The Hidden Musicians - Ruth Finnegan Music Culture

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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 assume – as many past studies and approaches have implicitly done – that we already know what in fact should still remain as a question for investigation. It is easy to think that we already know or agree on what is most ‘important’ about music, how it should be defined and judged, how people value and experience different aspects of our culture, or how far people’s lives are determined by, say, governmental decisions, the mass media, socio-economic class – or the practice of music. But these questions need both further thought and empirical investigation on the ground before we can accept the sometimes unquestioned conclusions of, say, the mass society theorists or the class-dominated visions of some social scientists, at least as far as local music goes; for when these and similar assumptions are investigated at the local level, the reality turns out to be rather different.

      This study therefore is not intended to contribute to some great Theory of music, but rather to be a more modest social study based in the first instance in the local ethnography but also moving out to wider questions and drawing inspiration from a broad if somewhat unsystematic range of sources across several disciplines, in particular anthropology, sociology, urban and community studies, folklore, the study of ‘popular culture’, the more anthropological side of ethnomusicology, and social history. These ethnographic findings and the theoretical approaches which I found useful to elucidate them illuminate some central questions in the social study of both urban life and musical practice. These to some extent underlie the exposition throughout (specially in parts 4 and 5) and are taken up for more explicit discussion in the two final chapters. Their end result is sometimes to build on but also often to reject the emphasis and conclusions evident in a number of other studies of music by the test of the facts as discovered in this case study of musical practice.

      The approach in this book thus follows a rather different line from that of the majority of studies of music.12 A focus on the existence and interaction of different musics, on musical practice rather than musical works, and on the amateur rather than professional side of music-making reveals the hitherto unsuspected scope of music-making, with far-reaching implications for our lives today. One revelation was the sheer amount and variety of local music: far richer, more creative and of more significance for people’s lives than is recognised even in the participants’ own consciousness, far less in much conventional social science wisdom about English culture. Many of our valued institutions are pictured as just floating on invisibly and without effort. On the contrary, as will become clear, a great deal of work and commitment have to be put into their continuance: they do not just ‘happen’ naturally.13 Local music, furthermore – the kind of activity so often omitted in many approaches to urban study14 – turns out to be neither formless nor, as we might suppose, just the product of individual endeavour, but to be structured according to a series of cultural conventions and organised practices, to be explained in this book, in which both social continuity and individual choices play a part. The patterns within this system may not always be within our conscious awareness, but nonetheless play a crucial part in our cultural processes.

      This study will therefore, I hope, enhance our understanding of British cultural institutions, a subject on which social science writing is relatively sparse

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