The Hidden Musicians. Ruth Finnegan

      Preface to the 2007 edition

      People are always complaining that things aren’t the same as in some golden age in the past – which for some is now the period twenty years ago when I first carried out this study of the amateur musicians in the English city of Milton Keynes. It is true that the local choir I sing in has dwindled drastically since its earlier heyday. It’s now down to a small core of mostly rather ageing members, and we sometimes worry about its continuance. On the other hand it has just appointed a new conductor – and an excellent one too. So, as it has done continuously since 1973, the Sherwood Choral Society goes on singing devotedly at its Wednesday evening practices and performing at its regular local concerts. Then again, new choirs have been founded in the meantime and are going strong, and another choir I sing in is getting almost too big for its long-time rehearsal place. The ebb and flow of specific groups is after all nothing new. Now, in the twenty-first century, the cyclical celebrations of the year are still supported by enthusiastic volunteer musicians, invisible to some but bringing their expertise to bear on the expected occasions. Brass bands are still performing in public places around the city, new rock bands emerge with their flamboyant names, and the old as well as the new styles are played across the wide spectrum from classical and brass band music to folk, jazz, country and western, and rock.

      Of course there have been many changes in the city of Milton Keynes during those twenty intervening years, but what strikes me now are the continuities in its music-making, not just the changes. The town has grown bigger in both population and area. New migrants, both national and (far more than before) international, have settled in, providing additional resources for music and raising new issues for social and political debate both within and outside the city. New musical styles and fashions have flourished. The range of music shops has changed, and with the expansion of the city glamorous new venues for music have been erected and are patronised by visiting professionals. There are new technologies too, which many musicians have turned to avidly. In short, music in its varying guises seems to have remained as strong a commitment as ever for those thousands of people engaged in the musical pathways charted out in this study, and Milton Keynes still hosts a profusion of diverse musical worlds.

      Many of the musical organisations noted in the 1980s still in one way or another function today, with their continually renewing cycles of members and innovations, not least the larger-scale and more formalised associations like the brass bands, operatic societies, classical orchestras, and the leading country-and-western club. Among the small bands only a sparse handful have survived since the 1980s (among them the Fenny Stompers of chapter 8), but just as before, new bands arise to fill the places of the old, themselves no doubt destined to dissolve in the coming years, following