Hobart Conservatorium of Music

Davey Street

The Hobart Conservatorium of Music was founded in 1965 as the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, a small department of the University of Tasmania charged with training the island's performers, teachers and composers. Until then, a young Tasmanian who wanted serious musical training had to leave for Melbourne, Sydney or London, and most of those who left did not come back. The Conservatorium was established after years of lobbying by the island's music teachers, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and a handful of patrons who were tired of watching the island's best young players disappear across Bass Strait.

It began in borrowed space. The university gave it a converted Georgian house in Davey Street, with practice rooms in the old bedrooms, a library in the former dining room and a recital hall in a church hall two streets away. There were six full-time staff in its first year and fewer than forty students. Pianos were bought second-hand from churches and schools, and the first orchestra the students played in was made up largely of their own teachers.

Student life in Davey Street was cramped and close. There were never enough practice rooms, and students queued for them from seven in the morning, practised in corridors and stairwells, and on fine days took their instruments into the gardens of the Domain. Everyone knew everyone. Teachers lent students money, music and occasionally a bed, and the end-of-year recitals in the cold church hall were attended by most of the students' families and a fair number of their neighbours.

Its founding director was Dr Leonard Ashby, an English organist and choral conductor who had come to Tasmania from Durham in the 1950s. He was a capable administrator and an indifferent musician by his own admission, and he spent most of his eleven years in the post arguing with the university for money. His great achievement was to persuade a group of unusually distinguished teachers to work in a converted house at the bottom of the world for very little pay.

Ashby was succeeded in 1976 by a series of directors drawn from the staff, none of whom stayed longer than six years. The Conservatorium was hard to run. It answered to a university that did not entirely understand it, depended on an orchestra that was itself under threat, and served an island whose music teachers expected it to produce both concert performers and people who could teach recorder to eight-year-olds in Queenstown. Most directors tried to do both and were criticised for failing at each.

The Lindemann Years

The most important of them was Charles Lindemann. Born in Leipzig in 1911, he had studied piano with pupils of Liszt and taught in Germany until 1939, when he left for Australia a few months before the war. He spent the next twenty-five years teaching in Melbourne and Adelaide, and came to Hobart in 1965 as the Conservatorium's first head of keyboard. He was exacting, formal and occasionally frightening, and he insisted that his students understand the history, philosophy and circumstances of everything they played, not only its notes.

He taught in a narrow room on the first floor at a Bechstein that had travelled with him from Leipzig, and he did not allow students to play a note in their first lesson. He made them talk instead about the composer, the year the piece was written and what had been happening in the composer's life. Students who had not done the reading were sent away. Many of them hated him for a term and spent the rest of their lives quoting him.

Lindemann shaped the Conservatorium's early character more than anyone. Its teaching in those years was rigorous, Central European and unapologetically serious, and it produced a small number of very good players. Among his students in the 1970s was Rowena Turner, a Hobart pianist who entered the Conservatorium in 1974, graduated with honours in 1977 and went on to perform with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and to teach at the Conservatorium herself for decades afterwards. It was at a faculty recital of Australian music in 1976 that she met her future husband, Wayne Hodgman.

The orchestra and the Conservatorium were bound together from the start. Many of the orchestra's players taught there part-time, including Robert Harris, a first violinist who took a small number of violin students through the 1970s and 1980s and was remembered by most of them as a demanding, sometimes harsh teacher who mellowed with age. Students played in the orchestra when it was short, and the orchestra's concerts were, for many of them, the only professional music they heard.

Composition was taught for its first twenty years by Joan Craddock, a Hobart composer whose orchestral works had been played by the orchestra under its founding conductor, Karl Foerster, in the 1950s. She was the only member of the founding staff who had been born in Tasmania. She taught harmony, counterpoint and a stubborn belief that the island needed its own music, and most of the Tasmanian composers whose work the orchestra and The Tasman Strings later played had passed through her classes.

In 1972 the Conservatorium began a Saturday junior programme for school-age children, with theory classes, chamber groups and a junior orchestra that rehearsed in the church hall every week of term. It became the route by which most of the island's serious young musicians found their way to the Conservatorium proper. Among the children who passed through it were Daniel Harris, a piano prodigy who played in its chamber groups from the age of eight, and, a generation later, Amelia Rothschild, who played violin and then viola in its junior orchestra through the 1990s.

Lindemann retired in 1985, at seventy-four, after twenty years at the Conservatorium. He gave his last recital in the church hall in Davey Street and died in Hobart in 1991. His students endowed a piano prize in his name, which was still awarded in 2026.

Lean Years

The 1980s and early 1990s were difficult. University funding tightened, student numbers fell, and the Davey Street house, never designed for the purpose, was crumbling. Practice rooms leaked in winter. The recital hall had no heating. Several of the Conservatorium's best teachers left for the mainland, and its directors spent much of their time defending its existence to university committees that regarded a music school on an island of half a million people as a luxury.

In 1994 a university review proposed reducing the Conservatorium to a diploma school and sending its degree students to Melbourne. The proposal was defeated after a public campaign led by the Conservatorium's staff, its graduates and the orchestra, with concerts in the Town Hall, petitions in the street and a series of letters to the press. The campaign saved the Conservatorium, but it left the institution exhausted and acutely aware of how close it had come.

The Conservatorium's teaching in those years depended heavily on people who were paid for far less than they did. Staff accompanists, part-time teachers and visiting orchestral players kept it running. In early 1996 a member of staff, a friend of the painter Margaret Harris, asked Margaret's son Daniel, a former prodigy who had abandoned a solo career after a breakdown in Melbourne, to accompany a nervous young cellist in her end-of-year recital. He agreed because he could not think how to refuse, and found he was very good at it. He took more accompanying work at the Conservatorium over the following years.

The Waterfront

The turning point came at the end of the decade. In 1998 the university agreed to move the Conservatorium out of Davey Street into a converted nineteenth-century warehouse on the waterfront, a short walk from the site of the new Federation Concert Hall. The building was refitted with practice rooms, studios, a library and a recital hall with proper acoustics for the first time in the Conservatorium's history.

The warehouse had been built in the 1840s to store wool and later held apples bound for England. Its sandstone walls were nearly a metre thick, which made it unexpectedly good for practice rooms, and its old loading doors on the water side were glazed and turned into the windows of the recital hall. Students who had spent years in the damp rooms of Davey Street walked around it in the first week as though they had been admitted to a palace.

The move was completed in 1999, and with it the institution changed its name to the Hobart Conservatorium of Music. The change was argued over for months. Older graduates disliked losing the word Tasmanian, and some regarded the new name as a concession to the city at the expense of the north of the state. The university wanted a name that identified the building with the waterfront and the new concert hall. It got its way, and within a few years most people in Hobart had forgotten the old name, though graduates of the Davey Street years went on using it for the rest of their lives.

Daniel Harris was appointed staff accompanist the same year, and spent the following quarter-century playing for the Conservatorium's students, examinations and recitals. In 1998 the Conservatorium also appointed a new professor of viola, Dieter Brandt, a German-trained violist who had spent his career in German radio orchestras and came to Tasmania late in it. Brandt was precise, dry and generous with his time, and he played with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra as a guest principal in the early 2000s.

Next Door to the Orchestra

The opening of the Federation Concert Hall in 2000 transformed the Conservatorium's relationship with the orchestra. Students attended rehearsals as a matter of course, played in the orchestra's education concerts and sat in its sections when it needed extra players. Several of the orchestra's principal players taught at the Conservatorium, and the path from one building to the other, a few hundred metres along the waterfront, became the most important route in Tasmanian music.

Among the first students to enrol under the new name was Amelia Rothschild, who came to the Conservatorium in 2001 to study viola with Dieter Brandt. Brandt was the first teacher to tell her that she played as though she were apologising. She completed her Bachelor of Music in 2004 and an honours year in 2005, won the Conservatorium's prize for performance in her final year, and went on to the Royal Academy of Music in London. She came home in 2008 to join the orchestra and was appointed its principal viola in 2019.

The Conservatorium in those years was small, ambitious and constantly short of money. It produced players who went to the Royal Academy, the Royal College and the conservatories of Europe, and some of them came back. Its students played in Hobart's churches, wineries and hotel lobbies to pay their rent, and the city's weddings and funerals were full of them. Brandt retired in 2010 and returned to Germany, where he died in 2019.

It also widened. In the 2000s the Conservatorium established courses in jazz and contemporary music, recording and music education, partly on principle and partly because classical performance alone could not fill its classrooms. The classical staff were divided about it. The jazz students played in the waterfront bars at night and brought in more applicants than the orchestral departments did, and within a decade the building's corridors were as likely to carry the sound of a drum kit as of a Bach partita.

Masterclasses

From the 2000s the Conservatorium increasingly drew on its own graduates and on the orchestra's senior players for teaching. Rowena Hodgman gave masterclasses there for many years, and they drew students from across the country. James O'Sullivan, the second violinist of The Tasman Strings, became a familiar figure there in his later years, giving masterclasses and private lessons and speaking to students about the injury that had nearly ended his career in 2011.

The Conservatorium also became, quietly, a place where musicians' health was taken seriously. After Amelia Harrington's tendinitis in 2016 and her public campaign on musicians' health with the orchestra, the Conservatorium introduced compulsory classes on posture, injury prevention and performance anxiety for its first-year students. Some of the older staff thought the classes were indulgent. The students attended them in large numbers.

The pandemic closed the building in March 2020. Teaching moved online, recitals were filmed in empty rooms, and the year's graduating students gave their final performances to cameras. Several staff, including Amelia, found that they liked teaching online more than they had expected, and some of it continued after the building reopened.

Restructuring

The 2020s brought renewed pressure. In 2023 a university restructuring proposed cutting several part-time performance positions and merging the Conservatorium's administration with the university's wider creative arts faculty. The proposal provoked the largest public protest in the Conservatorium's history since 1994, led by students, staff and the orchestra. The administrative merger went ahead. The teaching positions were mostly saved.

In 2024 the death of Elizabeth Harris, concertmaster of the orchestra, was felt at the Conservatorium almost as keenly as at the Federation Concert Hall. She had never studied there, having gone straight from school to London, but she had taught and examined there for years, and many of its string students had grown up playing in her free Saturday programme in Bridgewater. Later that year the orchestra established the Chen-Harris Young Strings Fellowship, and the Conservatorium became the base from which its fellows studied.

In 2025 the surviving members of The Tasman Strings gave one of their first concerts after Elizabeth's death in the Conservatorium's recital hall, with the orchestra's associate concertmaster, Hannah Varga, as their first violinist. Many of the students in the audience had been taught, at one time or another, by at least one of the players on the stage.

The Warehouse

By 2026 the Hobart Conservatorium of Music had around three hundred students and remained one of the smallest conservatoria in the country. It was led by Professor Anna Kowalczyk, a Polish-born pianist who had been appointed director in 2022 and had steered it through the restructuring. Its building on the waterfront was showing its age, its funding remained precarious, and its graduates still left for the mainland and for Europe in greater numbers than the island could afford to lose.

Its students in 2026 came mostly from Tasmania, with a growing number from the mainland and from Asia attracted by small classes and lower costs. Most of them would not become concert performers. They would teach, play in orchestras, accompany, record and play weddings, as Tasmanian musicians always had, and the Conservatorium prepared them for that more honestly than it had in Lindemann's day.

Daniel Harris still played for its students. Amelia Harrington still taught a small number of its viola students. The Lindemann piano prize was still awarded every year, and the old Davey Street house had long since been turned into offices. The Conservatorium still did what it had been founded in 1965 to do: give young Tasmanian musicians a reason to stay, or at least a reason to come home.