research, that of using specific case studies to lead to the kind of illumination in depth not provided by more thinly spread and generalized accounts.2 Having lived in the area for a dozen years or more I have been able to draw on lengthy experience of local music practices as well as on the more systematic observation I undertook in the early 1980s, supplemented by local documentary sources and surveys (more fully described in the appendix on sources and methods), so as to reach an understanding in some depth of the patterns of local music-making. The main research was during the period 1980–4, so in describing the specific findings I have mostly used the past tense. As will emerge, the detailed groups and events were sometimes ephemeral and so are not appropriately described in the present, unlike many of the continuing and more general patterns (analysed later in the book) to which this local case study contributes.
One point of the book is thus merely to provide an empirically based ethnography of amateur music in one modern English town at a particular period. What kind of music-making actually went on there? This might seem a simple matter on which the answers must surely already be known. But in fact it is a question surprisingly neglected by researchers. There are of course some excellent historical accounts,3 illuminating research on specific topics,4 and a plethora of variegated work on the mass media and the nationally known bands and their procedures.5 All these make their own contribution to our understanding of English music. There is also plenty of writing by ethnomusicologists and others on musical practices far away or long ago, as well as nostalgia for the ‘rich amateur world’ of earlier days, for New Orleans in the ‘jazz era’ or for Liverpool in the 1960s. But there is little indeed on modern grass-roots musicians and music-making across the board in a specific town: its local choirs, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan societies, brass bands, ceilidh dance groups or the small popular bands who, week in and week out, form an essential local backing to our national musical achievements.6 I hope therefore that this first detailed book on local music in a contemporary English town – for there is no comparable study – will provoke further investigation of a subject so important for our understanding both of music and of the practices of modern urban life.
The picture that emerges from this ethnography is not quite what one might expect from some of the more general and theoretical writing about English culture. Let me foreshadow briefly some of the approaches and findings that will be elaborated later.
Perhaps the most striking point is how far the evidence here runs counter to the influential ‘mass society’ interpretations, particularly the extreme view which envisages a passive and deluded population lulled by the mass media and generating nothing themselves.7 Nor can music be explained (or explained away) as the creature of class divisions or manipulation, or in any simple way predictable from people’s social and economic backgrounds or even, in most cases, their age (as will emerge in chapter 10, the theory of a ‘working-class-youth sub-culture’ has little to support it). And far from music-making taking a peripheral role for individuals and society – a view propagated in the kind of theoretical stance that marginalises ‘leisure’ or ‘culture’ as somehow less real than ‘work’ or ‘society’ – music can equally well be seen as playing a central part not just in urban networks but also more generally in the social structure and processes of our life today. It is true that local music-making in the sense of direct participation in performance is the pursuit of a minority. But this minority turns out to be a more serious and energetic one than is often imagined, whose musical practices not only involve a whole host of other people than just the performers, but also have many implications for urban and national culture more generally.
Given this importance, why has the existence and significance of these local musical practices been so little noticed? In addition to the difficulty of explicitly noticing the taken-for-granted conventions which invisibly structure our activities, reasons can be found in current and earlier approaches to the study of music. These have often rested on assumptions which conceal rather than illuminate the kind of evidence revealed in this research. Among such assumptions challenged in this book, let me briefly highlight three.
First, and perhaps most important, musicological analyses have been concerned either to establish what kinds of music (or music-making) are ‘best’ or ‘highest’ – or, if not to establish them, then to assume implicitly that this is known already with the direction for one’s gaze already laid down. This book accepts neither of these paths. Once one starts thinking not about ‘the best’ but about what people actually do – about ‘is’ not ‘ought’ – then it becomes evident that there are in fact several musics, not just one, and that no one of them is self-evidently superior to the others. In Milton Keynes, as in so many other towns, there are several different musical worlds, often little understood by each other yet each having its own contrasting conventions about the proper modes of learning, transmission, composition or performance. Because the pre-eminent position of classical music so often goes without saying, the existence of these differing musics has often simply been ignored.
Or again – to look at the same problem but from a different viewpoint – the common social science emphasis on ‘popular’ or ‘lower-class’ activities has led to particular research concentrations. Rock (and sometimes brass band music) has been particularly picked out as if only it, and not classical ‘elite’ music, were somehow worth serious consideration. But what became very clear in this study is that each musical tradition – classical, rock, jazz or whatever – can be studied in its own right. When no longer judged by the criteria of others, each emerges as in principle equally authentic and equally influential in shaping the practices of local music.
This study, therefore – unlike most others – does not concentrate on just one musical tradition but tries to consider all those important in the locality: an ‘obvious’ thing to do, of course – except that few scholars do it. Thus part 2 presents several musical worlds in turn through both general summaries and short case studies of particular groups and clubs – detailed ethnographic description that forms the necessary foundation for the later analyses. Part 3 then picks out some of the contrasting conventions which both differentiate and to some extent unite these differing worlds as a basis for the more general reflections in parts 4 and 5.
The discussion of each tradition is thus inevitably quite short, and some might argue that I should instead have concentrated on understanding just one world in depth. But despite its costs this comparative approach is essential to discover the interaction of traditions in the local area, and provide the perspective for a more detached view of their differences and similarities. The existence of this varied and structured interplay of differing and interacting worlds is something that simply does not surface at all in studies focussing exclusively on just a single tradition.
To some it may seem perverse to treat all these forms of music as on a par. But I take the view that music is neither something self-evidently there in the natural world nor fully defined in the musical practices of any one group; rather what is heard as ‘music’ is characterised not by its formal properties but by people’s view of it, by the special frame drawn round particular forms of sound and their overt social enactment. Music is thus defined in different ways among different groups, each of whom have their own conventions supported by existing practices and ideas about the right way in which music should be realised.8 My own musical appreciations were of course enlarged by this study (though I continue to have my own preferences), but as a researcher I consider the only valid approach is not to air my own ethnocentric evaluations as if they had universal validity but to treat the many different forms of music as equally worthy of study on their own terms.
I have thus quite deliberately not confined this study to classical music, or indeed to so-called ‘popular’ music,9 but have tried to give some description of the practice of music across the whole spectrum to be found in the locality. It therefore covers music-making in the classical tradition, jazz, brass bands, musical theatre,