The first regional history of music in England.
Music in the West Country is the first regional history of music in
England. Ranging over seven hundred years, from the minstrels, waits,
and cathedral choristers of the fourteenth century to the Bristol Sound
of the late twentieth, the book explores the region's soundscape, from
its gateway cities of Bristol and Salisbury in the east to the Isles of
Scilly in the west, and examines music-making in tiny villages as well
as conditions in important centres such as Bath, Exeter, Plymouth, and
Bournemouth. What emerges is both a study of the typical - musical
practices which would apply to any English region - and a portrait of
the unique - features born of the region's physicalisolation and charm,
among them the growth of festival culture, the mythologising of folk
music, the late survival of parish psalmody and nonconformist carolling,
and the unique continuance, today, of a professional resort orchestra,
the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
Banfield's vividly written and extremely readable history of music in
the west country considers an array of subjects, firmly centred on
people's stories: musical inventions and theidea of tradition, music as
cultural capital, the economics of musical employment and the
demographics of musicianship, musical networks, the relationship of the
hinterlands to the metropolis, the influence of topography, the
importance of institutions and events, and the question of how to
measure value. A study in prosopography, it shows how people went about
their lives with music and explores how things changed for them - or did
not.
STEPHENBANFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of
Bristol.
