• Ruth Finnegan, The hidden musicians: music-making in an English town
  (first edition 1989, revised 2007).

In several posts I’ve praised Finnegan’s classic work en passant—and revisiting it now, I find it even more impressive. I struggle to encapsulate its virtues without citing every paragraph.

Its subject is local grass-roots musicking in Milton Keynes, mainly at the amateur end of the amateur–professional continuum, so often taken for granted. It’s a model of participant observation: Finnegan was a long-term resident of the area, with most of her material collected from 1980 to 1984. Writing in an accessible style, she constantly debunks facile assumptions.

Having started out by studying oral performance in Africa, Finnegan now embarked on a project concerning doorstep (rather than armchair) ethnomusicology. The hidden musicians soon became core reading for the ethnomusicological study of musicking in Western societies, including Western Art Music (for which she abides by the traditional term “classical music”).

An attention to “ordinary musicians” was already implicit in the ethnomusicological approach to more “exotic” societies (note Bruno Nettl’s masterly survey of the field), but it is all the more revealing for a culture so near to home. In The hidden musicians, references to research on other world cultures, standard for such studies, might have been instructive, but the economy of theory and jargon is welcome. Among Finnegan’s main inspirations is Howard Becker’s 1982 study Art worlds. In 2022 her work inspired a BFE conference (in Milton Keynes, to boot, where the Open University is fortuitously based) on “ordinary musicians”, addressing topics in societies around the world.

The opening of the book anticipates that of Christopher Small’s Musicking (1998), observing the diverse ways in which music-making pervades people’s lives. Like Small, she focuses on “musical practices (what people do), not musical works (the ‘texts’ of music)”—seeking processes rather than products. She finds “an invisible but organised system” that lies at the heart of our cultural lives.

After an important chapter unpacking gradations on the amateur–professional continuum, in Part Two Finnegan outlines the diverse yet overlapping musical worlds of classical music, brass bands, folk music (including ceilidh and Morris bands), musical theatre (amateur operatic societies, panto, and so on), jazz, Country and Western, rock and pop. She disputes the “mass society” theory that ”envisages a passive and deluded population lulled by the mass media and generating nothing themselves”, as well as simplistic socio-economic or age-based analyses. She challenges assumptions, such as “high culture”, and, taking a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach, she finds

several different musical worlds, […] 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.

If the pre-eminence of classical music was only notional by the 1980s, her material does indeed seem to confirm this unspoken assumption. Conversely, social scientists have emphasised “popular” or “lower-class” activities such as rock. But

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.

Part Three, “Contrasts and comparisons” opens with an insightful chapter on learning music (cf. the Growing into music film project). While Finnegan largely concurs with the notional dichotomy in training between the worlds of classical and popular musics, she notes commonalities. “Performances and their conditions” perceptively compares the conventions of events belonging to different musical worlds, noting aspects such as preparation and audience behaviour. In “Composition, creativity, and performance” she investigates degrees of dependence on written texts (cf. studies of “improvisation”, for which we can again consult Nettl as a handy guide). And in Chapter 14, preparing the ground for her later metaphor of “pathways”, Finnegan refines the concept of musical “worlds”, noting their plurality, with a certain overlap, and wider connections further afield; they are “relative, shifting, and situational”.

Part Four, “The organisation and work of local music”, contains chapters on the home and school; the churches; clubs and pubs; a case study on the organisation and administration of the Sherwood Choir; small working bands; resources, rewards, and support (including music shops and recording studios—with more on the amateur–professional continuum, and patronage).

With amateur music, people’s time and work are often as important as their money. So too are non-monetary rewards such as aesthetic enjoyment, the pleasure of performing, status, the sense of creativity, or even just the symbol of having earned “a fee” irrespective of its actuall monetary price. This in turn chimes in with a series of commonly held values: the high worth commonly attached to “performance”, to “music”, and to working for a “good cause”, as well as the view held by many people that “doing your own thing” has something inherently valuable about it—or, at the least, that the various groups organised to pursue different ends are an acceptable part of modern life.

It would be too simple just to assert—as some do—that local music is supported by “the community” or to speak of it as essentially “community music-making”. There are too many different interests, sections, conflicts, and unfamiliarities to take that romantic picture. Nevertheless there is a grain of truth in this view. For local musical activities only remain possible through the support of a complex network of institutions, many of them essentially realised by local participants at the local level whatever their wider links: not only the continuing moral, social, and financial (as well as musical) input of local musicians, but also the local music shops, studios, businesses, special interest groups, bands, performers, musical societies, pubs, personalities, fund-raising groups, schools, churches, and charities.

In Part Five, “The significance of local music”, Finnegan asks

Are there wider implications that can be drawn out from this system of local music-making? This part builds on the earlier ethnographic material to explore such questions as what local music practice and its pathways mean for those who live out their lives in the urban (perhaps impersonal?) setting of modern society or for the rituals and functioning of our society and culture more generally. Finally—and on a more speculative level—are the many many small acts and decisions which, however little recognised, lie behind the continuance of music-making of any wider significance for the fundamental experience and reality of humankind?

Again, she never falls back on untested assumptions. Critical of the familiar paradigms of the city as inimical to personal control or warmth, and of the romantic sense of “community”, she finds diversity in terms of education, wealth, and occupation—though she does conclude that gender roles remain hard to break through. She reflects on participation by age; and on the ordering of time, noting regularity—along with “rehearsals”, “concerts” and “gigs”, life-cycle and calendrical events (my term, not hers) are important social contexts.

She elaborates on “pathways” in modern living, stressing that they “depend on the constant hidden cultivation by active participants of the musical practices that, with all their real (not imaginary) wealths and meanings, keep in being the old and new cultural traditions within our society.” Finally, in “Music, society, humanity”, she broaches concepts such as sociability and the search for value; and she ponders, with typical detachment, whether music is somehow different from other social activities.

* * *

In her Preface for the 2007 edition, Finnegan reflects on golden-age nostalgia, change, ebb and flow rather than decline, new technologies, immigration. She outlines gaps in her study, and how one might update it: she might now pay more attention to mass media, constantly expanding since the 1980s, and the role of cultural, religious, and ethnic “minorities” (then less evident in Milton Keynes than in many English cities) would certainly now play a greater role, including South Asian, Irish, Italian, Polish, Vietnamese, and Somali subgroups.

While it’s an urban study, Finnegan’s book has influenced ethnographers in diverse fields, including my own study of Gaoluo village. As she comments, in a passage that applies verbatim to my work there and on the Li family Daoists, her research

enlarged and challenged my own preconceptions, […] tied in to an activity to which I attached real value, and presented me with some complex intellectual, methodological, and moral challenges. […] 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 both trod and created irrespective of the ways scholars thought they should be behaving. In the end, I still like this study because it is about real people in a real, not 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.

Note the roundup under Society and soundscape, particularly What is serious music?! and Is Western Art Music superior?. See also Just remind me again, what is music?! and Old and new musics. Cf. Das Land ohne Musik, and for lowly tennis players and “ordinary Daoists”, here.