The way music was experienced at international exhibitions in the late nineteenth century British Empire mirrored many aspects of wider musical life. Exhibitions, through their intention to represent every industrial and artistic achievement of the world, highlighted and brought into focus, in microcosm, issues and debates relating to the role and function of music across the societies that held them. They underlined ongoing debates about the place of ‘art’ music, the materiality of the instruments that facilitated music's realisation, and the relative values of commercial music, popular music, and music from non-European cultures. The exhibitions discussed here did this in many ways: through the taxonomic ordering and exhibiting of commodified instruments and the subsequent advertisement of these by performance; through the exhibition of instruments as museum-objects for their cultural and historical importance or curiosity value; through the presentation of ‘high art’ musical works as a means of educating the public and demonstrating cultural ‘progress’; through the debates about attracting large audiences by way of ‘popular’ music, and subsequent arguments about public health and outdoor leisure; and finally, through providing opportunities for Western audiences to engage with music from non-Western cultures. Music was able to play so many roles within the exhibitions because, as an ephemeral, temporal art, within an institution that sought – above all else – to order, codify, and catalogue objects, its resistance to material classification allowed it to fit multiple categories of display and fulfil many different functions.

These exhibitions also had a lasting physical and philosophical impact on the societies that held them in general, and in specific relation to music. There are obvious architectural and institutional legacies. In London, the Victoria & Albert Museum and many of the surrounding South Kensington museums are the direct institutional descendants of the exhibitions, in terms of both their establishing collections and language of display. In Australia, the building for Adelaide 1887 quickly became the Technological Museum, which existed from 1889 to 1963. In Melbourne, the building used for both 1880 and 1888 (although not the vast sheds that housed many of the exhibits) remains the only Australian non-Aboriginal cultural site to receive UNESCO World Heritage status, and is the only remaining original nineteenth-century exhibition building in the world.