Grainger Fellow - Sarah Kirby

Percy Grainger on Stage and Screen

This project aims to interrogate depictions of Percy and Ella Grainger on stage and screen, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger’s self-conscious self-depiction through his museum and collection. In examining (semi)fictionalised representations of the Graingers through the work of other artists—directors, writers, and filmmakers—it considers questions of identity, meaning and representation, asking: what attracts creators to Grainger’s story, and what do changing depictions of his life tell us about our relationship with Grainger the person, his music, the Grainger Collection, and Australian social, cultural and political history overall? This re-evaluation will offer new understandings of the role of the Grainger Museum in the contemporary Australian context and how both the academy and Australian society might engage with Grainger, his music, and his complex legacy in the twenty-first century.

In addition to this project, the Grainger Fellow role includes curatorial research for the Museum’s exhibitions, assisting and teaching into the Academic Engagement programme, supporting the Creative Research Residencies and Student Composer in Residence each year, and providing access to the collection and advice to anyone who wants to use the collection for research.

Biography:

Dr Sarah Kirby is a recent doctoral graduate of the University of Melbourne. Her PhD research, funded by an Endeavour Research Fellowship, explored music at international exhibitions in the British Empire through the 1880s. She has published widely on Australian and British music history, women in music, and music and museum culture. Her first monograph, Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire is out now with Boydell & Brewer, and she has recently published an edited collection with John Gabriel titled Australasian Music, At Home and Abroad (Australian Scholarly Publishing). She lectures in undergraduate music history at the Melbourne Conservatorium, and recently at the University of New England. She is the associate editor of Musicology Australia and was also the 2022 Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of NSW, with a project on music and inter-war internationalism.