The ten manuscript books of the tunes that Harry Scharfer played provide a unique picture of the dance music of one part of Australia over a period of close to a century. Where other dance musicians have listed the tunes used for a particular dance (such as Harry McQueen did on cards kept in his accordion case), this collection might well be the only existing example of a bush dance musician writing down his repertoire of dance music.

Harry Schaefer was born in 1876, into a family where at least the father played music and, perhaps rather cunningly, interested his children in music by forbidding them to touch his violin. It would seem probable that a young Harry Schaefer learnt tunes from other musicians in the Echuca district where he was brought up. There are several tunes in the collection with names from around the Murray River - the Echuca Waltz, for one.

The region around Forbes had only been settled since the goldrushes of the 1850s, and it is likely that Harry learnt tunes from musicians who had been there since that time after he arrived in the Forbes district just after the turn of the century. He seemed to be adding to his repertoire until at least the 1930s or 40s, and was playing those tunes for some years after that. As Rob Willis' interviews suggest that Harry Schaefer was a major, if not the major, figure in the district's dance music for the first half of this century, these handwritten books of tunes can be seen as a musical history of this part of NSW, and as such, among the most important documents pertaining to dance music in this country.

The diversity of the dance music in Harry's books reinforces the concept that a traditional dance player did not differentiate between older tunes and popular song tunes of the day. The main concern was that they fitted the tempo of the particular dance. It is interesting to note that Harry listed that actual dance alongside the name of the tune eg "The Fair and the Brave - Gypsy Tap".

Several of Rob's informants have suggested that Harry wrote the tunes out for his own reference, after learning them aurally from older players, or perhaps in later years after hearing tune on the wireless or on a gramophone record. The fact that several other musicians had written out tunes from Harry also suggests that this was a way of distributing tunes to other musicians who may have been more sight readers that 'ear' players.

A number of the tunes in the manuscript books are well known with different names, especially the older ones which might be considered 'folk tunes' rather than popular music of this century, and this also suggests that they were learnt aurally from other musicians. The three polkas that have been transcribed are common to the repertoires of many dance musicians in Australia, but we can only wonder who 'Violet' was, and where 'Suttan' can be found.

It is likely that we have transcribed several tunes in this book which are copyright to their various composers or publishers. Most of the fox-trots, and popular dances of the inter-war years are obviously popular, published tunes of the era, and we have not included them, but a glance through the list of the tunes in Harry's manuscript books will give an idea of the volume of music that Harry played. In publishing this book we are trying to give an idea of the scope of material used by dance musicians such as Harry Schaefer, and have concentrated on tunes that are most likely in the public domain. Our apologies for any breaches of copyright, but the transcriptions are of what Harry wrote down, and it will be interesting, when time permits, to compare his versions with the published ones.

We have tried to transcribe the music as it is in Harry's books, but he had a somewhat free approach to things like pick-up bars, and occasionally the number of bars in a tune. Mazurka No 2, for instance, was notated with 17 bars. Bob McInness has kindly edited several of the tunes into more playable form, but any errors or departures from usual notation conventions are inevitably mine.

Graham McDonald
Canberra 1995

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