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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 53| October 2001


The Collector's Book of Sheet Music Covers

Cover of The Collector's Book of Sheet Music Covers

Less than a year since the project first began, The Collector’s Book of Sheet Music Covers by Robyn Holmes and Ruth Lee Martin has now been released. The bright, burnt-orange cover glows on the Library’s bookshop shelf, the cover within the cover a beautiful though subtle representation of the colours of the Aboriginal flag to accompany the piece of music My Country.

This piece of music is better known to the Australian public as the musical setting for the Dorothea Mackellar poem beginning I Love a Sunburnt Country. It is a perfect example of what the book—and the sheet music collection—is all about. The piece itself is connected to Australia’s collective identity through the universal appeal of its title, and to a lesser degree in the identification with the text.

The sheet music cover itself, however, is what the book is about, and it is this feature that makes this particular version so striking. Whereas the covers of early sheet music about ‘our country Australia’ have always been dominated by figures of Anglo-Saxons waving flags (see page 25 of the book for an example), the My Country cover of 1982 reflects Australia’s growing acknowledgement of and respect for Indigenous Australia as an intrinsic part of our national identity.

I spoke with Robyn Holmes, co-author of The Collector’s Book of Sheet Music Covers and Curator of Music at the National Library, about music as a ‘social barometer’.

‘When I started looking at the [music] collections for my Remarkable Occurrences article, I was absolutely struck by how much storytelling there is … the music was really embedded in the cultural history. I kept thinking: the music presents a different perspective on some of the core events of Australia’s history. Like Federation, for example: we see in the sheet music the last decades of the nineteeth-century leading to a more federated view of what Australia is—there was a sense of a nation long before Federation, though these songs are very empire dominated. We were sons of Britannia as well as sons of the Sunny South.’

The vast amount of information evident in sheet music occurs on two levels—the artefact and the meaning, or interpretation. Holmes explains: ‘Take any one piece of music and you can read what the cover tells you and the way in which an event or a meaning or a concept or an idea is portrayed, often in the visual imagery. You get a lot of social history and all the industry information on the covers—cost, publisher, often performer, a sense of who’s playing it, who’s buying it, audience issues—layers and layers of advertisements … and that’s in the artefact alone. Then you look at the meanings and you get attitudes, you get commentaries, musical styles and the way we’ve inherited them, issues of a transplantation of musical styles.’

The sheet music selected for The Collector’s Book of Sheet Music Covers is primarily popular music. This music generally has the most visual impact—it is the music marketed to the masses, and as such its presentation is paramount. Popular music has increasingly become a commercial product, as opposed to other genres such as art or folk music. The sheet music in the Library’s collection is predominantly western European music, being the music of the empire, but more importantly the music that is notated and published. For these reasons The Collector’s Book of Sheet Music Covers is not a comprehensive history of Australian music. It is an overview of the National Library’s sheet music collection as it has reflected and even created Australian culture, with visual examples.

In the book there are many familiar icons. Items that have become synonymous with Australian culture, such as the Holden and Aeroplane Jelly, household names such as Don Bradman, Johnny O’Keefe and Kylie Minogue, iconic places such as Sydney, Melbourne and even Gundagai, and events such as the World Wars and Federation. You may even find a piece of music you own or have played yourself! Certainly there’ll be lots you’ve heard.

Enjoy the book not only for its nostalgia value but for its remarkable insight into the sheet music collection of the National Library and the revelation of the role and the power of music as a tool in culture.
—Kirsty Gillespie is Music Digitisation Officer at the National Library

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au

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