The local activities and groups within this classical music world took various forms. There were the occasional visits of famous professional orchestras and soloists to give performances in one or other of the local halls, and concerts by local orchestras and choirs with visiting professional soloists. Local pupils from time to time went on to professional music training at one of the specialist music colleges outside the area after initial instruction by local teachers. But these more spectacular events were only part of the picture, for there were also the ‘lesser’ local activities that on a day-to-day basis both reflected the ideal classical model and, ultimately, enabled its realisation in practice.
School music was one important element. In addition to formal music lessons, children’s ensembles played regularly outside lessons, and schools put on concerts for parents and friends (described further in chapter 15). The Buckinghamshire Education Authority also ran two music centres (one in Bletchley – the North Bucks Music Centre – and one at the Stantonbury Education Campus) which organized peripatetic instrumental teachers for local schools and ‘Junior Music Schools’ on Saturday mornings where local children played in groups or gave regular termly concerts (see figure 8). Like the schools, these centres were predominantly in the classical (and to a lesser extent brass) tradition, and also encouraged classical musical activity by teaching and by providing rehearsal facilities and other services for classical groups. They formed one local nucleus of musicians, many also functioning as private teachers or members of local orchestras, choirs and other ensembles.
Figure 8 The North Bucks Youth Orchestra (one of the many junior orchestras at the North Bucks Music Centre) perform Swan Lake at their termly concert accompanied by local dancers
There were also the many private music teachers and their pupils. They too played a part not just in socialisation into music but in the actual music-making of the locality, hundreds of hours of playing every week. There were scores of instrumental and singing teachers with varying qualifications, above all in piano teaching, and each year about a thousand practical music examinations for the national examining schools were held in local centres – some indication of the extent of classical music. Private music teaching, especially to children, was a flourishing industry with pupils of varying levels of proficiency playing musical instruments not only to their teachers but also at school or church, in local groups and in the home.
The churches were another context for the local enactment of classical music. Many had their own choirs, together with one or more organists who played from the recognised classical repertoire on church occasions, including the life-cycle ceremonies so often held in church – christenings, weddings, funerals. It was thus through the churches as much as through formal concert halls that many people came to appreciate the large proportion of the classical musical heritage that is so closely associated with the Christian tradition, and themselves actively participated in it (see further in chapter 16).
A further essential part in the local enactment of classical music was played by the local groups formed to promote or perform music. The extent and scope of these active musical groupings, and the systematic conventions by which they organised their music, may well surprise those who bemoan the disappearance of active music-making today, or the ‘cultural desert’ in our cities. Let me illustrate this by some description of the local orchestras, instrumental ensembles, and choirs.
First, the orchestras. The best known was the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra, founded ‘to provide a regular series of high quality professional concerts in the new city’ as part of MKDC’s strategy for making the city a centre for artistic excellence. As described in chapter 2, this soon became recognised as a professional orchestra, with national as well as regional connections, and many of its players lived outside Milton Keynes. As such it does not really come within the scope of this study, but did have some relevance in that its regular local rehearsals and performances provided one model for younger instrumentalists as well as a focus for local audiences keen on hearing professional playing.
Among the other orchestras the highest in the classical hierarchy was the Sherwood Sinfonia (figure 9). This was founded in 1973 as a high-standard amateur orchestra for the area and by the 1980s was playing regularly under a professional conductor. Local music teachers made up a substantial proportion of its members and recruited their advanced pupils from local schools, supplemented by other experienced players from the area, playing the typical classical orchestral instruments: strings (violins, violas, cellos, double bass), wind (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets, horns, trombone and tuba) and percussion – about 55 players in all. Membership was restricted to those with the appropriately high-level qualifications, the accepted criteria being high grades reached in the nationally recognised examinations, personal recommendation by an existing member (especially the music teachers) or in some cases audition. In keeping with the classical music tradition, the orchestra had enlisted a nationally known and highly qualified musician as their President, his name printed in its full glory on the orchestra’s letterhead: Sir Thomas Armstrong, MA, D. Mus. (Oxon.), Hon. FRAM, Hon. FRCO, Hon. FTCL.
Figure 9 Christmas concert by the Sherwood Sinfonia. The leading amateur orchestra rehearse for their concert with the St Thomas Aquinas school choir at Stantonbury Theatre
The Sherwood Sinfonia were a serious and committed orchestra which took justifiable pride in their high standards, and at the same time remained very local in their playing, membership, audiences, rehearsals and performances. They gave about four concerts a year in local halls, mostly playing works from the accepted classical repertoire by composers like Mozart, Dvořák and Brahms, though for their light-hearted Christmas family concert, they chose lighter pieces together with joke items, quizzes, or audience-sung carols. As with most groups of this kind, they moved through a repeated annual cycle: the weekly rehearsals were climaxed by the intensive activity leading up to the regular concerts, each preceded by its three-hour afternoon rehearsal and culminating in the evening performance in front of an audience largely made up of friends and relations. In the early 1970s the Sherwood Sinfonia was described as ‘the classical musical activity in the town’, and even ten years later, despite the founding of the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra, it had not wholly lost this position.
When orchestras and ensembles were graded in typical classical fashion by their playing and performing standards, other orchestral groups were reckoned lower in both expertise and aspirations. There were the Newport Pagnell Concert Orchestra (founded in 1980) and the older Wolverton Light Orchestra, both expecting to recruit players who were of reasonably high standard (the national Grade VII examination was mentioned as desirable for the former, for example) but were perhaps not experienced enough for the Sherwood Sinfonia or just preferred a different kind of musical expression and atmosphere. Some individuals played in more than one orchestra, often choosing to go to the Wolverton Light Orchestra with their second instrument ‘for fun’. These orchestras had the same general range of instruments but were smaller and more locally orientated than the Sherwood Sinfonia. They relied on local soloists and conductors rather than professionals from outside, and appeared at smaller local venues