The LYREBIRD PRESS is a small publisher of scholarly books about music and music making in Australia and New Zealand. It shares the name of Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre (The Lyrebird Press), which was established in Paris by Melbourne-born publisher and patron of the arts Louise Hanson-Dyer (1884–1962) in 1932. Lyrebird upholds the L’Oiseau-Lyre tradition of scrupulously edited and attractively designed publications.

Lyrebird Press publishes the peer-reviewed series Australasian Music Research (AMR), maintaining a title that began as a journal in 1996 and, from volume nine onwards, became an irregular monograph series. Lyrebird also publishes peer-reviewed books on music and Australia that sit outside AMR’s parameters. Examples include scholarly collections of edited letters and books of a shorter length. Lyrebird Press is not currently publishing editions of notated music.

In 2013 Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre ended its presence in Europe and reverted to the parent holding, Lyrebird Press, at the University of Melbourne. It is now possible to purchase copies of l’Oiseau-Lyre publications through the Lyrebird Press shop.

Lyrebird Press is supported by the Louise B.M. Hanson-Dyer and J.B. Hanson Bequest at the University of Melbourne through the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

Lyrebird Press (Australia) was established at the University of Melbourne in 2006 to continue the work of Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre (Paris & Monaco).

FRITZ HART: AN ENGLISH MUSICAL ROMANTIC AT THE ENDS OF EMPIRE

By Peter Tregear (University of Melbourne/University of Adelaide) and Anne-Marie Forbes (University of Tasmania)

Fritz Bennicke Hart (1874–1949) stands as one of the more astonishing figures of the so-called English Musical Renaissance. This long-overdue biographical study explores and assesses the substantial and lasting contributions he made to the musical life of England, Australia and Hawai’i. As Tregear and Forbes have richly documented, Hart was a charismatic, and extraordinarily productive, composer, conductor, educator and institutional leader whose life-journey in music throws new light on the aesthetic concerns of early twentieth-century imperial Britain and how they were received and refracted at that empire’s farthest extent.

Peter Tregear is a singer and conductor, Principal Fellow of the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor of the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (Scarecrow, 2013) and Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking Tertiary Music Education (Currency House, 2014), and writes regularly for the Australian Book Review and The Conversation.

Anne-Marie Forbes is a singer and researcher in music history, and music and health, at the University of Tasmania. She has published widely on Australian and British music, including editions of Fritz Hart’s songs and choral works, and co-edited Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic and Musical Patriot (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) with Paul Watt, and Heart’s Ease: Spirituality in the Music of John Tavener (Peter Lang, 2020) with June Boyce-Tillman.

See this book in the Lyrebird shop here.

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This book on the Australian music publisher and patron Louise Hanson-Dyer brings together, for the first time, an international group of scholars with expertise in the history of early French musicology and sound recording; fine art and design; and critical editions and music publishing in France. With a focus on the interwar period, it aims to synchronise Hanson-Dyer’s Melbourne and Paris ventures, seeing her work in a global perspective and showing how she played a significant role in the transnational cultural relationship between Australia and France. Hanson-Dyer had vision and objectives and the drive to realise them; this volume situates the consolidation of her role as cultural activist in early twentieth-century Europe and Australia and presents new light on her publication of critical musical editions, her art collections and early sound recordings.

Edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill. Including chapters by Kerry Murphy, Gerard Vaughan, Sarah Kirby, Catherine Massip, Susan Daniels, Rachel Orzech, Thalia Laughlin, Carina Nandlal, Madeline Roycroft and Isabelle Ragnard.

See this book in the Lyrebird shop here.

Our Lyrebird catalogue 2025 provides details of all books published since 2012, including our latest publications. For further information and purchases see the Books page (via the menu on the top right of the home page) or visit the online Lyrebird shop.

EARLY POPULAR MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA: ROOTS, DIVERSITY AND DIRECTIONS

By John Whiteoak (Monash University)

Exploring the diversity of popular musics played and heard in Australia in rotundas, showgrounds, street parades, balls, civic receptions, department stores and nightclubs, these eleven essays examine how both urban and country musicians adapted a variety of transnational genres, from blackface and black minstrelsy to ragtime, jazz, brass band, circus, “German band”, Latin, “Gypsy”, hillbilly and country and western music. Given that much of this music was unwritten and often improvised, disseminated by ear and from one generation to the next, this research draws on an imaginative range of sources, including personal reminiscences, rare sheet music and recordings. Always entertaining and accessible, Early Popular Music in Australia uncovers extraordinary musicianship, remarkable collaborations and a vein of homespun larrikinism to significantly broaden and enrich our understanding of the Australian cultural landscape in the century before rock and pop.

To be published in December 2025.

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RAISING HER VOICE: WOMEN WRITING OPERA IN AUSTRALIA

Edited by Suzanne Robinson and Joel Crotty

Women have been composing opera in Australia since 1905, yet  until very recently few of those works were staged, commissions  were rare and revivals were non-existent. Happily, a sea-  change in the last two decades has seen an upsurge in opera  composition by women and those operas are now performed all  over the world by first-rate ensembles and capable casts. Essays  in this volume examine operas composed by thirteen women  born or resident in Australia—Anne Boyd, Deborah Cheetham  Fraillon, Florence Ewart, Helen Gifford, Peggy Glanville-Hicks,  Andrée Greenwell, Cat Hope, Elena Kats-Chernin, Liza Lim,  Mona McBurney, Kate Neal, Johanna Selleck and Margaret  Sutherland—documenting the obstacles, incomprehension and  prejudice many of them faced and yet how vividly imaginative  and accomplished these works are. Based on newly discovered  archival sources and interviews with living composers, librettists  and directors, and accompanied by production photos and  copious musical examples, Raising Her Voice is landmark study  of more than a hundred years of invention, inspiration and  persistence in a genre regarded as the most prestigious of all.

Foreword by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. With contributions  from Ty Bouque, Jacinta Dennett, Louise Jenkins, Pamela  Karantonis, Linda Kouvaras, Sally Macarthur, Aidan McGartland,  Stephen Mould, Faye Patton, Jaslyn Robertson, Suzanne  Robinson, Helen Rusak, Johanna Selleck and Sue Tweg.

To be published in January 2026.

HEAR PETER TREGEAR AND ANNE-MARIE FORBES ON THE ABC MUSIC SHOW

Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes, authors of the recent biography of Fritz Hart, appeared on the Music Show with Andrew Ford on Saturday 11 October to discuss Hart’s origins, his enormous output of compositions and why the book included a photo of the composer sunbathing on Waikiki beach.

Hear the interview here.

LAUNCH OF FRITZ HART: AN ENGLISH MUSICAL ROMANTIC AT THE ENDS OF EMPIRE

Fritz Hart: An English Musical Romantic at the Ends of Empire, by Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes, was launched on Tuesday 12 March 2025 at the Victorian Artists Society in East Melbourne in the very room that Hart himself would have taught as director of the Melba Conservatorium. Composer Richard Mills described it as as “a cracker of a book” and music was provided by Ben Spears (violin), Dr Joe Chindamo (piano), Stella Horvath (soprano), Chris Watson (tenor), Elspeth Bawden (soprano) and Sophia Gyger (mezzo). Photos were taken by Peter Campbell.

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NEW LOUISE HANSON-DYER EXHIBITION

The Holst Victorian House, birthplace in Cheltenham of Gustav Holst, is holding an exhibition this year showcasing its acquisition of a Louise Dyer collection. The exhibition will run from 8 June 2024 to 1 February 2025 and is accompanied by an illustrated booklet, to which the Hanson-Dyer Library at the University of Melbourne has contributed. For further information see their website here.

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NEW CD COLLECTION

Shane Lestideau, author of a chapter in Memories of Musical Lives (Lyrebird, 2023), has just released a new CD with the Evergreen Ensemble, featuring performances of works from the music collections of the two Scottish immigrant violinists she discusses in the book. The Bell Birds of Scotland is available as a digital album here.

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BOOK LAUNCH: PURSUIT OF THE NEW

Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, Publisher and Collector, edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill, with contributions from Jim Davidson, Gerard Vaughan, Sarah Kirby, Catherine Massip, Susan Daniels, Rachel Orzech, Thalia Laughlin, Carina Nandlal, Madeline Roycroft and Isabelle Ragnard, will be launched at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music on 28 February 2024. The book is now available in both print and digital formats in the online shop here.

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BOOK LAUNCH: MEMORIES OF MUSICAL LIVES

Memories of Musical Lives, edited by Rosemary Richards and Julja Szuster, was launched at the conference of the Musicological Society of Australia held in Adelaide in November 2023, in the presence of both editors. Further details can be found on the Books page of the website and in the online shop here. A review of the book by Duncan Stuart Warren Reid has appeared in Musicology Australia and can be read here.