all benefited. MIFOH and its successors contributed forty years of performance and teaching to Melbourne and left a major legacy to many people. It is surprising that such a large body of work had slipped almost out of visibility. This research has delivered an overall perspective and the supporting materials to enable this long running substantial Festival to be seen in a clearer light (Wigan 2017). It covers the contributions it made, and also addresses the repository and analog to digital recovery aspects now required to fully realise its musical legacy for the community at large. The substantial Appendices provide a basis for future scholars and interested parties that simply did not exist previously. Social network explorations are now possible. Large scale digital recovery - already ~83Gb - from original recording media is now possible, to create a major Music Repository. This will require the issues identified on music metadata, Intellectual Property, clearance and access requirements to be integrated into a fresh and living repository archive for musical works.
Dedication
This work, documenting and bringing into context the Festival, the 1000 performers over 40 years, its legacy, the eScholarship, and the associated large collection of original music recordings and their digital recovery are dedicated to my late wife, Jane Frances Ramsay Wigan (nee Geiringer) who sang with the Ormond Singers and at MIFOH for five years (1976-81) before her death during the 1981 Festival. This work and the associated creation and bringing together of an (initial) 83Gb+ of digitised original recordings and previously widely scattered documentation brings the scale, the contributors, and the contributions of MIFOH onto the record not only in her memory, and enables appropriate recognition of the 1000 other performers and the many almost entirely voluntary Friend organisers who can now be recognised for what they built, maintained and delivered for 40 years.
Keywords
- MIFOH,
- Organ,
- Harpsichord,
- Festival,
- Music,
- eScholarship,
- Digital Humanities,
- Melbourne,
- Bendigo
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring May 23, 2017
Degree
MA by Research
Field of study
Musicology
Department
Sir Zleman Cowen School of Music, Monash Univerity
Advisor
Professor John Griffiths
Comments
Major Examiners report
For one who has been involved in early music and the establishment of databases for more than thirty years, this thesis has been a delight to read. As an example of eScholarship, I have found that it breaks new ground in historical musicology, as intensive search for and use of digital materials have supplemented the severe lack of conventional documentation and successfully established a coherent if not complete account of the history of an important enterprise in Melbourne’s musical history. The strength of the thesis is the thoroughness of its research using the techniques of eScholarship and Digital Humanities. In the light of the paucity of surviving written documents, this seems to be an exemplary piece of data-gathering. The vastness of the information gathered in spite of relatively poor surviving documentation is both inspiring and disturbing to those who have written of the past on the basis of surviving documents only.
The weaknesses in the thesis seem to have arisen from the limitations arising from the MA word-limit and the writer’s minimising interpretation of the data gathered. As the writer says in his chapter of conclusions, ‘It is clear that a substantial multimedia ’book’ is needed to continue the much larger personal project of which the present thesis is simply an initial first stage.’ As it stands, the thesis itself functions as an explanatory guide to the documentation gathered in the appendices.
The implied argument of this thesis is that by the application of eScholarship techniques, the almost-disappeared MIFOH can be restored to an internationally-connected festival of over 40 years with the participation of more than a thousand performers, full details of programs and 80+gig of recordings. Although the writer modestly claims this to be ‘simply an initial first stage’, it is a demonstration of what can be achieved through modern IT techniques. It may well serve as a paradigm of the historical musicology of the future. We look forward to the databases becoming publicly available and an interpretative history published in book form
John Stinson OAM, Emeritus Scholar, La Trobe University 85
Citation Information
Marcus R Wigan. "The contributions of the Melbourne Festival of Organ and Harpsichord and its successors: 1971-2010" (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mwigan/32/
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.