The Hidden Musicians. Ruth Finnegan

      1

      The existence and study of local music

      A choir of local residents – men, women and children – file in special costume on to the platform for their annual concert accompanied by visiting soloists and an orchestra of local amateurs. A jazz and blues group play to enthusiastic fans over Sunday lunchtime in the foyer of a local leisure centre. A brass band of players from their teens to their seventies thunder out Christmas carols beside the local shops, making a bright show as well as resounding harmony with their military-style uniforms and gleaming instruments, and one member rattling the collection box. An inexperienced but ambitious band of teenagers set up their instruments in a pub for their first gig, nervous about performing in public but supported by friends sitting round the tables, and deeply enthusiastic about the new songs they have spent months working on. Or a part-time church organist extricates herself from her other commitments to come again and yet again to provide the musical framework for another Saturday wedding or Sunday service.

      Most readers will have encountered at least some of these events – or of the many similar activities that take place in one form or another in English towns today.¹ It is to such events and their background that this book is devoted: grass-roots music-making as it is practised by amateur musicians in a local context.

      It is of course widely accepted that musical activities of this kind are part of modern English culture. But the organisation behind them is seldom thought about or investigated. In fact we regularly take them so for granted that we fail to really see the unacclaimed work put in by hundreds and thousands of amateur musicians up and down the country. Yet it is this work, in a sense invisible, that upholds this in other ways well-known element of our cultural heritage.

      Despite its familiarity there are real questions to be investigated about local music in this country. What exactly does it consist of? How is it sustained and by whom? Are the kinds of events mentioned earlier one-off affairs or are there consistent patterns or a predictable structure into which they fall? Are they still robust or by now fading away? Who are these local musicians – a marginal minority or substantial body? – and who are their patrons today? And what, finally, is the significance of local music-making for the ways people manage and make sense of modern urban life or, more widely, for our experience as active and creative human beings?

      It will emerge from the account in this book that the work of local amateur musicians is not just haphazard or formless, the result of individual whim or circumstance. On the contrary, a consistent – if sometimes changing – structure lies behind these surface activities. The public events described above, and all the others that in their various forms are so typical a feature of modern English life, are part of an invisible but organised system through which individuals make their contribution to both the changes and the continuities of English music today.

      I think of this set of practices as ‘hidden’ in two ways. One is that it has been so little drawn to our attention by systematic research or writing. There has been little work in this country on the ‘micro-sociology’ of amateur music; and, incredibly, questions on active music-making as such (as distinct from attendance at professional events or participation in artistic groups generally) seldom or never appear in official surveys – almost as if local music-making did not exist at all. Thus academics and planners alike have somehow found it easy to ignore something which is in other ways so remarkably obvious.

      Second and perhaps even more important, the system of local music-making is partially veiled not just from outsiders but even from the musicians themselves and their supporters. Of course in one sense they know it well – these are not secret practices. But in another it seems so natural and given to the participants that they are often unaware both of its extent and of the structured work they themselves are putting into sustaining it. We all know about it – but fail to notice it for what it is.

      The purpose of this book, then, is to uncover and reflect on some of these little-questioned but fundamental dimensions of local music-making, and their place in both urban life and our cultural traditions more generally.

      The example I focus on to illustrate these themes is the town of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Clearly this town, like any other, has its own unique qualities, described more fully in chapter 3 and, more indirectly, throughout the book. Suffice it to say here that I am not claiming that Milton Keynes is in every way representative of all modern