Finnegan, Ruth.

The hidden musican: Music-making in an English

town.Grand Britain, Cambridge University Press.

Preface

“Rather late in the day I realized that what was going on around me was an equally interesting
subject, linking with many of the traditional scholarly questions about the social contexts and
processes of artistic activity and human relationships. (xi)

But eventually I began to wonder just how music was practised locally and what was the taken-
for-granted system which underpinned the amateur operatic societies, brass bands, rock
groups, church choirs or classical orchestras. These apparently simple questions turned out not
to be much thought about or as yet the subject of very much systematic research. This study
attempts to provide some answers. (xi)

The book focusses on local music in one English town -Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire in the
early 1980- in order to uncover the structure of the often-unrecognized practices of local music-
making. Milton Keynes is not of course typical of all English towns, but it is in any event a real
place which contains real people experiencing and creating musical forms which they (xi)
themselves value and to which they are prepared to commit a great deal of their lives. I believe
that it is a better test case for exploring the significance of local music as it is actually practised
than the usual abstract or evaluative theorising. (xii)

But for the great majority of people it is the local amateur scene that forms the setting for their
active musical experience, and it is these ‘ordinary’ musicians and their activities that form the
centre-piece of the study. (xii)

It is also based on my conviction that amateur practitioners are just as worth investigation as
professional performers, and that their cultural practices are as real and interesting as the
economic or class facets of their lives to which so much attention is usually devoted (xii)

I hope it can lead to greater appreciation and study of what are, after all, among the most
valued pursuits of culture: the musical practices and experiences of ordinary people in their
own locality, an invisible system which we usually take for granted but which upholds one
vulnerable but living element of our cultural heritage. (xii).

I The existence and study of local music

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. (3)

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 (3) 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? (4)

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 continuities of English music today.
(4)

Ithink of this set of practices as ‘hidden’ in two ways. One is that is has been so little drawn to
our attention by systematic research or writing. […]
Second and perhaps even more important, the system of local music making is partially veiled
not just from the outsiders but even from the musician themselves and their supporters. (4)
[unaware to its extent and structure]

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. (4)

but that I am following one well-established tradition in social and historical 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. (4)

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. (5)

But there is little indeed on modern grass-roots musicians and music-making across the board
in a specific town: its local choir, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan societies, brass bands, ceilidh
dance groups or small popular bands who, week in and week out, form an essential local
backing to our national musical achievements. (5)

Perhaps the most striking point is how gar 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. Nor can
music been 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 […]. 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 (5)
‘culture’ as somehow less real than ‘work’ or society’- music can equally well be seen as playing
a central part no just urban networks but also more generally in the social structure and
processes of our life today. (6)
[Three assumptions which are challenged in this book]

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. (6)
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 others. (6)

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. (6)

But despite its costs this comparative approach is essential to discover the interaction of
traditions in the local area, and provide de perspective for a more detached view of their
differences and similarities. (7)

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. (7)

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 practice of music: on that people
actually do on the ground. (8)

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. (8)

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. (8)

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 […]. 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. (8)
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. (8)

Why should we assume that music-making is the monopoly of full-time specialist or the prime
responsibility of state-supported institutions like the national orchestras or opera houses? (9)

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. (9)

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. (9)

But these questions need both further thought and empirical investigation on the ground
before que can accept the sometimes unquestioned conclusions of, say, the mass society
theorists or the class-dominated visions of some social assumptions are investigated at the local
level, the reality turns out to be rather different. (9)

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.
(10)

Local music, furthermore -the kind of activity so often omitted in many approaches to urban
study- 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, […], in which both social continuity and individual choices play a part. (10)

2 ‘Amateur’ and ‘professional’ musicians

Among all these variations, which are que ‘amateur’ musicians and groups on which this study
claims to focus? Unfortunately there is no simple answer, nor are the ‘amateur’ always
unambiguously separated from the ‘professional’ musicians. (13)