Red letter day

This has been a big week so far.  On Tuesday I finally saw my grant application through final submission, which means that I now sit in wait until November for a decision.  It also means that posting should return to something like normal service here.

Today is the feast of St Dunstan of Canterbury.  My main connection to the saint is that the Anglican church in Violet Town, where I grew up, is dedicated to him.  It's not a parish I know, as I was brought up in the Uniting Church in town.  There is a website, but it's very poorly maintained with a lot of information that's at least five years old.  My entry to Anglicanism came about as a result of the family moving up the road to Benalla, but that's a story for another time.

The other anniversary today is Dame Nellie Melba's 150th birthday.  Melba was a symbol of Australia's cultural maturity in the late-nineteenth century, even if that maturity was measured by European standards.  I've always found it interesting that we find it easier to valourize cricketers, bankers, crooks and politicians, yet we find it difficult to extend the same prestige to exponents of the high arts.  There's been an interesting debate on this point over on The Age website in response to an article by Peter Craven today.  At the end of the day, it's the connection of one Melburnian to another that I'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate here.

In addition to her memoirs, Melodies and Memories, there are three non-fiction biographies of Melba.  A further, fictional, account was published by Beverley Nicholls, who had ghost-written Melodies.  Of the three (or is it really four or five? one looses count) standard biographies, I would say that John Hetherington's book withstands rereading very admirably, with its chatty style and breezy narrative interspersed with some very pungent character sketches.  Therese Radic's book provides an interesting account of Melba's relationships in Melbourne, and how she brought her international experiences to bear on cultural life here.  One of the most useful aspects of this book is Radic's painstaking lists of Melba's recordings.  Ann Blainey's biography is very interesting, more up-to-date on methodology, and makes use of source material previously unavailable , but I found it left me feeling a bit undernourished reading from a musicological perspective.  Perhaps it didn't help that I read it on a long-haul flight.

My encounters with Melba have been filtered through my research work.  A few years ago I delivered a paper looking at Melba's art patronage, and she loomed up in one of the chapters of my Ph.D. thesis.  But even this encounter rests on older foundations: from 1992 until 1995 I was a student at the Melba Memorial Conservatorium.  Even then I was intrigued by Melba, and around the building one could find the odd relic of the lady herself, such as a dumb piano that she used for practice on long sea voyages, a very fine copy of the Tom Roberts portrait, various photos and other ephemera.  To the modern mind the idea of a cult of relics is a little difficult to fathom, but in that setting I quite understood how the relationship between an object and its original owner might serve to enchant the present moment: to touch the keys of a dumb piano once played by Melba was a heady thought.

Actually, even that encounter has an earlier foundation.  The first funeral I attended as a small child was that of an elderly uncle who had lived most of his life in Ballarat.  My father recalled visiting him when he was young, and described how the evening would be passed either in reading, conversation or listening to records of Melba.  Her presence therefore might be said to go back into my ancestral sound world.

Coming into the here-and-now, my present work place is about a stone's throw away from the Richmond City Hall.  This was the place where Melba sang in public for the first time as a young girl.  Melba was born in Richmond, and much of her early life was spent in the area.  Within a short walk of my office I can pass the Dame Nellie Melba Kindergarden, Dame Nellie Melba Memorial Park and Doonside Street, the latter named for the house in which Melba was born.

Melba is fortunate to have lived through the period where recording technology was becoming reliable.  Such was the pace of innovation that it is clear from her biographers that she was reluctant to record using methods that might quickly be superseded.  Some of the recordings are better than others, on technological and vocal grounds, and you have to be patient with the whooshing sound that comes with old records.

Here's a couple of recordings of Melba from the archives of youtube.  I've chosen items from her 1904 recording sessions.  There is a simple reason for this: Melba's voice was still very much at its peak, and the quality of her performances come through on these recordings very clearly.  The first recording is something for which Melba was famous: the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.  Listen carefully for the flute part.

Melba's ancestry was Scots, so it's most appropriate to have Comin' thro the Rye.