Despite its familiarity there are real questions to be investigated about local music in this country. What exactly does it consist of? How is it sustained and by whom? Are the kinds of events mentioned earlier one-off affairs or are there consistent patterns or a predictable structure into which they fall? Are they still robust or by now fading away? Who are these local musicians – a marginal minority or substantial body? – and who are their patrons today? And what, finally, is the significance of local music-making for the ways people manage and make sense of modern urban life or, more widely, for our experience as active and creative human beings?
It will emerge from the account in this book that the work of local amateur musicians is not just haphazard or formless, the result of individual whim or circumstance. On the contrary, a consistent – if sometimes changing – structure lies behind these surface activities. The public events described above, and all the others that in their various forms are so typical a feature of modern English life, are part of an invisible but organised system through which individuals make their contribution to both the changes and the continuities of English music today.
I think of this set of practices as ‘hidden’ in two ways. One is that it has been so little drawn to our attention by systematic research or writing. There has been little work in this country on the ‘micro-sociology’ of amateur music; and, incredibly, questions on active music-making as such (as distinct from attendance at professional events or participation in artistic groups generally) seldom or never appear in official surveys – almost as if local music-making did not exist at all. Thus academics and planners alike have somehow found it easy to ignore something which is in other ways so remarkably obvious.
Second and perhaps even more important, the system of local music-making is partially veiled not just from outsiders but even from the musicians themselves and their supporters. Of course in one sense they know it well – these are not secret practices. But in another it seems so natural and given to the participants that they are often unaware both of its extent and of the structured work they themselves are putting into sustaining it. We all know about it – but fail to notice it for what it is.
The purpose of this book, then, is to uncover and reflect on some of these little-questioned but fundamental dimensions of local music-making, and their place in both urban life and our cultural traditions more generally.
The example I focus on to illustrate these themes is the town of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Clearly this town, like any other, has its own unique qualities, described more fully in chapter 3 and, more indirectly, throughout the book. Suffice it to say here that I am not claiming that Milton Keynes is in every way representative of all modern English towns – clearly it is not – but that I am following one well-established tradition in social and historical research, that of using specific case studies to lead to the kind of illumination in depth not provided by more thinly spread and generalized accounts.2 Having lived in the area for a dozen years or more I have been able to draw on lengthy experience of local music practices as well as on the more systematic observation I undertook in the early 1980s, supplemented by local documentary sources and surveys (more fully described in the appendix on sources and methods), so as to reach an understanding in some depth of the patterns of local music-making. The main research was during the period 1980–4, so in describing the specific findings I have mostly used the past tense. As will emerge, the detailed groups and events were sometimes ephemeral and so are not appropriately described in the present, unlike many of the continuing and more general patterns (analysed later in the book) to which this local case study contributes.
One point of the book is thus merely to provide an empirically based ethnography of amateur music in one modern English town at a particular period. What kind of music-making actually went on there? This might seem a simple matter on which the answers must surely already be known. But in fact it is a question surprisingly neglected by researchers. There are of course some excellent historical accounts,3 illuminating research on specific topics,4 and a plethora of variegated work on the mass media and the nationally known bands and their procedures.5 All these make their own contribution to our understanding of English music. There is also plenty of writing by ethnomusicologists and others on musical practices far away or long ago, as well as nostalgia for the ‘rich amateur world’ of earlier days, for New Orleans in the ‘jazz era’ or for Liverpool in the 1960s. But there is little indeed on modern grass-roots musicians and music-making across the board in a specific town: its local choirs, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan societies, brass bands, ceilidh dance groups or the small popular bands who, week in and week out, form an essential local backing to our national musical achievements.6 I hope therefore that this first detailed book on local music in a contemporary English town – for there is no comparable study – will provoke further investigation of a subject so important for our understanding both of music and of the practices of modern urban life.
The picture that emerges from this ethnography is not quite what one might expect from some of the more general and theoretical writing about English culture. Let me foreshadow briefly some of the approaches and findings that will be elaborated later.
Perhaps the most striking point is how far the evidence here runs counter to the influential ‘mass society’ interpretations, particularly the extreme view which envisages a passive and deluded population lulled by the mass media and generating nothing themselves.7 Nor can music be explained (or explained away) as the creature of class divisions or manipulation, or in any simple way predictable from people’s social and economic backgrounds or even, in most cases, their age (as will emerge in chapter 10, the theory of a ‘working-class-youth sub-culture’ has little to support it). And far from music-making taking a peripheral role for individuals and society – a view propagated in the kind of theoretical stance that marginalises ‘leisure’ or ‘culture’ as somehow less real than ‘work’ or ‘society’ – music can equally well be seen as playing a central part not just in urban networks but also more generally in the social structure and processes of our life today. It is true that local music-making in the sense of direct participation in performance is the pursuit of a minority. But this minority turns out to be a more serious and energetic one than is often imagined, whose musical practices not only involve a whole host of other people than just the performers, but also have many implications for urban and national culture more generally.
Given this importance, why has the existence and significance of these local musical practices been so little noticed? In addition to the difficulty of explicitly noticing the taken-for-granted conventions which invisibly structure our activities, reasons can be found in current and earlier approaches to the study of music. These have often rested on assumptions which conceal rather than illuminate the kind of evidence revealed in this research. Among such assumptions challenged in this book, let me briefly highlight three.
First, and perhaps most important, musicological analyses have been concerned either to establish what kinds of music (or music-making) are ‘best’ or ‘highest’ – or, if not to establish them, then to assume implicitly that this is known already with the direction for one’s gaze already laid down. This book accepts neither of these paths. Once one starts thinking not about ‘the best’ but about what people actually do – about ‘is’ not ‘ought’ – then it becomes evident that there are in fact several musics, not just one, and that no one of them is self-evidently superior to the others. In Milton Keynes, as in so many other towns, there are several different musical worlds, often little understood by each other yet each having its own contrasting conventions about the proper modes of learning, transmission, composition or performance. Because the pre-eminent position of classical music so often goes without saying, the existence of these differing musics has often simply been ignored.
Or again – to look at the same problem but from a different
