The Hidden Musicians - Ruth Finnegan Music Culture

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local newspapers) and start practising farther afield.

      Even beyond these personal career stages, the general interaction between amateur and professional worlds is very perceptible at the local level. Amateur groups like to put on grand performances from time to time with soloists who appear for a fee (how large the fee and how well-known the artist depending partly on the available money, though personal links on the soloist’s side also sometimes play a part). This is particularly common in choirs, who often need solo singers to appear with them or instrumentalists to supplement local players accompanying their big concerts, but local orchestras too like to stage some concerts with outside soloists. Local music societies too engage performers – both individuals and small ensembles – to appear at local concerts for their members, selecting their chosen artists in part from the brochures or letters with which secretaries of local music groups are deluged. This continuing interdependence is essential to both sides: to the individual artists on the one side who, whether just starting out on their careers or already established professional players, have the opportunity to perform for a fee before an audience; and to the local groups on the other, who both want the prestige and need the services of experts to assist them in performing admired works in the classical canon.

      This interdependence of performers at different points along the amateur/professional continuum is particularly strong in the classical music world, where the accepted repertoire includes many works based on solo–group interaction. But it also comes out, if in rather different forms, in other types of music. Local brass, folk, and country and western bands form both the training ground and the reservoir from which the players and bands who eventually ‘make it’ in terms of fame and finance are ultimately recruited. This is particularly important for rock players, who typically learn ‘on the job’ by becoming members of local groups, sometimes with practically no previous musical experience at all but developing their skills through local practising and performing. The largely ‘amateur’ activities at the local level – the ‘hidden’ practice of local music described in this book – provide the essential background for the more ‘professional’ musical world.

      The local situation, then, is a complex one. Rather than the presence of any absolute divide between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ there are instead a large number of people and groups who, from at least some viewpoints and in some situations, can be – and are, both by themselves and in this book – described as ‘musicians’. And this is despite their having a whole range of different economic, occupational, social and musical characteristics in other respects. Though this book concentrates mainly on the amateur end of this multi-faceted continuum, in view of the many overlaps and interrelationships the spheres cannot be totally separated: the concept of ‘amateur’ music is a relative, partly arbitrary, and sometimes disputed label rather than a settled division. In this context the difficulty of making any absolute divide is more than just a problem of presentation; it also tells us something about the characteristics of contemporary English music-making and forms the background to the people and music described in this book.

      3

      Introduction to Milton Keynes and its music

      In Milton Keynes local music was unquestionably flourishing. A quick preview of the music-making going on between 1980 and 1984 can give a preliminary indication of its extent.

      Here, then, is a summary list of the main groups and activities in and around Milton Keynes in the early 1980s, each the subject of fuller exploration in later chapters: three to four classical orchestras and several dozen youth and school orchestras; five to eight main brass bands and several smaller ones; nine or ten independent four-part choirs in the classical tradition together with many small groups, and choirs in most schools and churches; around six operatic or musical drama societies, including two Gilbert and Sullivan societies; over a dozen jazz groups playing in regular jazz venues known to their devotees; five or six folk clubs, a dozen folk groups, and about four ‘ceilidh’ dance bands; two leading country and western bands plus other more fluid groups and an extremely successful club; and a hundred or more small rock and pop bands. Live music was being heard and performed not just in public halls but also in churches, schools, open air festivals, social clubs and pubs, and the local newspapers were teeming with advertisements about local musical gatherings.

      Definitive numbers are impossible, if only because groups typically formed, disappeared and re-formed during the four years of the research, and because of varying definitions of ‘music’ or of ‘group’ as well as the problem of just how one draws the boundaries of ‘Milton Keynes’ or of ‘Milton Keynes music’.1 But in all there must have been several hundred functioning musical groups based and performing in and around the locality, and hundreds of live performances each year.

      How can this striking efflorescence of the musical arts be explained, and how was it sustained? One crucial factor might at first sight seem to lie in the special position of Milton Keynes as one of Britain’s ‘new towns’ with consequential financial and social benefits. Let me start therefore by explaining this background.

      Figure 1 Borough of Milton Keynes and surrounding area

      Figure 2 The new city of Milton Keynes (designated area) at the time of the research

      Milton Keynes originated from 1960s plans to create new towns to relieve industrial and social pressures in London and the South-East. An area of 22,000 acres in North Buckinghamshire was designated in 1967 as a ‘new city’2 and a development corporation created with government funding. The plans were being implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, so that the population of the designated area grew from 40,000 in 1967 to 77,000 in 1977, 95,000 in 1980, 112,000 in 1983 and 122,000 in 1985 with a target of 200,000 in 1990. The site was partly chosen for its established north-south communication links: starting from the Roman Watling Street (to become a main coaching route north, later still the A5) as well as the Grand Union Canal, nineteenth-century railway and, more recently, the M1.

      By the early 1980s ‘the new city of Milton Keynes’ had become known throughout the country for its glamorous advertising, its large covered shopping centre (reputedly the largest in Europe) and its imaginative landscaping with its millions of trees. It had also managed to attract a variety of both large and small firms, mostly light industries, distribution centres and offices offering a wide spread of employment. The promotional literature describes it, in typically glowing language, as ‘a growing city which is providing people with an attractive and prosperous place in which to live and work’.

      The town thus built up was not totally new, however, despite the impression sometimes given to outsiders. The Milton Keynes ‘designated area’ also incorporated thirteen or so existing villages and, more important, three established towns of some substance. These were Bletchley, originally a local market town, then, from the establishment of the London-Birmingham railway, a thriving industrial centre and later London overspill; Wolverton, once itself a ‘new’ town, home of the railway works from 1848, for long the largest single employer in the area; and Stony Stratford, dating back to the thirteenth century and still notable for its Georgian high street and old coaching inns. As can be seen clearly in the aerial views in figure 3, Milton Keynes was a mixture of the old and the new. The locality was thus influenced not only by the new plans of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC) interacting with both private enterprise and public authorities, but also by already-established local institutions. Because of the existing links which already ran across the area, Milton Keynes was often thought of as not confined just to the ‘designated’ site of the ‘new city’ but also as taking in the slightly wider area covered by the Borough of Milton Keynes (BMK). BMK included around 20,000 more people and covered the town of Newport Pagnell and villages such as Woburn Sands. These had long been part of the local connections in this part of North Buckinghamshire and were also increasingly associated with

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