Walking along the beach from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness during the 2011 Aldeburgh Festival, Andrew Ward and Peter Wiegold discussed the potential for a contribution to the coming Britten centenary, which might be facilitated by the new Institute of Composing. A book seemed a good starting point – but what could we usefully contribute in generating more words about Britten? Then, the 1964 On Receiving the First Aspen Award came to mind, and the idea that this might provoke debate and reflection on the composer in society, then, and through to today.

Britten said: ‘I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships. I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to “enhance their lives”.’

Much that has happened in British music-making in the last fifty years resonates with this. There have been many explorations of the role of music in ‘enhancing lives’, led by composers seeking new practice, by arts organisations seeking to broaden their ‘outreach’, by funding bodies determined that the arts must demonstrate sustained communal benefit – all of these driven by genuine questions about the relationship of arts to society. Possibly more open and radical questions than would be asked elsewhere.

In her chapter, Gillian Moore quotes Nigel Osborne as saying, ‘a rather wonderful strain of “democratic” thinking runs through the British musical tradition’ and, as Moore reports, such thinking could be witnessed in the early 20th century in the activities of Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, who promoted amateur music-making and folk music, sometimes with overtly political intention, Holst at one point hanging the Red Flag side by side with the Union Jack in Thaxted Church. Moore gives a welcome account of the pioneering work of Imogen Holst, for a period a full-time ‘community musician’.

The contributors to this book are, for the most part, people who have been involved in the making of new work. The third part of Peter Wiegold’s chapter is entitled ‘That’s how it happens’ (from a poem by Cage), and this book is written by practitioners, composers, performers, facilitators and producers, who were ‘there when it happened’, writing from the place of experience and shared experience. We have woven the contributions into a kind of narrative that, we trust, throws light on many different personal and societal motivations and, most importantly, many diverse kinds of musical practice.