has led to particular research concentrations. Rock (and sometimes brass band music) has been particularly picked out as if only it, and not classical ‘elite’ music, were somehow worth serious consideration. But what became very clear in this study is that each musical tradition – classical, rock, jazz or whatever – can be studied in its own right. When no longer judged by the criteria of others, each emerges as in principle equally authentic and equally influential in shaping the practices of local music.
This study, therefore – unlike most others – does not concentrate on just one musical tradition but tries to consider all those important in the locality: an ‘obvious’ thing to do, of course – except that few scholars do it. Thus part 2 presents several musical worlds in turn through both general summaries and short case studies of particular groups and clubs – detailed ethnographic description that forms the necessary foundation for the later analyses. Part 3 then picks out some of the contrasting conventions which both differentiate and to some extent unite these differing worlds as a basis for the more general reflections in parts 4 and 5.
The discussion of each tradition is thus inevitably quite short, and some might argue that I should instead have concentrated on understanding just one world in depth. But despite its costs this comparative approach is essential to discover the interaction of traditions in the local area, and provide the perspective for a more detached view of their differences and similarities. The existence of this varied and structured interplay of differing and interacting worlds is something that simply does not surface at all in studies focussing exclusively on just a single tradition.
To some it may seem perverse to treat all these forms of music as on a par. But I take the view that music is neither something self-evidently there in the natural world nor fully defined in the musical practices of any one group; rather what is heard as ‘music’ is characterised not by its formal properties but by people’s view of it, by the special frame drawn round particular forms of sound and their overt social enactment. Music is thus defined in different ways among different groups, each of whom have their own conventions supported by existing practices and ideas about the right way in which music should be realised.8 My own musical appreciations were of course enlarged by this study (though I continue to have my own preferences), but as a researcher I consider the only valid approach is not to air my own ethnocentric evaluations as if they had universal validity but to treat the many different forms of music as equally worthy of study on their own terms.
I have thus quite deliberately not confined this study to classical music, or indeed to so-called ‘popular’ music,9 but have tried to give some description of the practice of music across the whole spectrum to be found in the locality. It therefore covers music-making in the classical tradition, jazz, brass bands, musical theatre, country and western, folk, pop and rock as well as some of the more common contexts and institutions associated with music-making more generally. If this seems to draw the book out to inordinate lengths and include over-simplified or ‘obvious’ descriptions of traditions familiar to particular readers, remember that each world and context was to its participants a full and richly creative one – for them the most truly musical one, certainly not to be omitted in any fair account of local musics – and that at least some readers will be unfamiliar with any given tradition and will need some straightforward introduction. And looking at one’s ‘own’ in the setting of comparisons with others can (as I discovered) throw new light on taken-for-granted conventions.
A second reason why the extent of local music-making and its underlying structure has been little noticed is that it is relatively unusual to concentrate on the practice of music: on what people actually do on the ground. That there are of course many other valid and illuminating approaches to music I do not wish to dispute. But for the purposes of uncovering the local activities, the standard analyses in terms of traditional musicological theory or of the intellectual content or texts of music cannot take us very far. These are the second set of assumptions, then, that I question in this study. Most misleading of all in this context is the powerful definition of music in terms not of performance but of finalised musical works. This is the more so when it is accompanied – as it so frequently is – with the implication that these works have some kind of asocial and continuing existence, almost as if independent of human performances or social processes, and that it is in musical ‘works’ that one finds aesthetic value (see, for example, Sparshott 1980, p. 120). This is a view of music that may have some limited validity in the classical tradition, but even there obscures the significance of its active realisation by real human practitioners on the ground; and for many other musical traditions it is altogether inappropriate for elucidating how music is created and transmitted. Such an approach would uncover few of the activities described in this book.
The concentration here, then, is on musical practices (what people do), not musical works (the ‘texts’ of music). This is admittedly partly due to my own inadequacies. I am unqualified to undertake the musicological analysis of musical texts either by training or from the kind of data I collected, and should therefore make clear that this study is not intended as a work of musicology – or at any rate not musicology in the commonly used formalist sense of the term (see, for instance, Treitler’s useful critique in Holoman and Palisca 1982). More positively significant for the approach of this study, however, I discovered that looking closely at people’s actions really was a route to discovering a local system that, even to me, was quite unexpected in its complexity and richness.
Looking at practice rather than formalised texts or mental structures, at processes rather than products, at informal grass-roots activities rather than formal structure has always been one strand in social science research (perhaps particularly in anthropology); sometimes too in the humanities. Recently this emphasis has come more to the fore in a number of areas, a trend with which I would wish to associate my own work.10 This kind of focus is one that, unlike more ‘formalistic’ analyses, leads to a greater appreciation of how individuals and groups organise and perceive their activities at the local level, whether in music-making or any other active pursuit.
Most studies of music and musicians are of professionals. This is the third major reason why amidst the concentration on central institutions, ‘great artists’ and professional musicians, local music has been so little noticed. But musical practice can equally be found among amateur and local practitioners.11 Why should we assume that music-making is the monopoly of full-time specialists or the prime responsibility of state-supported institutions like the national orchestras or opera houses? Once we ask the question and start looking it becomes clear that it is also the pursuit of thousands upon thousands of grass-roots musicians, the not very expert as well as expert, still learning as well as accomplished, quarrelling as well as harmonious – a whole cross-section, in other words, of ordinary people engaged in music in the course of their lives. This book, then, is not on central institutions or the professionals, but about amateur music-making in a local setting.
With the partial exception of brass bands, there has been little study of amateurs in England: indeed, as Muriel Nissel sums it up in her authoritative Facts about the arts, ‘very little information at present exists on the varied and widespread activities of the many people involved in the arts as amateurs’ (1983, p. 1). Given this lack of research it is perhaps not surprising that the role of local musicians should be so little appreciated, but their contribution becomes very obvious once attention is focussed on the actual practices of these part-time amateurs. Not that the concept of ‘amateur musicians’ is unambiguous – some of the complexities and qualifications surrounding the term are explored in the next chapter – but it can be said that the findings of this study reveal how serious a gap in our knowledge has resulted from the existing concentration on the professionals.
The main points I have been making can best be summed up by saying that we should not
