Our priorities include helping our membership flourish, lobbying on behalf of the amateur music making community, and encouraging participation in music as a means to enhance personal and community well-being. We offer a range of services to support hobby music makers. They include:

• Lobbying and advocacy: helping to guarantee that you have the opportunity to take part in music-making, carrying your voice to the decision-makers in government and elsewhere.
• Practical resources: these range from our highly competitive insurance schemes, 60+ guidance sheets, and specialist tools to discounts, one-to-one advice, and much more.

• Networking and development: including training, networking events, national conferences, and support near you through a team of managers in the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

• Artistic support: an annual selection of professional artists, young and established, at specially negotiated prices, with some subsidies available; Music Bank offering repertoire searching, a member sheet music exchange and free programme notes; and national and local projects for members to take part in to develop themselves, their members and their audiences.

We're here to help everyone flourish in their music making, and this website provides a space for all leisure-time musicians to come together in a community to share experiences, ideas and expertise.

Philip and Dorothy Green Trust

The Philip and Dorothy Green Trust was established by prolific film and television composer and conductor Philip Green (1911-1982), along with his wife, Dorothy, to help young musicians and composers.

Since 2002, the Trust has supported Making Music’s Awards for Young Concert Artists (AYCA), which has been running since 1961, thus securing its long-term future. Since 2015, the Trust has also co-funded Making Music’s Adopt a Music Creator (previously Adopt a Composer) project.

Our History 

In the 100 years previous to the emergence of the National Federation of Music Societies (NFMS), music-making and concert going became a hugely popular leisure activity. Increased incomes and leisure-time enabled more and more people to take part and from the 1820s, groups began to organise and formalise into societies. Train travel enabled festivals and competitions, and professional musicians to tour. The standard was high, concerts were packed and professionals made careers out of writing and performing for societies. 

In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, amateur choirs, orchestras and music clubs were struggling to promote concerts and even to survive. As a result, they were offering fewer engagements to professional musicians. A group of influential musicians decided to create Regional Federations of Music Societies to help amateur groups exchange information and music, avoid clashes of concert dates and arrange professional artist tours in order to make their events more financially viable. By the end of 1934 there were 11 federations representing 486 societies.

The NFMS was founded in York on 23 February 1935 with Frederick Woodhouse from ISM and Dyson as founders. A grant of £30,000 (£1.8M today) was given by the Carnegie UK Trust and societies joined from across the UK to apply for the scheme; a financial guarantee of up to '75% of the estimated loss on a season's concerts'. The original trustees wrangled over membership regulations including 'amateur status, local constitutions, responsible officers, audited accounts'. Some members on the first ledger remain members today including Penzance Choral Society, Ludlow Music Society, Northumberland Orchestral Society and Ayr Choral Union. 

The first conference brought together over 900 delegates from 300 societies. The event is best remembered for conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s attack on the BBC. Some saw broadcasting as a great threat to live classical music and complaints were made about programming, cuts and rearrangements, and the London-centric concert selection. Dyson gave the threat of 'mechanised music' generally as one of the reasons for establishing the NFMS.  

The Carnegie Trust continued to fund societies through NFMS for 15 years. Following World War II, The Arts Council was formed. They quickly realised the importance of the amateur sector and took over the subsidising of societies through the NFMS in 1951. Dyson wrote in 1960 that the Federation was now 'an integral and permanent feature of our social and artistic musical life'.

Dyson’s work to establish the NFMS was driven by an understanding of the great value of music societies to the country which remains true today. In a 1936 account he said: 'These choral and orchestral societies are the backbone of our music. They stimulate teaching, employ the profession, encourage the amateur and educate the public. When they flourish, music flourishes; when they languish, so much music goes. And there is no substitute for them.'

1935

Frederick Woodhouse of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) and Sir George Dyson founded The National Federation of Music Societies (NFMS) in York on 23 February 1935, with the support of a grant of £30,000 (the equivalent of £1.5M today) from the Carnegie UK Trust. Sir George Dyson became our first Chairman and President. At our first conference, Sir Thomas Beecham’s speech to 900 delegates from 300 member societies contained a scathing attack on the BBC, which brought our organisation before the public eye.

1943

During the Second World War, membership swelled to 600 as new groups formed to provide much-needed respite. When The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was created, it invited us to allocate funds to larger performing societies and music clubs who were not eligible for support from Carnegie. This role continued when CEMA became the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945.

1961

In 1961 we launched the Award for Young Concert Artists. This was the first award to offer engagements as a prize and it has gone on to support over 100 young musicians at a crucial point in their career, including Steven Isserlis, Ian Bostridge, Craig Ogden and Elizabeth Watts.

1969

Having launched our popular insurance scheme in 1962, seven years later we struck an agreement with the Performing Rights Society to allow members to easily pay for performances of copyright music in unlicensed venues. Estimates suggest the scheme has since generated in excess of £3.5M for PRS for Music and composers since then.

1993

In 1993 we teamed up with British Telecom (BT) to present Making More of Music, a project that enabled 10,000 representatives of member societies to attend training events across the country over the course of three years. We worked in partnership with BT again on community development project, The Music Experience, funded by The National Lottery through The Arts Council of England and publicly launched in September 1998. This was the largest project ever undertaken in the voluntary arts sector in this country.

2000

In 2000, we took the decision to change our working title from the National Federation of Music Societies to Making Music, in order to reflect the increased importance of inclusivity and breadth of membership. Since then our membership has continued to grow rapidly, and now includes a wide range of musical groups and genres, from choirs, orchestras and music clubs to steel bands, samba groups and festivals.

2014

In the face of growing cuts to public funding, in 2011 we successfully campaigned to save the Wakefield music collection, one of the most important national collections in the UK, used by thousands of amateur music groups. Three years later, we were again in the thick of it, fighting alongside the ISM to successfully defeat a government consultation proposing the end of Local Authority funding for music education.