Читать книгу The Hidden Musicians - Ruth Finnegan - Страница 14

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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 English towns – clearly it is not – 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.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, country and western, folk, pop and rock as well as some of the more common contexts 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 compared to the huge number of treatments of, for example, social stratification, industrial employment, or macro-studies of society or state. Artistic expression and enactment are also important to people, perhaps as significant for their lives as the traditional concerns of social theorists – or, at any rate, it seems often to be a matter of mere assumption rather than objective evidence that they are not. I hope my treatment may help to redress the balance of social science work on Britain as well as lead to greater understanding of the nature and implications of local music.

One final point. It is hard to write at once with the social scientist’s detachment and at the same time with a full personal appreciation of the human creativity involved in artistic expression and performance.¹⁵ The constant temptations are either to fall into the reductionist trap of, say, seeing music as just the epiphenomenon of social structure or alternatively to be swept away by the facile romanticising of ‘art’. By considering mainly musical practice and its conventions rather than musical works, I hope to some extent to have avoided the second of these temptations. As for the first, a written academic account can probably never totally avoid giving a faceless and reducing impression of what to the participants themselves is rich and engrossing artistic experience; I am also aware that by comparing the many different musics in the area I am depriving myself and my readers of the full understanding that a deeper search into just one musical group or tradition might have provided. I hope, though, that despite all this my genuine appreciation for the real (not merely ‘reflective’ or ‘secondary’) musical achievements of local musicians will still shine through the attempt at objectivity and reveal something of a reality that has too often remained unnoticed.