approach more nearly than others to the ideal of the expert professionals in terms of specialist musical qualifications, and this often – though not always – went along with the kinds of jobs or backgrounds loosely referred to as middle class. The leading amateur orchestra, the Sherwood Sinfonia, was a good example. Players had gone through the formal examinations of the national music institutions, and there was a high proportion of local music teachers and of individuals in high-status occupations among their members. But even here there were exceptions, like the young sausage-maker, later music shop assistant, who besides being a Sherwood Sinfonia violinist was a keyboard player and composer with a local rock group, or pupils from local comprehensive schools not all in the ‘best’ areas. The amateur and widely based emphasis within English music was particularly noticeable in the choirs, with their long tradition of extensive local participation without formalised musical expertise or selective background. It was true that the older pattern of local choral societies made up of a cross-section from one locality was – with the change in transport arrangements perhaps – being replaced in the 1980s by choirs recruited on a city-wide rather than neighbourhood basis; but both local ties and a wide mix of backgrounds were still evident in the church and school choirs (see chapters 15 and 16). In such cases generalisation about classical music practitioners coming from just one social background or set of occupations does not stand up: many (though not all) choirs were very mixed.
The same applied to instrumental players, despite the elite nature of some smaller ensembles. Piano and organ playing were widespread, sometimes still learnt on a self-taught basis (especially in church contexts), and even instrumental groups were not all highly select. The Wolverton Light Orchestra, for example, went back far into the local history of Wolverton, the town long dominated by the local railway works. It was first founded as the Frank Brooks Orchestra after the First World War by a bandmaster of the Bucks. Volunteers who also conducted the local brass band, and was later renamed the Wolverton Orchestral Society. Between the wars it played light music with a First World War flavour, the thirty or so players giving regular winter concerts in local cinemas. It was revived after the Second World War, but later took the title Wolverton Light Orchestra to make clear that in contrast to the newly founded Sherwood Sinfonia their policy was to play smaller-scale works rather than symphonies. This they were still doing very effectively in the 1980s, giving six or seven concerts a year, mainly around the Wolverton area, with a playing membership of about thirty. By then there was a fair proportion of local schoolteachers in the orchestra, but over the years – and to some extent still – it had been strongly rooted in the local community and still had a mainly self-taught conductor from the local railway works. It would be hard to regard this as a select elite or middle-class activity in the sense often attached to those terms.
All in all, the picture was a varied one. The high-culture model of classical music should not lead us to conclude without further question that the musicians who in practice made up the classical music world at the local level were themselves members of some clear elite or drawn predominantly from some single class. For Milton Keynes, at least, the evidence points to a weighting towards teachers and fairly high-status occupations in several of the more aspiring instrumental groups, but otherwise – and particularly in the choirs – great heterogeneity of background, education and occupation.
The power of the specialist model, then, which focusses attention on professional concerts and national performing organisations, should not be allowed to obscure the equally real practices of local performance, training and appreciation. This classical ideal – misleading though it can be – is nevertheless of great relevance for the local scene. It provides a framework for the local practice, and without it one justification and measure for the many local orchestras, choirs and instrumental ensembles would be lacking. The recognised tradition of the classical repertoire and the currently accepted styles of presentation also provide local groups with a rationale which they both draw on and help to perpetuate. All in all the over-arching classical music model on the one hand and the local performers and enactors of the tradition on the other interact together in a complex and varied way to transmit and sustain, carry and form, the national and enduring world of classical music so characteristic of this country as a whole and so richly practised at the local level
5
The brass band world
Given the well-known association of brass bands with the North, the strength and continuity of the local brass band tradition came as something of a surprise. For there were five to eight main brass bands in and around Milton Keynes in the early 1980s (the exact numbers depending on just where one draws the boundaries): the Wolverton Town and British Rail Band, the Woburn Sands Band, and the Bradwell Band (all going back many decades), and the more recent Stantonbury Brass, the re-formed Bletchley Band and (from 1984) the Broseley Brass; also regarded as in a sense local were the century-old Great Horwood Band and the Heath and Reach Band, in villages about five miles from the city boundary. There were also youth bands, bands connected with the Boys’ Brigades and similar groups, and Salvation Army bands in Bletchley and Bradwell. Brass band gatherings like the Bletchley spring festivals had been a local tradition for some time, and were currently concentrated in two annual events, with 50 or so brass bands coming from all over the country to the February ‘entertainment contest’, and a massed concert by local bands every autumn.1
The main bands contained 15 to 30 amateur players each, fluctuating according to the fortunes of the band at any one time, the regulation ‘competition band’ being 25 plus conductor. Their instruments were the standard brass combination of cornets, trombones, baritone and tenor horns, euphoniums, Bþ and Eþ basses, and percussion, played by members of many different ages and, in most of the bands, of both sexes. They made frequent public appearances (far more often than the choirs and orchestras) – highly visible performances, because of the loudness of brass instruments, the tradition of playing in the open, and their distinctive uniforms.
Brass band players were exceptionally articulate about their traditions; ‘it’s a world on its own’, I was constantly told, ‘a whole world’. Among all the musical spheres in Milton Keynes, it was the brass bands and their players that most emphatically made up a self-conscious ‘world’ with its own specific and separate traditions.
This perception was partly moulded by the popular publications about brass bands, the activities of national brass associations and the strong if unwritten traditions that have grown up round brass bands since the last century. This too was how outsiders often regarded them. The image was of bands as essentially working class, following their own autonomous musical style and repertoire separate from the elitist high culture, and composed of (male) players who were either self-taught or had learnt within the family or the band itself. In the past, so went the tradition, it was the heavy manual workers like miners who formed the brass bands: their work-hardened hands could not cope with stringed instruments, but they had one sensitive part left to them – their mouths and tongues. The brass bands were also assumed to be closely linked to their local community, which they supported both through local performances and through carrying the band’s name forward in the glamorous brass competitions.
Band members in Milton Keynes were well aware – indeed proud – of this long brass band tradition which itself shaped their understanding of present-day activities, as well as influencing their repertoire and mode of performance. What is more, several of the brass bands in the area did indeed date back to the turn of the century or earlier, a continuity which added to their sense of historic tradition. The Wolverton Town and British Rail Band was started in 1908 and had even earlier antecedents, the Great Horwood Band was formed in the 1880s, and the Woburn Sands Band in 1867 (though it had lapsed for many years until its refounding in 1957), while the Bradwell Band dated its foundation precisely to 15 January 1901, since when it had had a continuous existence as the Bradwell Silver Prize Band, Bradwell United Prize Band, United Brass Band, then Bradwell Silver Band. Even the younger Boys’ Brigade Bugle Band in Bletchley had continued without break since 1928, while
