From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, celebrate the life and work of Jane Austen with the music to screen adaptations of her best-loved works.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Austen’s work has inspired many beloved screen adaptations, and music is a huge part of those worlds.<\/p>\n
Screen composers who worked on these adaptations were heavily influenced by music from Austen’s time.<\/p>\n
“[Music] is one way of peering into and understanding Austen’s world,” says ABC Classic’s Breakfast presenter Megan Burslem.<\/p>\n
The musical world of Jane Austen<\/p>\n
In her time, young women like Austen and her sisters entertained themselves by playing popular contemporary songs on the piano or another instrument using sheet music.<\/p>\n
But often Austen had to copy out the music owned by acquaintances or the circulating libraries because they were not always available or affordable.<\/p>\n
Dooley has researched Austen’s extensive sheet music collection<\/a>, indexing at least 160 pieces of music in Austen’s hand, comprising songs, nursery rhymes and dances.<\/p>\n This forms the broader Austen family’s collection, which has around 600 pieces of music.<\/p>\n “A lot of them are unattributed or [popular] folk music,” Dooley says.<\/p>\n Jane Austen copied hundreds of pieces sheet music by hand, including popular songs and dances. (Gillian Dooley: Jane Austen House Museum, Chawton)<\/p>\n Unlike many of her heroines, who played for their social standing, Austen played for her own enjoyment or to amuse her nieces and nephews.<\/p>\n Among Austen’s sheet music, Dooley found piano arrangements of Mozart’s waltzes, songs by Haydn and other composers including women.<\/p>\n “Three songs in Austen’s own manuscript books are attributed to female composers,” Dooley says.<\/p>\n These songs were composed by the Duchess of Devonshire, a Miss Mellish, and even one attributed to Marie Antoinette or one of her companions.<\/p>\n The broader Austen family collection also featured songs by female composers, as well as words written by women.<\/p>\n Even though many Austen adaptations feature music by Beethoven, who was a contemporary of Austen, “there are no works identified as being by Beethoven in any of the Austen family music books that I’m aware of,” Dooley says.<\/p>\n Drama by the piano<\/p>\n The pianoforte was the centrepiece of many dramas in Austen’s novels.<\/p>\n It was the most fashionable instrument of the era and the status symbol du jour.<\/p>\n The grander the piano, the more expensive it was.<\/p>\n Dooley says Austen had a square piano at home.<\/p>\n Jane Austen owned a square piano like this instrument, played by Dr Gillian Dooley. (Supplied: Gillian Dooley)<\/p>\n “It looks like a table, and it doesn’t have the full range of a piano with 88 keys,” Dooley explains.<\/p>\n Enthusiasts like Dooley love performing on the historic square piano, but in its day, it was the most modest of the models, unlike Austen’s imaginary pianos.<\/p>\n In Emma, the heroine’s frenemy, Jane Fairfax, receives a pianoforte from an anonymous donor.<\/p>\n It thickens the plot by giving Emma more fuel for her unfounded speculations about Jane.<\/p>\n Jane’s pianoforte is an expensive, “very elegant looking instrument \u2014 not a grand, but a large-sized square pianoforte”.<\/p>\n The incident is reported by Mrs Cole, herself a proud owner of a grand piano despite admitting: “I do not know one note from another.”<\/p>\n Jane is an orphan with limited options, making her prowess at the piano a catch-22 situation.<\/p>\n Historically, women were supposed to play only for family and friends<\/a>, not professionally.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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