The celebration of 125 years of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide is an ideal time to review the significant role of Music, whether as an area of practical and academic study throughout this time, as a faculty in its own right, or as a school within the Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) Faculty, as has been the case since the mid-1990s. This chapter is organised in three sections. The first section covers the period 1885–1990, and makes reference to V. A. Edgeloe's The language of human feeling: A brief history of music in the University of Adelaide (1985), which documents the first one hundred years of Music within the University. The first section also includes the first major ‘fusion’ in the late 1890s between the newly formed Conservatorium and the Adelaide College of Music. The second section explores the development of Music since 1991, in particular the merger with the City Campus of the former South Australian College of Advanced Education in 1991, and the third section looks at the merger with the TAFE Flinders Street School of Music in 2002.

The context for the study of music is very firmly grounded within the Elder Conservatorium, which came out of Sir Thomas Elder's generous bequest to the University in 1897, with the foundation stone of the Conservatorium being laid in 1898. The first Bachelor of Music (MusBac) course, however, commenced earlier, when Australia's first chair in Music was established in 1884, which had largely been enabled by support from the Governor, Sir William Robinson, who had secured donations to support the appointment for a five-year period.