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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 the same pattern of dissolution and renewal as in earlier years.

The wondrous new technological devices for music-making and -listening and the opportunities of the web in one way make for striking changes in the musical environment. But at the same time much of what musicians exploit them for seems to be an extension of what they were doing already – for publicity, for recording and distributing their music, for experimenting, for listening and interchanging with others. Amidst all the changes, the pubs, schools, churches and homes still provide venues and occasions for music-making, and the rituals of urban living still give a meaning and a call for the services of local musicians.

When I was first contemplating this study of amateur music-making nearly thirty years ago – for it took far longer than I could ever have believed at the outset – my basic questions were essentially ethnographic. Rereading the material now reminds me of the queries I started out with, when I was eager simply just to discover what kinds of musicians and music-making operated in the town where I lived. Other questions soon emerged. Certainly individuals and their diverse preferences and commitments were central – but in the numerous music-making options in the town, were there also some systematic patterns and conventions? And how was it that the rich musical traditions that are taken to be a valued a part of English culture (and not just English I suspect) were actualised and sustained, and by whom? Did the practices at the local level accord with more generally held beliefs about music or about city life? Perhaps many of the answers will by now seem fairly obvious, but on several of those points I had some surprises at the time.

The music-making activities in this one smallish English town at this one period of time were certainly extensive enough to fill a book, and I remain happy that they did. But another result of my recent rereading is to renew my awareness of its gaps. It confined itself primarily to the amateur musicians (or, more accurately, to the amateur end of the complex amateur-professional continuum) and said little about the professionals or the music industry more generally. Not that I apologise for that focus, for the book is long enough already, but it did mean that this study of music in the city of Milton Keynes is only about certain dimensions and not about all its musical activities, either then or now. Nor did the study really get into the role of the mass media – again a deliberate decision given the over-emphasis on that angle at the time (or so I thought) at the expense of local creativity. If I was embarking on a new study now I might try to come to grips with the many-sided and elusive ways in which people use the variety of contemporary media (and, currently, the developing electronic technologies and the internet) and how these options interrelate with local artistries and interpretations. It is a subject of growing interest, not least for the ways in which such technologies may be reviving our grasp of the multisensory and performance qualities of much music-making – not just as a matter of audition but often also as visual, corporeal and material.

One gap that troubled me from the start came from my inability to go further into the musical practices of what might now be termed ‘minorities,’ whether defined in cultural, religious or ethnic terms. More specifically I was aware that a small number of individuals (and to some extent groups) had, for example, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Polish, Irish and Italian backgrounds or Islamic, Hindu or Sikh affiliations. I would have found it appealing to have undertaken a proper study of all or any such groups, especially those with non-European traditions, and, to be candid, I felt quite badly that as an anthropologist I was not including some in-depth material on the specificities of their activities, language and, of course, music. Given several more years or an army of research assistants (none of which I had), perhaps I could have gone some way in that direction. As it was, I had to face the fact that the city of Milton Keynes at the time had only a small number of such residents, and in order to produce a balanced local study I needed to focus on the predominant musical pathways being followed at that time and in that place. Although I did wish to note the presence of additional traditions and the issues raised in trying to handle them (subjects touched on in the chapter on ‘Plural worlds’), I was unfortunately unable to elaborate further on the wider range of musics.

Another factor also was at work, for such musics were not necessarily associated with distinctive or, as it were, sustained communities within the city. In fact many (though not all) of the people who could in some sense be regarded as being of ‘non-English origin’ – which in itself is an elusive and controversial concept – had lived in the area for many years, had been born there and/or had children in local schools. A number were in fact participants in one or more of the musical worlds that are portrayed here. I should also add that at that time there seemed little evidence of anything that could be identified as a distinctive ‘black’ culture in Milton Keynes. There were scattered exceptions, true, chiefly in the abstractions of university-centred debates and in a very few bands where colour was possibly of some relevance. But in general one of the surprises, at least to contemporary readers, was the relative lack of what might now be called ‘ethnic consciousness’ in Milton Keynes musical practices – a difference no doubt from a number of cities, including certain other British cities even at that time. By now things have probably changed. With the expansion of Milton Keynes and the increase in international migration, the city has in some respects become more heterogeneous – it now has an extensive Somali community for example. Both for that reason and because of the more overt public debates over race, ethnicity and religion that have in some ways been raising consciousness in the interim, a contemporary study might need to approach things somewhat differently.

If I was starting off anew, I would also want to take account of the many advances in the study of music and culture in the years since I conducted the earlier study. Many wonderfully detailed and sensitive ethnographies of musical practices have been completed since then, leading to challenging new insights and perspectives, some of which confirm that I was correct in attaching importance to music. Expanding work exists on experience and lived meaning; on audiences; on the sounds of the city, recorded and ‘background’ as well as live; on ‘world music’; on the interaction of the global and local; on music and place; and on the overarching social and economic powers and constraints and opportunities that I touched on only lightly but that perhaps carry more weight than I was alive to at the time. Musicological analysis – something of which I may have been over-suspicious for its imbuement with narrow-minded, elitist analyses – also has started to come into its own as an illuminating route into the further understanding of the ‘popular,’ not just of high-art western musics. There is much to learn from the many perceptive studies conducted over recent years, quite a few of them associated with this very Music/Culture series in which I am honoured to be included. If I were writing now I hope I would be more informed by this developing work on a subject that, too little regarded in earlier years, is now being understood so much more deeply.

That said, I believe a place still exists for a study of the kind represented by this book – an ethnography specific to its place and time both in the content of what it documents and in its historically situated approach, struggling to expand into a greater understanding of the pluralism of multiple musics, of musical practices not just works, and of the active pathways trod by practising musicians in a local setting. Such ethnographies, I believe, can retain their value. As well as resonating with experiences elsewhere, these individual musicians and their arts are unique to a time and place, realising their complex and imaginative musical action in a specific and multifaceted setting.

I suspect that many authors secretly like some of their books more than others. Perhaps I may be allowed to end with my personal feelings about this one. Returning to it has made me recognise that amongst my various offerings over the last forty years or so The Hidden Musicians, with all it shortcomings, is indubitably one of my favourites. Trying to work out why has been interesting. It’s no doubt partly that the book came out of a huge amount of work (it was all vastly more complicated and extensive than I really had been prepared for), that it enlarged and challenged my own preconceptions, that it tied in to an activity to which I attached real value and presented me with some complex intellectual, methodological and moral challenges. There were hard patches, needless to say, and the work went on a very long time, but it was also fun to do because I was dealing with something that I personally enjoyed and found inspiring. Most of all it involved human beings, not just abstractions or generalisations, and the complex and diverse pathways they so impressively both trod and created irrespective of the ways the scholars thought they ought to be behaving. In the end, I still like this study because it is about real people in a real, not a pseudonymous, place that existed and exists: about people actively engaging in intensely human practices in which they took trouble and pains, in which they experienced disputes and sociability – and, rightly, delight.

Milton Keynes, England	R.F.
December 2006