The Geoff Harvey Collection

A selection of music arrangements from the Geoff Harvey Collection. Photo courtesy Julie Watson

Bradley Cummings examines music from the Geoff Harvey Collection. Photo courtesy Julie Watson
In October 2008, the National Library of Australia acquired nearly 120 boxes of musical arrangements from Geoff Harvey, who was the Musical Director at the Channel 9 television station from 1962 to 1998. The boxes contained approximately 5000 arrangements of popular music, television program themes, and incidental music used by the Nine Network in both Sydney and Melbourne over the course of Harvey’s career.
Represented in this collection are works by 20 or more of Australia’s foremost musical arrangers of the time, including Ron Falson, Jack Westmore, Graeme Lyall, George Brodbeck, Alan Deak, Tommy Tycho, and numerous others who wrote their arrangements for a bewildering array of performers on television shows that include the Don Lane Show, the Midday Show, the Graham Kennedy Show, and one of the earliest variety shows on Australian television, In Melbourne Tonight. The earliest item identified so far in the collection is an arrangement of ‘What Child is This’ by the Melbourne-based arranger Geoff Kitchen, used on IMT in December 1960, and the most recent item is an arrangement of ‘Jump, Jive and Wail’ by Graham Jesse, performed by George Washingmachine on the Midday Show in November 1998.
For the National Library of Australia this acquisition presented significant collection control and management issues—and even the process of physically getting the material to Canberra was fraught with difficulty. The collection had been housed in a shipping container on Geoff Harvey’s rural property since the very late 1990s, which, as can be imagined, is a less-than-ideal long term storage environment for documents such as these. Staff from the Library spent two days on Harvey’s property sorting and boxing the material in readiness for a contractor to move it all to Canberra from Harvey’s hay shed (which was the only protection available from the weather!). Decisions had to be made on site about how the material would be organised and about which items would require immediate attention by the Library’s preservation and conservation experts.
Fortunately, the collection was ordered, well labelled, and even had an accompanying set of catalogue cards that identified each item by a unique shelf number. The decision was made to retain the original filing systems that were adopted by the Channel 9 libraries in Sydney and Melbourne and to more-or-less replicate that within the Library. Doing so not only made the collection much easier to control but it also retained the integrity of the original Sydney and Melbourne division of the collection which may be important to researchers in the future.
The collection itself comprises, for the most part, scores or charts for each individual arrangement together with the name of the arranger, the name and broadcast date of the television show for which it was written, and the name of the performer. As a whole, the collection presents an interesting picture of live/studio television music and the people who created it across, primarily, three decades. Take, for example, Jack Westmore, who made a very large contribution to television music but whose work is otherwise little known (only three entries relating to his work can be found on Music Australia). It is curious to see that he was the only arranger consistently engaged in Melbourne in the first few years of the 1970s, and it was only after 1975 that the number of arrangers who were commissioned in Melbourne began to increase.
In 1985, Westmore was arranging primarily for the Safeway New Faces show, for which the NLA now holds more than 100 arrangements that he wrote between February and July of that year alone. That figure equates to slightly less than five arrangements each week which is a very high workload indeed given that Westmore also played in, and led, the band and, like most musicians, was likely to have been involved in other commercial music activities. These figures alone explain why Westmore seemed to rely heavily on commercially available sheet music for the rhythm section to which he added horn parts and front-line arrangements—a practice which is evident from the material now held in the Library’s collection.
A comparison can be made with the workload of some of the other arrangers in the collection for the same year. From 1985 the National Library now holds 60 arrangements written by the Sydney-based arranger Ron Falson, 29 by Neil Thurgate, 20 written by David Basden, and 45 from George Brodbeck. In Melbourne in the same year Peter De Visser wrote at least 24 arrangements. These figures are indications only as there is no way of knowing whether all of the work of these arrangers has been kept. However, they begin to provide a picture of the amount of television music that these arrangers were preparing each week, and they also give an indication of the fluency and skill that was required to consistently produce quality work that was acceptable to the top national and international performers of the time.
There are many more patterns and trends that emerge from even a cursory study of this collection—for example, the performers who regularly got television gigs; the amount and type of music that was used on different television shows; and even the use of dancers in this style of television broadcast (which was very popular in the 1980s). The acquisition of this collection provides an incredibly rich resource for researchers wanting to further investigate these and many other aspects of music in Australian television history.
The Geoff Harvey Collection complements other collections within the National Library such as the Flynn Collection (containing music that was used at the radio station 3DB), the State Theatre Collection (containing music that was used for silent film screenings), and the J. C. Williamson Collection of theatre music. Adding this very large collection of musical arrangements for television reflects the commitment of the National Library of Australia to documenting Australian musical life and history as comprehensively as possible. The Geoff Harvey Collection is a significant contribution to this endeavour.
At the time of writing, it is expected that the collection will be available and accessible to researchers from July 2009.
Bradley Cummings
Music Acquisitions and Cataloguing Unit