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Living Archive Milton Keynes (LAMK) has produced innumerable community celebrations in art form of local people’s life experiences – from large-scale documentary musical dramas to BBC broadcast radio ballads. Throughout the last 50 years, over 100 songs have been composed for all these by local musicians, written about people who lived in the area from before it became the New City and Metropolitan Borough of Milton Keynes in the latter part of the 20th century. The show LAMK produced from all this was the first one staged in the new Milton Keynes Theatre in 1999.
The earliest settings of songs come from local and national archives which chronicle changes emanating from the development of 18th century canals and 19th century railways; but most songs are sourced directly from LAMK’s own archive in transcribed interviews – like Tom Worker’s Song of life in the Depression of the 1930s, or Settling In, inspired by new Bletchley residents in the 1950s. The interviews included people who not only experienced the disruption of tumultuous times – war, hardship, social change – but also the protective blanket of their close-knit communities. The first Milton Keynes Song Book was launched in 2017. It contained 36 songs originally composed for local community documentaries, dramas and radio programmes produced by Living Archive MK (LAMK) in the previous four decades. They covered people’s stories and memories throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They were largely based on interviews with local people conducted by LAMK, as well as letters, diaries, memoirs and photographs donated to the archive. All these songs were given new standard musical scores as well as background stories to explain their provenance. The book was published and sent to every school in the Milton Keynes City and Metropolitan Borough, a celebration of local history. By 2022, 40 more songs had been identified in the LAMK archive. They would also be published in a new book to be sent to all Milton Keynes schools, with further copies available from LAMK: Living Archive | A living history of Milton Keynes. However, for schools without music specialists who could read scores, additional audio performances were needed for students and teachers to hear the songs on the website. These came from LAMK’s archive of past documentary shows as well as from the Living Archive Band’s (LAB) repertoire. With these as the base, it was decided to create audio guides for all 76 songs. This meant that as well as having the score to follow, there would be a melody to hear, as well as musical backing to sing to or to play along with. The team that created the original MK Song Book and continued with Volume 2 were: • Marion Hill for research and editing • Craig McLeish for creating musical scores • Dylan Jeavons for design and publishing. The extra team for creating audio guides as well as completing musical scores for the second MK Song Book volume was led by professional musicians: • Lucy Hill: singer, composer, arranger, producer and choir teacher • Sam Freshwater: saxophonist, jazz musician, transcriber and instrumental teacher. And key to the team’s output was... • Amy Coates: double bassist, composer and improvisor. From this extended team, the 40 new songs for The Milton Keynes Song Book Volume 2 could be published and distributed to local schools as before; but the website could also be greatly expanded with audio guides for all 76 songs, freely available to the general public, but most importantly, to schools throughout the MK Borough. |
The books can be purchased here.
Volume 1 was funded by MK Community Foundation
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Welcome to the new, expanded and unique Milton Keynes Song Book!
Milton Keynes Community Choir conducted by Craig McLeish with the Living Archive Band (Godfrey Yeomans,
Lors Featherstone, Marion Hill, Brad Bradstock and Chris Mitchell), at their MK50 concert 'All Change!' at the Ridgeway Centre, Wolverton on 29th July 2017.