Keeping time : the piano as a barometer of Auckland society, 1896-1900

Abstract

With its hundreds of moving parts likened to automobile production in the twentieth century, the piano was a major product of the nineteenth-century British Industrial Revolution. Made by men in factories and played by women, it was the social anchor of the middle-class home symbolising male prosperity and female cultural refinement. The piano in Auckland in Iate-Victorian times, being at its peak as the quintessential middle-class symbol of respectability, provides a gauge upon which local social and cultural identity may be measured. Using personal diaries and published newspaper andjournal reports, a reconstruction is made of who played the instrument when, where and why. Of particular significance is the arrival in Auckland of two major British examining bodies - Trinity College, London, and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, in 1895 and 1897 respectively. Auckland's early settlers, working-class and quickly labelled 'speculators', 'capitalists' and 'land-sharks', were the parents and grandparents of newly middle-class Iate-Victorian Aucklanders. In turn, Iate-Victorian Aucklanders were to become the grandparents and great grandparents of the generation who, from the mid to Iate twentieth century, became known by the rest of New Zealand in derogatory terms. This thesis, using the piano-barometer, attempts to understand the path which brought about negative imagery. Whether the piano was a musical instrument of intellect and spirituality and thus, a means by which a rejection of industrialism's crass philistinism could be made, or whether its very presence in the home exemplified that philistinism, underpins the discussion. From the beginning of time, architecture has been used by the socially superior as a means of distinguishing themselves from those whom they consider to be socially inferior. Linked to this is the fact that, as the British Industrial Revolution gathered force, the city began to segregate industrial and business space from living space. A scrutiny ofhow both architecture and separate spheres for living and working affected social organisation of domestic space as it existed within the ubiquitous bay villa in Iate-Victorian Auckland is made in order to understand why the piano took pride of place in its front and best room - the parIour/drawing room.