The number of choirs in the area was thus great. There were perhaps 100 in all, with membership ranging from 90 or so down to around 12–15 (a not uncommon number for the smaller groups), or as few as 5 or 6 in some church choirs. The total number of choral singers in the area was thus probably well over 1,000, though it is hard to calculate exact numbers because of the amount of multiple membership – another notable feature of the choral tradition.
These many choirs and instrumental groups practised through the year without always being especially noticeable except to those most directly involved. However, there were points in the year when their activities became more prominent. At Christmas practically every choir and orchestra gave performances, and there were also a great many concerts towards the end of the summer term in the school year. Easter too had its performances, together with other key festivals in the Christian year (especially, but not only, by the church groups). Another high point was February. The annual ‘February Festival’, initially promoted by the MKDC arts division, included both nationally and internationally known professional artists from outside the area, and a few of the leading local groups.
February was also the month of the Milton Keynes (earlier Bletchley) Festival of Arts, a more modest and locally generated event, which followed the established music festival tradition of competitive classes in music, dance and speech for both children and adults in a wide range of ages and standards, judged by visiting adjudicators. It included classes for solo singers and performers on just about every classical instrument, band, recorder groups, small ensembles, and church choirs. The largest choirs and orchestras did not enter, but the festival still provided a showpiece of the classical music world in Milton Keynes. Over the days of the festival, many hundreds of entrants came forward and performed in two Bletchley halls, from piano classes for tiny tots to ‘recital classes’ by young aspirants for music college entrance. The festival had grown from one day in 1968 to an event of more than a week and over 3,000 entrants (almost 80 per cent of them local) by the mid 1980s.
But a mere catalogue gives no real taste of what these many musical activities meant to the participants. This was something over and above the time and work they put into them or the incidental results (sociability or friendship or status) that certainly also often flowed from them. The rewards for those committed to the classical music world are hard to capture in precise words, but they certainly included a sense of beauty and fundamental value, of intense and profoundly felt artistic experience which could reach to the depths of one’s nature. For participants in this world there was perhaps nothing to equal the experience of engaging in a beautiful and co-ordinated performance of some favoured classical work, whether in practice or (at a heightened level) in public concert: the expectant thrill of players or singers entering a hall in their special dress ready for performance, the familiar and evocative sounds of tuning up in front of the audience, the hushed moment as the performers gathered themselves to start or the conductor called all eyes by lifting his baton, and the split second of silence (more of symbolic quality than measured time) at the end before performers and audience returned alike to the everyday world. For those steeped in the classical tradition these richly symbolic moments were experienced as somehow implicating the deep core of people’s being.
This experience was not, ultimately, dependent on the super-high professional standards insisted on in the elite national music world. It was something within the compass and imagination of the quite ordinary part-time musicians in the local halls and schools and churches.
These locally practising musicians were of course influenced by many things, social as well as musical, and it would not do to give either too purist or too generalized a picture of what drew each to his or her musical engagements or the views each held of these. One aspect, however, which to some degree or other set them within an overall common background was the general evaluation of the place of classical music in our culture and the model most people had of this. These shared assumptions were usually implicit only, but some brief (if simplified) comments on this model of classical music are relevant for understanding the local scene, even though to many readers they may seem too obvious and ‘natural’ to need stating.
The musical organisation, artistic forms, and personnel associated with classical music in the broad sense of that term2 were widely, if rather vaguely, assumed to be bound up with many privileged institutions and values of our society: the educational system, church and state functions, and the generally accorded status of a ‘high art’. This status was further supported by the existence of specialised musicians who had managed to establish themselves as a recognised profession with control over recruitment and evaluation. The performances and high-level teaching provided by these experts formed the most visible element in what was accepted as the classical music world. The model of classical music in English society was explicitly defined by the specialists in terms both of the kind of music played – most typically performed in a formal public concert – and its historical and theoretical basis.
There were many detailed differences within this overall world, not least the changing historical styles as analysed in advanced musical studies, but in general terms the current idea of the European classical music tradition, as distinct both from non-European music and from ‘popular’ forms, centred round transmitting the works of influential musicians from the past – the ‘great composers’. Musical genres have of course varied at different historical periods, but those commonly cultivated in local (as in national) performances included orchestral symphonies, suites and concertos, instrumental sonatas, oratorios and classical operas, and vocal music of various kinds, usually with instrumental accompaniment and with the underlying idea that their central essence could be – and was – represented in written scores. There were also classical compositions for particular instrumental combinations from recorder groups to string quartets and instrumental duets, following accepted conventions about both the instruments (specific types of strings, wind and keyboard together with the voice and to some extent percussion), and about how they should be played.
In practice what was classified as within this classical tradition depended not so much on an objective set of criteria as on cultural conventions about the appropriate forms and contexts of music – ones which those outside this world regarded as uninspiring but which classical musicians could justify both in terms of particular patternings of melody, harmony and thematic structures and by the accepted classifications by music specialists, further authorised by the strongly held image of this music as an artistic heritage coming down in written form from the past. Just what was included changed from time to time, and the whole concept of classical music was certainly fuzzy at the edges; what was clear was that it was based not just on musicological content but on definitions and validations by particular groups of people.
This socially defined canon of classical music was what present-day musicians largely worked with. A few themselves composed, but in general their central responsibility was the perpetuation of this heritage, teaching others the skills to appreciate it or to realise it in their own playing. They thus transmitted the musical works written by earlier composers and did so in a context in which this was considered a high, indeed revered, form of artistic expression supported by widely accepted values about high art and (in some cases) direct state patronage. Concerts by nationally and internationally known soloists and orchestras and by varying combinations of professional players, both live and broadcast, epitomised what most people envisaged as the classical music tradition of this country, backed up by the system of specialised music training, national music colleges and professional musicians.
These activities by elite musicians perpetuating the musical heritage of the past in public concerts made up the most visible manifestation of classical music. But they did not constitute the whole of the classical musical world as it was realised in practice. Certainly this particular model deeply influenced even those on the face of it far removed from the specialist performances of highly qualified professionals. But, as will be clear, there was also a whole grass-roots sub-structure of local classical music. Though perhaps ‘invisible’ to most scholars, in practice this was the essential local manifestation of the national music system, and also (as emerged in chapter 2) both interacted with it and formed its foundation.