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.
Lyrebird Press is supported by the Hanson Bequests 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).
Header image: Claire Bonnor
Our 2022 Lyrebird catalogue includes details of all books published since 2012, including Take Note: Interviews with Australian Composers (2021), edited by Madeline Roycroft. The next catalogue, with details of the latest books, will be out soon.
Taking opera as an explicitly gendered phenomenon, Emily Wilbourne interrogates the position of the female composer in relationship to her work. With reference to Elena Kats-Chernin’s operas Iphis and Matricide: The Musical, both of which depict a lesbian relationship, and drawing upon interviews with the composer herself, Wilbourne produces an audacious analysis of the relationship of gender and opera, providing arresting insights into the work of one of Australia’s most admired composers.
Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York.
Music-lovers from Australia and New Zealand have collected and bound sheet music and handwritten music since the earliest years of settlement. In these nine essays, the authors discuss music and dance collections found in libraries, historic houses, archives and homes, explaining what these cherished artefacts reveal about the owners, their emotional life and their musical practice. Beautifully illustrated, and with suggestions for how these collections might be further explored or disseminated, this is a landmark book in the history of music in private life.
Rosemary Richards is an Australian musicologist, teacher, performer and collector. Her research has explored the biographical, historical and musical significance of manuscript music collections belonging to Georgiana McCrae (1804–90) and her contemporaries.
Julja Szuster is a musicologist and Visiting Research Fellow at the Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide. Her research interests include music in colonial Australia and seventeenth-century Italian Baroque music.
Join us and meet Emily Wilbourne at the launch of her compelling new study of the intersections of gender and contemporary opera, Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Iphis and Matricide: The Musical.
Emily is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, the author of Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and editor-in-chief of the journal Women in Music.
She will be interviewed by the composer and musicologist Linda Kouvaras. Copies of the book will be available for sale and for signing at the discounted price of $30 (RRP $44) (no cash sales).
Date and time: Monday 5 December, 5.30pm.
Location: Tallis Wing, Conservatorium Building, Royal Parade, Parkville, Melbourne.
This is a free event. Registrations are not obligatory but would be appreciated.
Take Note: Interviews with Australian Composers
Edited by Madeline Roycroft.
Published December 2021 | viii, 206 p., ill.
ISBN: 9780734037961 (ebook: pdf). Free.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. “Getting my hands dirty”: Larry Sitsky in Interview (Patricia Shaw)
2. “A never-ending search for a sound nobody has ever heard”: An Interview with Elena Kats-Chernin (Patricia Shaw)
3. Discontinuous Dialogues: Chris Dench in Conversation with Bruce Petherick (Chris Dench)
4. Against the Tide: Julian Yu and the “New Wave” of Chinese Music (Martin Greet)
5. Illuminating the Dark Side: An Interview with Brenton Broadstock (Linda Kouvaras)
6. Whipping Up a Storm—Composing Batavia: An Interview with Richard Mills (Anna Goldsworthy)
7. Collaboration in Creation: An Interview with Nigel Westlake (Jillian Graham)
8. Teetering on the Brink of Tonality: An Interview with Neil Kelly (Wez Prictor)
9. Compositional Credos and Performance Perspectives: An Interview with Carl Vine (David Pereira)
10. Drawing Together Strands of Influence: An Interview with Elliott Gyger (Stuart Greenbaum)
11. Eclectic Experience—Eclectic Style: An Interview with Joseph Twist (Peter Campbell)
12. “The music is dancing free”: An Interview with Felicity Wilcox (Kat Nelligan)
13. “Where words cannot reach”: An Interview with Gordon Kerry (James Wade)
14. The World Turned Upside Down: An Interview with Elliott Gyger (Andrew Aronowicz)
15. The Ecology of Collaboration: An Interview with Liza Lim (Madeline Roycroft)
16. Products of Our Own Histories: An Interview with Linda Kouvaras (Maurice Windleburn)
17. A Brain That Keeps Working: An Interview with Helen Gifford (Jaslyn Robertson)
18. A Collage of Remembrance: An Interview with Paul Stanhope (Philip Eames)
19. Twenty Sonatas in Twenty Years: An Interview with Stuart Greenbaum (Laura Abraham and Robert McIntyre)
20. Ruling the Hive: An Interview with Melody Eötvös (Simone Maurer)