Harry Gardner
Harry Gardner, (1927-2018) collected, provided details of, arranged and transcribed some of the Australian tunes in this archive.Dr Harry Gardner is an accomplished violin player who has been at the forefront in the transposition of collected music.
Harry trained as a chemist, earning the first PhD in that discipline from the University of Western Australia in the mid 1950s. He joined the CSIRO in Melbourne in 1957. Harry loved music, first the classics - he conducted a youth orchestra in the 1970s, and later Australian folk music. He was President of the Victorian Folk Music Club for a time and became a life member. He held weekly sessions at 'Harry's Place' for many years, often threatening to turn the lights off, so that players would memorize rather than read tunes. Harry regularly attended folk festivals, composed a few tunes, collected more from various informants, transcribed these tunes, transcribed many more tunes collected by others and collaborated with Peter Ellis in preparing and publishing
- "Music Makes Me Smile" [1] 1st Edn published 1998, [2] 2nd Edn published 2015, the story of folk music from the Nariel Valley in north east Victoria.
- Harry also contributed transcriptions to "Tunes of Ma Seal (music) / collected by John Meredith and Peter Ellis" [3], Pioneer Performer Series, Carawobbity Press, published 1994.
The National Library of Australia holds aural recordings of interviews conducted with Harry Gardner.
He was interviewed by:
- Rob Willis in October 2008, [4], Folkloric recording. Dr Harry Gardner, born 1927, speaks about his early days in Perth, W.A.; his early musical influences; his academic career in science; a Fulbright scholarship; work for CSIRO. He discusses his thougths in 'playing by ear' and re-educating himself from being a classical performer to ear playing. He plays and sings several numbers.
