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Title: Anarchy in Milton Keynes
Author: Colin Ward
Language: en
Topics: anthropology, art, music
Source: Retrieved on September 26, 2010 from http://libcom.org/library/anarchy-milton-keynes-music-colin-ward

Colin Ward

Anarchy in Milton Keynes

Everyone has their own definition of anarchism. One I find generally

useful is the first three paragraphs of the article Peter Kropotkin was

asked to write for the 11 th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in

1905. This is the collection of volumes which (however repugnant we now

find its sales techniques) is the place we look for a working definition

of most things.

Kropotkin’s first paragraph said that:

ANARCHISM (from the Greek, contrary to authority), is the name given to

a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is

conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained,

not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free

agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and

professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and

consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of

needs and aspirations of a civilised being.

That’s his first paragraph, and of course he has the usual problem of

anyone writing an encyclopaedia definition, he has to be concise, but at

the same time, to bring everything in. So his second paragraph goes:

In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which

already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a

still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the State in

all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed

of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and

degrees, local, regional, national and international — temporary or more

or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production, consumption

and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual

protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side,

for the satisfaction of an ever increasing number of scientific,

artistic, literary and sociable needs.”

Kropotkin was a scientist, a physical geographer in origin, and his

third paragraph drew an analogy from physics and from biology, and you

might even claim from structural mechanics and music. For he claimed

that:

Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the

Contrary — as is seen in organic life at large — harmony would (it is

contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of

equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this

adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would

enjoy a special protection from the State.

These opening remarks express the kernel of his argument for society as

opposed to the State, and for the community as opposed to the

government.

Society or the State

The next stage in the argument for me, at least, was provided by the

philosopher Martin Buber, who wasn’t an anarchist, although he had

strong anarchist connections. He was the friend and executor of a German

anarchist Gustav Landauer, who made a very profound remark, which I

quote from Buber’s book Paths in Utopia (Routledge, 49). “The state”,

said Landauer, “is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution,

but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode

of human behaviour; we destroy it contracting other relationships, by

behaving differently.” Buber wrote a brilliant essay called ‘Society and

the State’ which was printed in English in the long-dead journal World

Review in 1951, and printed in a book of his called Pointing the Way.

Buber begins by making a clear distinction between the social principle

and the political principle, pointing out that “it is inherent in social

structures that people either find themselves already linked with one

another in an association based on a common need or a common interest,

or that they band themselves together for such a purpose, whether in an

existing or a newly-formed society.” And he then goes on to stress his

agreement with the American sociologist Robert MacIver, that “to

identify the social with the political is to be guilty of the grossest

of all confusions, which completely bars any understanding of either

society or the state”.

The political principle for Buber, just as for Kropotkin, is

characterised by power, authority, hierarchy, dominion. He sees the

social principle wherever people link themselves in the pursuit of a

common need or interest. Then he has a very interesting flash of

understanding, which I see endlessly illustrated in contemporary

politics. What is it, Buber asks, that gives the political principle its

ascendancy? His answer was: “The fact that every people feels itself

threatened by the others gives the State its definite unifying power; it

depends upon the instinct of self preservation of society itself; the

latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal

crises ... All forms of government have this in common: each possesses

more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact, this

excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we

understand by political power. The measure of this excess which cannot,

of course, be computed precisely, represents the exact differences

between administration and government.” Buber calls this excess the

“political surplus” and he observes that “its justification derives from

the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis

between nations and within every nation. The political principle is

always stronger in relation to the social principle than the given

conditions require. The result is a continuous diminution in social

spontaneity.”

Neighbourhood and association

I find this a devastating perception. And I think that a whole lot of

people have always had an instinctive feeling that if any community

can’t organise itself, it is going to find governmental bodies filling

the vacuum. There has been at least sixty years of effort to establish

local community associations as voluntary, democratic, all-embracing

bodies able to become unifying influences in every locality. These

efforts are reported in a new book called Enterprising Neighbours: the

development of the Community Association movement published this year by

the National Federation of Community Associations. David Donnison

provides an interesting introduction welcoming the honesty of this

history because its approach to several questionable assumptions that a

whole lot of worthy grassroots organisers take for granted, primarily

the idea that “people want to spend their time making friends with

neighbours rather than because they have shared interests”.

We can define the two possibilities as communities of propinquity and

communities of interest. In practice plenty of us belong, for different

reasons, to both, fulfilling Kropotkin’s aspirations to “an interwoven

network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of

all sizes and degrees” and so on. Students of the social problems that

were said to arise in the vast new out-of town housing estates of the

inter-war years, like Dagenham outside London or Wythenshawe outside

Manchester, were apt to attribute them to the fact that huge new

settlements of people who were strangers to each other found themselves

living together in places without the familiar comrnuniry facilities of

the places they had come from, and thought that what was needed was a

programme of community building.

The lessons were supposed to have been learned in the post-war

programmes of New Towns which culminated with Milton Keynes. In practice

the stop/go financing of the New Towns all through the fifties, sixties

and seventies meant that the aspirations for synchronising new housing,

new industry and social and community facilities seldom really happened

as planned and as described in the publicity material. But I do think it

is fair to say that the money invested in most of the New Towns on the

funding of community facilities, including paying the salaries of people

described as Community Development Officers or some similar title, was

well spent, and contrasts favourably with the experience of the post-war

versions of those pre-war out of town housing estates which we all know

about: the places where we love to see television films of the

blowing-up by public authorities (not anarchists) of tower blocks which

won’t have been paid for until the early 2lst century.

All the same, the worthy citizens who organise local community

associations, whom we all know, when they pause and reflect on their

labours, talk wistfully of the apathy and indifference of the people all

around. They are not angry, they are just regretful that other people

don’t live up to a particular idea of society and community based on

propinquity. It makes me ponder yet again, not only on the very

significant observation I have quoted to you from Professor Donnison,

but on Kropotkin’s aspirations for an anarchist society.

Milton Keynes and music

This is why I need to tell you about my discovery of anarchy, in

Kropotkin’s sense, in Milton Keynes. It is because I have been reading,

with very great pleasure, the book The Hidden Musicians: music-making in

an English town by Ruth Finnegan, published last year by Cambridge

University Press. She is an anthropologist from the Open University, so

the particular English town she describes is Milton Keynes. The immense

advantage of her ethnographical approach is that she refrains from

making those value assumptions about music that most people

automatically assume. As we all know, people talk about ‘serious’ music,

meaning the music they take seriously, and implying that all other music

is somehow frivolous.

Professor Finnegan has, I am sure, her own musical preferences, but she

does not allow them to intrude on her study of music-making. I am

reminded of Mark Twain’s quip that “Wagner’s music isn’t really half as

bad as it sounds”.

Salvation Army bands, the Sherwood Sinfonia, the families dressing up

for the Country and Western night, church choirs, the Morris Men and a

hundred rock groups are all music, and when you consider the people

hiring venues, arranging gigs, negotiating with visiting soloists,

drawing up programmes, ferrying their children to rehearsals and carting

tons of equipment around, let alone packing in the audiences, you

realise that a vast and hitherto unrecorded proportion of the population

anywhere is directly involved in the activity of music-making. In fact

you feel that the whole population in one way or another is indirectly

involved.

This is a remarkable social fact: that music-making is, more than

anything else you can think of quickly, the cement of society, the

expression of that social spontaneity that Buber was looking for, the

most immediate and accessible example of Kropotkin’s vision of the

highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all

possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified

associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability

and constantly assume new forms which answer best to the multiple

aspirations of all.”

Professor Finnegan manages to sweep aside endless assumptions: the

sociologists’ preoccupation with class, the distinctions we make between

professional and amateur, and, above all, ideas about musical

exclusiveness. The same busy performers can find themselves in a brass

band one night, in a symphony orchestra another, and in an ad hoc jazz

group at the weekend. This is the fluidity of involvement in changing

communities that attracted Buber and Kropotkin. It’s nice to think that

a valuable element of the community quotient of any society, East or

West, can be expressed in termsof the sheer number of young people

endlessly practising for their big performances in a local pub under the

self deprecating group names they choose (Ruth Finnegan lists more than

a hundred, of which a mild example is ‘Typical Shit’). This is the

backhanded way in which shared enthusiasms hold communities together.

Let us take a look at some of the interlocking, mutually supportive

communities that her book describes, seeing them as a measure of the

community content of Milton Keynes.

The music subculture

She notes how we have a socially defined canon of ‘classical music’

epitomised by varying combinations of professional players, live,

broadcast and recorded, which “implicitly moulded people’s views of

music” but “there was also a whole grass-roots sub-culture of local

classical music. Though perhaps ‘invisible’ to most scholars, in

practice this was the essential local manifestation of the national

music system ... one aspect was the provision of audiences with the

necessary skills of appreciation for professionals coming to give

concerts locally, but it extended far beyond this to the whole system of

local training, playing, actively practising musical groups and public

performances by local musicians.”

One concrete example of this continuing tradition is the way in which

printed scores and music parts, both vocal and instrumental, get passed

on: “These were often borrowed rather than bought and when a local

choir, say, found itself, as so often, singing from old and well-marked

copies, it was easy to picture the earlier choirs 20, 30 or even 50

years ago singing from the self same copies — and repertoire — of

classical choral music in the day when, perhaps, those parts cost just

one penny.”

In Milton Keynes, as in anywhere else, the classical music tradition

rests on highly trained specialist musicians, so it can be seen as a

“high-art pursuit for the few”. But looking a little closer, Ruth

Finnegan sees that local musicians “varied enormously in terms of

educational qualifications, specialist expertise, occupation, wealth and

general ethos.” Take the leading amateur orchestra, the Sherwood

Sinfonia, where she found exceptions to the usual assumptions, “like the

young sausage-maker, later music shop assistant, who besides being a

Sherwood Sinfonia violinist was a keyboard player and composer with a

local rock group, or pupils from local comprehensive schools not all in

the ‘best’ areas.”

Take too the Brass Band world. Don’t be deceived by the way that people

imply that that sector is ‘a world of its own’ confined to families

where it had become a tradition. There is endless evidence of this in

the tradition of Salvation Army bands, works bands or Boys’ Brigade

bands, but we’re all familiar with great and famous performers who

belonged as much to the allegedly incompatible groupings of the dance

band, jazz group or symphony orchestra. In Milton Keynes, Ruth Finnegan

found that no other musical groups, except possibly a few church choirs,

had such solid links, sometimes actual instruments and sheet music from

long before the new city was conceived: from the Woburn Sands Band of

1867, the Wolverton Town and Railway Band of 1908 or the Bletchley Boys’

Brigade Bugle Band of 1928. By the 1980s the constituents of, say, the

Stantonbury Brass or the Bletchley Band and the new Broseley Brass had

members of both sexes and all ages. Ruth Finnegan was assured that their

political commitments were across the whole spectrum and the people

involved included postmen, teachers, telephone engineers, motor

mechanics, personnel managers, butchers, train drivers, clerks,

labourers, storemen and shopworkers, “but also included computer

engineers, a building inspector, a midwife and several schoolchildren”.

Forget your assumptions: the brass band world was more representative of

class and occupation in Milton Keynes than any political group. And

exactly the same was found to be true of the folk music world. One of

the things she observed in local folk clubs was their relative

transience: “There were others too, even less long-lasting, which for a

time engaged people’s enthusiasm but faded out after a few years or

months ...” like the Concrete Cow Folk Club. One leading singer at the

Black Horse in Great Linford explained that “anybody’s welcome to join

in, play along, sing a song, add some harmony to a chorus or simply have

a beer and listen”.

Change and variety

This is a reminder of Kropotkin’s important stress on impermanence, and

his insistence on “an infinite variety of groups ... temporary or more

or less permanent ... an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of

equilibrium”. In the brass world we emphasise thecontinuity of

tradition, in the folk world we love the way in which the mood and the

venue change from pub to pub. I see, where I live in Suffolk, how as the

venue changes, performers, some of them old friends, others complete

strangers, adjust to the mood, the audience and the acoustics, and play

along together, sometimes accompanying a singer none of them have met

before, exchanging through gestures and eye-signals information about

key and tempo, chords and harmony. It is exactly the same automatic

reciprocity that you notice between the members of a string quartet,

with the significant difference that people like the Amadeus had played

together for forty years.

When the whole variegated patchwork of the folkweave pattern comes

together, as in the Folk-on-the-Green Festival in Stony Stratford, they

provide, as Ruth Finnegan comments, “a magnificent showpiece of local

talent” bringing in other streams like Ceilidh bands to dance to, or the

Morns-dancing groups. As one adherent told her, “by playing with other

people you get another dimension to performance”.

Then she moves to the world of music theatre, meaning opera, the Gilbert

and Sullivan light operas, musical plays — not so much ‘Oklahoma’ or

‘West Side Story’ as local groups could never afford the copyright fees

involved, but old favourites and, for example, the series of musical

plays based on local history which emerged on the Stantonbury Campus,

one of which I have actually seen. It also covers the pantomimes put on

at Christmas by every kind of group from schools to Women’s Institutes.

If your measure of the importance of music in human society is the sheer

number of people involved in the actual production, music theatre must

be the winner. Among performers it brings together both singers and

actors, and it also calls for the utmost skill in scene designers,

lighting electricians, painters and stage-hands, costume makers, and an

enormous number of citizens involved in getting people to rehearsals,

feeding and bedding them, booking halls, producing programmes, drumming

up the audience and selling tickets. Many such ventures were conducted

to raise funds for local causes, and Ruth Finnegan is eloquent about the

meaning for the participants

...local soloists flourished and even the less skilled chorus and

small-part singers expanded, steeped in music for hours on end,

attending constant rehearsals, studying their parts in every odd moment

they could snatch from work or family — small wonder that one concluded

‘I ate, slept and dreamt music’. Some members had before had relatively

little systematic musical experience, and for them such experience would

be a revelation — as for the local plumber unable to read notated music

who talked and talked of the joy of singing in operas and pantomimes and

his discovery of the beauties of listening to music. For their regular

audiences too, the public performances were not only grand occasions of

theatrical display, marked by colour, movement, dance and dramatic as

well as musical expression, but also an opportunity to hear well-known

tunes and arrangements which even after the end of that year’s

performance could remain in the memory to evoke that special experience

and lay the foundation for looking forward to next year’s production.”

Fluidity and movement

Then there’s the jazz world. The three best-known bands playing in

Milton Keynes in the early 1980s were the Original Grand Union

Syncopators, the Fenny Stompers and the T-Bone Boogie Band. Dr Finnegan

discusses these three with a brief mention of dozens of others in the

area. These groups won a huge reputation locally, with wildly unexpected

combinations of performers and instruments. Talking of the T-Bone Boogie

Band, she explains that “they presented themselves as a zany ‘fun band’,

but their act followed many traditional jazz and blues sequences, with

beautiful traditional playing interspersed with their own wilder

enactments of blues. They spoke of these as ‘improvised out of nowhere,

on the spur of the moment’, but they were in practice based on long

hours of jamming together as a group.” She goes on to say that “they saw

themselves as ‘a community band’, playing ‘to give other people

enjoyment ... and for our own enjoyment as well’, a hobby rather than

professional enterprise. When they were approached by a recording

company and offered money to go professional, they turned it down.”

Her account of the fluidity of the jazz groups sounds like Kropotkin

describing his ideal society. She sees the actual instrumental

composition of jazz groups as “more variable than in most other musical

worlds” and that “jazz musicians were tied neither to written forms nor

to exact memorisation, but rather engaged in a form of

composition-in-performance following accepted stylistic and thematic

patterns”.

For them, jazz was freedom, as compared with either classical music or

rock. She says that “far more than other musicians they would break into

smiles of recognition or admiration as one after another player took up

the solo spot, and looked at each other in pleasure after the end of a

number, as if having experienced something newly created as well as

familiar. As one local jazz player put it, ‘we improvise, with the tunes

used as vehicles, so everything the group does is original’. Local jazz

musicians often belonged to several jazz bands, moving easily between

different groups ... jazz in Milton Keynes is more a series of venues

than an integrated and self conscious musical world ... and both the

musical activity itself, and the shared skills, pride and conventions

that constituted jazz playing seemed to be a continuing element in their

own identity and their perceptions of others.”

Dissent and co-operation

Then she moves to the country and western world, describing the Milton

Keynes Divided Country and Western Club, going strong in Bletchley since

the mid 1970s. The club’s name, she says, indicated certain options. One

of these was in dress: ‘divided’ between those who chose to come dressed

‘just as you like’ and those who preferred ‘western dress’. Either was

acceptable, and around half had opted for one or another version of

‘western’ gear which could range from a token cowboy hat or scarf or to

the full regalia. “In contrast to rock and jazz events,” she explains,

“the audience sitting round the tables was family based, with roughly

equal numbers of men and women, several children, and people of every

age from the twenties upwards, including middle-aged and elderly people;

only the late teenagers were absent. It was a ‘family night out’ ... the

secretary welcomed individual visitors from other clubs to interest and

smiles from his listeners — an established custom in country and western

clubs, in keeping with their general atmosphere of friendliness and

personal warmth”.

She makes it sound almost like a meeting of a religious sect like the

Shakers in nineteenth century America: “As the evening went on, more and

more people got up to dance, adding to and developing the music through

their rhythmic movements in the dance — one of the age-old modes of

musical expression and appreciation. The atmosphere was relaxed and

unselfconscious. and most people whatever their age, sex or build looked

remarkably carefree as they danced to the band — the middle-aged woman

with her tight jeans, jersey and big leather belt over her well-rounded

bulges, the visiting technician and grandfather with his broken

smoke-stained teeth, gleaming gun and cowboy gear, the young wife out

for the evening with her husband, drawn in by his general interest in

country and western music and now sharing his enthusiasm — and scores of

others.”

The country and western world was a co-existence of people interested in

the ‘western’ aspects and those who most valued the music. This

co-existence was summed up in the very name of the Milton Keynes Divided

Country and Western Club, which as Dr Finnegan says, at first sight

suggests dissension, but in practice symbolises fruitful co-operation

and an ultimate sharing of interests between these wings of the country

and western world.

She moves on to another musical scene, rock and pop, a catch-all phrase

since meanings and definitions are always shifting with what Derek

Jewell calls the continual flux of the vocabulary of popular fashion. Dr

Finnegan describes how “Milton Keynes was swarming with rock and pop

bands. They were performing in the pubs and clubs, practising in

garages, youth clubs, church halls and school classrooms, advertising

for new members in the local papers and lugging their instruments around

by car or on foot. There were probably about 100 groups, each with their

own colourful names and brand of music ... From the amount of time,

trouble and (in many cases) money the players invested in their music,

and from their own comments, it was clear that they got great social and

personal satisfaction from their band membership — ‘making people listen

to what you say’ and ‘finding a way to express ourselves’ — rather than

regarding it primarily as a profitable enterprise ... The players’ ages,

educational backgrounds and occupation were more varied than most of the

generalisations about modern rock music and youth culture might

suggest.”

She is greatly sceptical about the succession of scholarly writings

about mass culture, one influential group seeing it as “essentially

ruled by the market place, soporific and non-artistic, delivered by

non-creative and commercialised performers to passive and brainwashed

mass audiences,” another group of Marxist critics seeing it as dominated

by a capitalist power elite, while yet another declares that it is a

“cultural struggle” with “the working class struggling to assert their

own radical claims against the capitalist world” — a form of

working-class youth protest.

These views obviously aren’t convincing when applied to “the amateur

grass-roots local performers and their face-to-face audiences,” but all

the same, “local participants and observers were still to some extent

affected by this series of assumptions and were prepared from time to

time to make effective use of such images as their own publicity”.

Her own conclusion is that “the most prominent single characteristic of

rock players in Milton Keynes — apart from their variety — was their

interest in expressing their own views and personality through

music-making: a stress on individuality and artistic creation which

accords ill with the mass theorists’ delineation of popular music”. A

striking feature she saw running through all the bands was a sense of

personal pride and achievement. Her final word on them was that in such

bands “their members felt they could really make some individual mark

... in contrast to the hierarchies and insecurities of school, work or

the social services, playing in a band provided a medium where players

could express their own personal aesthetic vision and through their

music achieve a sense of controlling their own values, destiny and self

identity.”

Creativity

She goes on to discuss the processes by which musicians in Milton Keynes

learned the techniques of their art, the nature of performances. Whether

the performance was seen as an ‘engagement’, a ‘concert’, a ‘recital’, a

‘booking’ or a ‘gig’, there were several forms of social organisation

required: “mechanisms to frame the occasion as somehow apart, prior

preparation by organisers, and the crucial presence of an audience, not

just as passive recipients but as active and experienced participants

themselves playing an essential role in constituting the occasion as a

musical event”. Then she moves to an analysis of composition, creativity

and performance. A lot of musical composition happens in Milton Keynes

in several ways. “The first is the well-known classical mode of

prior-written composition by an individual. This mode is assumed to be

the natural form of ‘composition’ in most serious writing about music.”

A lot of that happens here, like the work of John Dankworth, working

nationally and internationally, not primarily through local musical

networks. There’s a lot of church composition, hymns and carols, and a

lot of music written for local school music festivals, or for the big

music dramas from the Stantonbury drama group.

But there are other models of composition which, she sees, “overlap and

mutually enrich each other”. And she concludes that “once one

understands the validity of differing systems for creating original

music, each autonomous in its own terms, it becomes clear that there is

indeed a remarkable amount of musical creativity and the grass roots. In

all forms of music, but perhaps most strikingly of all in the

prior-composition-through practice of rock groups, the local musicians

are quite consciously and deliberately among the modernday musical

composers.”

Pluralism and commitment

I have quoted at length from Dr Finnegan’s account of the different

musical worlds of Milton Keynes. She is well aware that there are others

too. There’s the big range of Irish music, both associated with groups

like the Erin Singers and the Green Grass Social Club as well as the St

Patrick’s Day Mass of the Milton Keynes Irish Society. Or there’s the

Austrian, Swiss and German music at the Bletchley Edelweiss Club, or the

Milton Keynes Welsh Society, or the Hindu Youth Organisation that

celebrated the Diwali Festival, or the Buddhist group associated with

the Peace Pagoda, or the musical traditions of the Sikh community and

the Muslim population, each with their own musical traditions. Or the

Milton Keynes Pipe and Drum Band or the celebration of the Chinese New

Year with dragon and drum beat. She stresses once again that “in the

limited sense in which the metaphor of ‘musical world’ is meaningful,

there is a plurality of such worlds in local music-making.”

Then she examines the home, the school and the churches, clubs and pubs,

not only as the physical places for music making, but as providing “a

complex of expected roles and opportunities for music” which continues

year after year. After all “music does not just happen ‘naturally’ in

any society, but has to have its recognised time and place, its

organisation of personnel, resources, and physical locations”. And she

has two chapters, one called ‘Working at it’ and another on ‘Small

working bands’, which illustrate the huge time and effort that vast

numbers of people, a much wider group than actual performers, put into

making music happen. Once more, I can’t resist quoting from the book at

length:

Not surprisingly some groups were more effective than others in

attracting the necessary personnel, coping with the various constraints,

and more or less meeting their participants’ aspirations, but even the

smallest of them — the precarious church choir of four members as much

as the 90-strong Milton Keynes Chorale — ultimately depended on the

ordered commitment of its participants: without that none could

continue.

When one thinks of local music, then, the correct impression should not

be either of the ‘cultural desert’ that some picture, or of a set of

smartly operated and highly efficient groups, or yet of the natural

co-operation of communally oriented or selfless individuals, but rather

a variegated landscape made up of a whole series of differing kinds of

groups and activities, some tightly organised, visible and populous,

others more informal, some struggling or on their last legs, some

starting up and perhaps benefiting from the dissolution of others, some

established but still vulnerable, some in direct competition with other

groups at some times but joining in co-operative ventures at others,

some lasting over the years, and some appearing for just one or two

events then lapsing. In the rich tapestry that makes up local music,

what all these groups and activities have in common-whether large or

small, ‘successful’ or not, harmonious or quarrelsome or mixed — is the

need for a constant input of organised co-ordinated effort from those

who at one level or another participate in them.

Now where have you seen this kind of language before? Well precisely in

Kropotkin’s definition of anarchism with which I began. Just to complete

the saga, I will quote &om Ruth Finnegan’s next paragraph. “Many of the

pictures we are given of cultural activity in this country rest on a

top-down model (patronage coming from the state or the large commercial

concerns) or on a model of culture, and more specifically music, as

essentially and ideally the preserve of specialists or as primarily

conducted through the mass media or large-scale professional concerts.

Local music-making falls easily within none of these models. Nor does it

fit the also common idea that amateur cultural activities are somehow

natural, easy and carefree, costing nothing and outside the normal

sphere of those who are interested in organisational processes. On the

contrary, the organisational processes of effective work, decision

making, communication, choice between alternative methods of achieving

objectives, delegation of responsibilities and, above all, co-operation

in the attaining of more or less agreed ends can all be found in the

processes of running local amateur music — indeed they must be found

there if it is to continue.”

My claim is that this book encapsulates a marvellous piece of research,

described with great sensitivity, and beautifully written. Yet nearly

everyone I know in Milton Keynes has never heard of this book published

last year, and the one who had heard of it said, correctly, that it was

so ludicrously expensive (£35) that he could never dreamof buying it. I

myself have never seen it reviewed anywhere, yet I see it as the most

enlightening piece of anthropological or sociological research that I

have read for years. Obviously the price has nothing todo with any

wishes of the author.

Yet if I were the marketing manager of the Cambridge University Press I

would have instantly seen the opportunities of a paperback run-on, on

newsprint if it’s any cheaper, of several thousand copies with big

lettering on the cover saying ‘Music in Milton Keynes: the truth at

last’, and I would have touted it around every bookshop andnewsagent in

Bletchley, Stoney Stratford, Wolverton and central Milton Keynes, and

would find that vast number of citizens would want to buy it, if only

because on the evidence of this book a very big proportion of the people

who live there are involved in one or another of these plural worlds of

music in Milton Keynes.

The lessons

I’ve just referred to a failure in marketing, and this gives me the

chance to draw an obvious implication from this book. For ten years we

have been lectured by our rulers about the virtues of the market

economy, the alleged magic of the market, and this by a clever

propaganda trick has been described as the enterprise culture. Now

enterprise has nothing to do with making a profit by buying cheap and

selling dear. In the very last paragraph of her magnificent book Ruth

Finne an reflects that “the reality of human beings is to be found not

only (maybe not mainly) in their paid employment or even their thought,

but also in their engagement in recognised cultural practices ... Among

the most valued and, it maybe, most profoundly human of such practices

in out society is that of music”.

If my purpose was just to write about her book, that is where I would

end. But I want you to reflect on what an interesting world we would be

living in if we organised everything the way we organise our music. I

mentioned Martin Buber’s perception of the social principle as what

happens wherever people “link themselves in the pursuit of a common need

or interest” and Kropotkin’s concept of this kind of voluntary

co-operation as a social structure which would “represent nothing

immutable. On the contrary — as is seen in organic life at large” he

went on “ — harmony would result from an ever-changing adjustment and

readjustment of equilibrium between the multitude of forces and

influences”, but above all, “would represent an interwoven network,

composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes

... temporary or more or less permanent — forall possible purposes.”

Suppose this was the way we chose to organise our work, or our education

or the production and management of housing, or our health services, or

our transport, or any of the things that make life possible and

enjoyable in Milton Keynes or anywhere else?