The Hidden Musicians by Finnegan Ruth H

Author:Finnegan, Ruth H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 26 A young performer at the annual Bletchley and District Middle Schools concert

Figure 27 (a) and (b) Performances at the annual Leon School music week

Musical expression was not just an internal activity but was also used by schools to embellish their more public occasions, give pupils experience in performance, involve members of the local community and generally advertise their achievements. Almost all the schools held concerts of one kind or another as a regular part of their yearly cycle. This feature of the school year was well known to parents – or, at least, those with children involved in school music – as well as reported from time to time in the local press. In the 1982 survey, all but four of the 51 schools reporting (including the special schools) had had at least one public musical event in the previous year, and the vast majority two or more; two of the comprehensive schools had had seven or eight. The most common cycle was one event at Christmas (in 1982 there were 25 carol services/carol concerts, 3 Christmas pantomimes, and 2 Christmas entertainments), and a summer concert. There were also other musical occasions, often combined with drama or dancing, as in the very common musical plays, operas, and pantomimes. In addition there were Old Time Music Hall performances, harvest, autumn and Easter festivals, ‘musical extravaganzas’, a dramatic and musical ‘Third world exhibition’, a musical week, a soloist evening, and a wind quartet at the annual speech day.

Once again a list sounds stark, but remember that each single item – the Leon School’s soloists’ evening, the Lord Grey carol concert or the Rickley Middle School musical evening – marked a joint musical performance which for the participants was the highlight of many weeks’, sometimes months’, work and meant constant rehearsals and pressure in the days beforehand. Each single instance formed part of an organised pattern in these and other schools across the years. The work and co-ordination needed are also brought home by the numbers involved – almost always at least twenty and in many cases a hundred or more, sometimes with all the school’s pupils taking part.

Concerts also linked school with the local community outside. Performances had to have audiences, and though a few were internal only, most were thrown open more widely, attended by relatives of the performers or friends of the school. When one considers the other possible attractions the audience numbers were remarkable, commonly around 100–150 or higher, and in cases where a show had more than one performance sometimes as many as 400–700, even 1,000. For the 134 different performances in local schools in 1982 the audiences totalled nearly 22,000 in all – and that left 40 schools uncounted. School musical events thus drew large and consistent audiences, sometimes limited only by the size of the school hall – more perhaps attended them than the much-vaunted school sports activities.

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