The Hidden Musicians - Ruth Finnegan Music Culture

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for example the flourishing Milton Keynes Amateur Operatic Society (founded 1952 as the Bletchley Amateur Operatic Society following the tradition of the pre-war Bletchley and Fenny Stratford Amateur Operatic Society), the Milton Keynes and District Pipe Band (founded from Bletchley, 1971/2) and the Bletchley Organ Society with its regular monthly meetings since 1971. Similarly many of the earlier local festivals continued into the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes the models for parallel festivals in the ‘new city’. Among these were the annual Bletchley Middle School Music Festival, the Bletchley and District First Schools Folk Dance Festival, the Boys’ Brigade annual procession, and the Spurgeon’s Church ‘Carols for Everybody’, a yearly event since 1961. The Milton Keynes Festival of Arts was founded as the Bletchley Festival of the Arts in 1968 and by the 1980s was attracting thousands of entries each year from throughout the city and beyond. The tradition of music in the schools was important too, and ex-scholars of the (earlier) Bletchley Grammar School and Radcliffe School in Wolverton were formative influences in local folk and rock music, and together with newcomers were still making an active contribution to the local music scene in the 1980s.

      To explain the musical character of Milton Keynes solely in terms of the new city or initiatives from above would thus be an over-simplification. It is understandable that some of the officials planning the arts should take the view that cultural development had to be initiated from the top – even half-believe that without their support grass-roots music could not really flourish. This, after all, is an approach in keeping with the accepted planning philosophy that ‘in all types of new community the basic responsibility for recreational provision lies with the local authority’ (Veal 1975, p. 79). An early arts manager in the city explained the process of ‘bringing art into the lives of those living in a new city’ from the viewpoint of planners: ‘It is a slow but rewarding process. One digs, fertilises, plants, prunes and tends – with a great deal of love. After many years the roses will have developed and the prize blooms will be ready for show.’3 Certainly this central encouragement was one real element. Without the initial sponsorship by the MKDC and BMK many of the larger-scale and more ‘nationally’ oriented and ‘professional’ musical institutions like the Wavendon Allmusic Plan, the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra, or the ‘February Festival’ would never have been set up; and MKDC in particular had an impressive record in tapping both private enterprise and local initiative to encourage a wide variety of local recreational opportunities. But concentrating only on a top-down model would be to miss the essential contribution of the existing musical traditions which not only often continued as important foci for local interest but also laid the base for later additional activities. Indeed some MKDC administrators explicitly recognised this, notably certain leading individuals in the ‘Social Development’ programme who made a point of working with existing musical groups and responding to the initiatives of local residents. The informal processes and expectations underlying the local practice of music and the people who maintained the local clubs and groups over the years thus also played a crucial role, one that cannot be understood by considering the official institutions alone.

      Probably no city is ‘typical’, and it will be obvious from the above that Milton Keynes in the early 1980s certainly was not. It was a ‘new city’ growing in population by some tens of thousands during the research and characterized by lavish publicity, demographic and social structure divergent from the national ‘average’, and the special impetus of new challenges and new developments in a new environment. In the absence of comparable studies, we do not yet know what is ‘typical’ of musical practice in contemporary English towns. This study does not therefore claim to present a detailed representation of all English towns, but to give an ethnographic account of just one at one particular period.

      Hence I have no doubt that the details of the extent and nature of the musical activities presented here or the personalities who helped to create them are indeed unique. But equally I feel certain from the informal evidence discussed later, from the existing foundations in the area, and from the very mix of people from different origins in Milton Keynes, that many of the broad patterns described in later chapters are to be found fairly widely in England – an invisible system structuring and maintaining local music up and down the country.

      2

      Musical worlds in Milton Keynes

      This part gives some account of the differing musics in Milton Keynes in the early 1980s. It is difficult to know how to present the inevitably overlapping and heterogeneous material of so complex a study as that of the musical activities of a whole town. I finally decided to begin with a plain description of the main ‘musical worlds’ into which local music-making seemed broadly to be divided (in part 2) and then (in part 3) consider some of the contrasts and comparisons between them before going on to the further analysis in parts 4 and 5.

      The idea of a musical ‘world’ partly arises from local participants’ own descriptions. Brass band involvement was ‘a world on its own’, and classical art music seen as a ‘quite different world’ from that of rock music. The term has also been used by anthropologists and others to refer to people’s ‘world view’ or to different ‘social worlds’, emphasising the differing and complex cultures of ideas and practice within which people variously live.1

      This has been taken further in Howard Becker’s illuminating study of ‘art worlds’ (1982). Since the concept of musical ‘worlds’ has structured my presentation in this part, it is worth quoting Becker’s exposition:

      Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of art worlds coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artifacts …

      The interaction of all the involved parties produces a shared sense of the worth of what they collectively produce. Their mutual appreciation of the conventions they share, and the support they mutually afford one another, convince them that what they are doing is worth doing. If they act under the definition of “art”, their interaction convinces them that what they produce are valid works of art. (Becker 1982, pp. 34, 39)

      The ‘musical worlds’ of Milton Keynes were instances of such ‘art worlds’.2 They were distinguishable not just by their differing musical styles but also by other social conventions: in the people who took part, their values, their shared understandings and practices, modes of production and distribution, and the social organisation of their collective musical activities.

      Part 2 therefore presents in turn some description of the various musical worlds of classical, brass band, folk, musical theatre, jazz, country and western, and rock or pop music which could with varying degrees of distinctiveness be found in Milton Keynes. Each is treated here as valid in itself, presented at least in part from the viewpoint of its participants. This approach is necessary for understanding the conventions in these differing worlds in their own terms, but it is also one that, surprisingly, cannot be taken for granted. ‘Music’ tends to be at once a word of approval and one that means different things to different people; what one group unambiguously define as ‘music’ may be rejected by others as not ‘really’ music, or as ‘mere noise’ or ‘childish’ or ‘just a boring series of notes’. It thus takes some detachment as well as self-education to envisage music right across the spectrum from ‘pop’ to ‘classical’ as equally valid, for this means refusing to accept any one set of assumptions about the ‘true’ nature of music and instead exploring each ‘world’ as of equal authenticity with others.

      4

      The classical music world at the local level

      Classical or ‘serious’ music is what many readers will first think of when music is mentioned. For its participants this is

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