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Yesterday's home
entertainment centre
Huge
numbers of pianos
were in front parlours through Victorian and
Edwardian times and into the 1920s. Central to home and community
entertainment, they also stoked the flames of love for courting
couples.
 Piano
in the Parlour is a musical and social history that looks affectionately at a period when pianos
were the most cherished domestic possessions in New Zealand and many
other countries.
Brought to life
by contemporary real-life stories and graphics, Piano in the
Parlour recreates a century of home musical culture between the
1820s and 1920s.
Who played and sang? What did they play; where and
how did they perform? Who looked after them: the music publishers at
home and abroad, entrepreneurs and companies including Charles Begg
& Co, the Dresden Piano Co and Auckland's Eady stores that serviced and sold pianos, and the old-time piano teachers.
Pioneers would go to extreme
lengths and spend a fortune to put a piano in their homes, as shown
in the Academy Award winning film, The Piano. That was
fiction, but similar real-life stories are in this book.
Piano in the Parlour also looks
at how and why piano culture declined in the 20th century.
Words and music (with
chord symbols) are included for 17 songs commonly played and sung in the piano's
heyday: Rule Britannia!, Auld Lang Syne, Home! Sweet Home, Annie
Laurie, Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep, Come Home Father,
Beautiful Dreamer, I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen, When You and I
Were Young Maggie, On the Ball, Love’s Old Sweet Song, The Holy
City, Waiting at the Church, Keep the Home Fires Burning,
Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Love’s Garden of Roses, Hine e Hine.
Though Piano in the
Parlour is
set mainly in New Zealand, the piano culture was similar elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
•
Beautifully produced hardback
edition in full colour
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Table of contents: click
here to see the table of contents and more pictures.
•
Index: click
here to see the
full index.
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There are some
books that immediately endear themselves to you like a lost
labrador. This is one.
John MacGibbon
takes a theme (the history of the piano, upright and
otherwise, in the New Zealand home) and plays an absorbing
set of literary variations which combine social history,
music and unabashed nostalgia into a nicely packaged
excursion through the domestic history of the piano.
Written with a
sense of time and place, it would take a hard unmusical
heart to resist this book. There's even a selection of music
from the Edwardian and Victorian parlour – including that
peerless hymn to the benefits of temperance and the evils of
alcohol, Come Home, Father.
Who knows,
MacGibbon could be launching a new piano age.
Christopher Moore
– 'Book of the Week', The Press, Christchurch |
” |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN MACGIBBON trained in classical
piano and graduated to playing keyboards in nightclubs and musical
theatre. Still an active pianist, though retired from professional
playing, he has written books on
Scottish emigrants, war history and the sheep industry. He is also a
free-lance writer and publisher.
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