Sounds from the Stables: the Story of Sydney's Conservatorium.

by Diane Collins; Allen & Unwin, 2001, $49.95.

HERE IS A HISTORICAL and cultural pilgrimage which reads rather like a modern music-based parable derived from the Stations of the Cross, but with a happy though necessarily inconclusive ending. It trudges along intersecting trails that chart the history of what began in 1915 as the state-initiated New South Wales Conservatorium, and is currently the Sydney Conservatorium, forced into a shotgun wedding in 1992, half-heartedly consummated, with the University of Sydney. Complete amalgamation with the reputedly decrepit Sydney University Music Department is on the agenda, and if carried out, will cause a mighty rumpus.

Dr Diane Collins, who lectures at this semi-hallowed institution in Historical and Cultural Studies, tells the tale with a frankness and honesty not always prominent in histories about a subject commissioned by that subject itself. She pulls no punches, and few go wide of the mark.

The Con has progressed, sometimes at snail's pace, sometimes by leaps and bounds, from its original neocolonial, import-dependent cultural status to international parity, even leadership in some fields. Yet it has lurched from one crisis to the next, plagued by a three-headed incubus, or three millstones round its neck, which some Wicked Fairy brought to its baptism. These are residential, financial and professional, and they have kept grinding away with predictable persistence.

The first has been the unsuitability of the Greenway Building--Governor Macquarie's extravagant architectural whimsy servicing the equestrian needs of nearby Government House--as an academic music establishment. Countered by the Good Fairy with a marvellous garden setting, that handicap was finally overcome (one hopes) with generous extensions, largely underground, in 2001.

The second bugbear, financial stringency, meant that the Con never received enough funding for its avowed objectives. Mind you, only utopia will bring an organisation that complains of over-funding, but the Con's busiest percussion instrument has been its rattling begging-bowl.

The third impediment was self-inflicted: the choice of directors (after 1992, principals), who were often ...