That George William Lewis Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) is far from a household name cannot simply reflect collective amnesia about Australian music of the era. While Nellie Melba and Percy Grainger remain widely celebrated, subversion of moral and religious orthodoxies left Marshall-Hall’s legacy significantly undervalued. These sixteen carefully sequenced essays, emerging from a 2010 symposium on Marshall-Hall’s life and legacy at the Grainger Museum, reflect two decades of thought and research into a man who, as the Foreword observes, ‘exercised an unprecedented influence over music-making in Melbourne’.
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