Kathleen Brady

Kathleen Teresa Brady (1934-1989) was born in Traralgon, Victoria, and began playing the piano at the age of four. She graduated from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in 1955 and taught music at Lauriston Girls’ School and Flemington Girls’ School. In 1963-65 she studied piano and harpsichord at the Quebec Conservatoire de Musique. Following her return to Australia in 1967, she was a tutor in music at Monash University for five years. She lived in London in 1973-76 and studied piano with Louis Kentner and nineteenth century pianism with Rhea Perrin. She then taught music at Loreto College, Ballarat, for two years and thereafter she held a number of short-term teaching positions in Melbourne. She also established a music publishing venture, Musica Australiana Press. Brady performed piano and harpsichord recitals in Australia, Canada and Britain and in her later years she mainly performed, recorded and published nineteenth century music, drawing on her studies of pianists such as Liszt. The first publication of her press in 1979 was a quartet by Charles Edward Horsley (1822-1876), the manuscript of which she found in a stack of old music in a shop in Melbourne. Brady was an assiduous collector and vendor of sheet music, albums and concert programs, especially piano music and popular songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She produced a number of music catalogues. Following her marriage in 1981, Brady often wrote under the name of Kathleen Brady-Zilles.