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
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.
“Fritz Hart offers a vital and pressing opportunity to reflect critically on British music’s complex and entangled relationship with modernity, globalism and empire. In their scrupulous and finely-tuned volume, Tregear and Forbes provide a foundational text for framing Hart’s richly diverse life and work as teacher, mentor, administrator and creative artist”. —Professor Daniel Grimley, University of Oxford
ISBN: 978 0 7340 3803 6 (paperback); published 2024. Also available as a downloadable pdf (ISBN: 978 0 7340 3804 3; AMR021E).
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.
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.
Announcing our June sale: most e-books discounted to $15. The offer applies until 30 June.
Visit the online shop and click on the cover of a downloadable e-book (pdf). The discount option will be visible in the cart.