Overview of folk music in Wales
The band Calan, a modern band performing with a Welsh traditional style and mostly Welsh traditional instruments.
Welsh folk music
(
Welsh
:
Cerddoriaeth werin Gymreig
) refers to music that is traditionally sung or played in
Wales
, by
Welsh people
or originating from Wales.
Folk artists include; traditional bands
Calan
and
Ar log
; harpists
Sian James
,
Catrin Finch
and
Nansi Richards
and folk singer
Dafydd Iwan
.
Traditions and history
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Early musical traditions during the 17th and 18th centuries saw the emergence of more complex
carols
, away from the repetitive ceremonial songs. These carols featured complex poetry based on
cynghanedd
. Some were sung to English tunes, but many used Welsh melodies such as 'Ffarwel Ned Puw'.
[1]
[
full citation needed
]
The most common type of Welsh folk song is the love song, with lyrics pertaining to the sorrow of parting or in praise of the girl. A few employ sexual metaphor and mention the act of
bundling
.
[
citation needed
]
After love songs, the ballad was a very popular form of song, with its tales of manual labour, agriculture and everyday life. Popular themes in the 19th century included murder, emigration and colliery disasters; they were sung to popular melodies from Ireland or North America.
[1]
Catrin Finch, Welsh harpist on stage at the InterCeltic Festival at Lorient, Aug 2008.
During the
British folk revival
of the early 1900s, some of the verses in the
Hen Penillion
(Old Stanzas) were
exploded
[2]
into longer songs, for example
Ar Lan y Mor
and
Marwnad yr Ehedydd
.
Harp tradition
[
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]
The manuscript of
Robert ap Huw
is the earliest surviving harp music in Europe and it comes from Wales.
[3]
Cerdd Dant
[
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]
This tradition descends from the form used by the early bards to sing their poetry to Welsh kings, princes and princesses.
[3]
Plygain
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Singer
Arfon Gwilym
explains that "the
plygain
tradition survives mainly in Montgomeryshire and takes place in churches and chapels over a six week period during Christmas and the new year."
"After a short service, the plygain is declared open and anyone in the audience can take part, as individuals or as small parties, the most common party being three people, singing in close harmony. The singing is always unaccompanied and in the past was dominated by men who sang in a simple folk style that was unique."
[3]
Traditional folk songs and ballads
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Singer
Sian James
explains that "a ballad which caught my imagination from a very young age was the very beautiful Yr Eneth ga'dd ei gwrthod (The rejected maiden) - a 19th century ballad from the Cynwyd area near
Bala, Gwynedd
, which tells the story of a young girl who, finding herself pregnant out of wedlock, is thrown out of her family home by her father, ostracised by her community and left destitute." "It ends with the girl drowning herself. She is found with a water-sodden note in her hand, asking to be buried without a headstone, so her existence would be forgotten."
[3]
Dance reels
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Thanks to the work of individuals such as
Lady Llanover
in the 18th century, many of Wales' traditional dance reels have survived.
[3]
Macaronic: Bilingual songs
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]
Macaronic
songs developed during the
industrial revolution
in which Welsh speaking people merged with migrant workers to form bilingual songs.
[3]
Celtic folk revival
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In the 1960s and 1970s Welsh language activism increased significantly. A well known Welsh folk music group is
Ar Log
: "By the early eighties Ar Log was travelling Europe and North & South America for around nine months of the year with a wealth of traditional Welsh folk music at our disposal, from haunting love songs and harp airs, to melodic dance tunes, and rousing sea shanties."
[3]
Modern folk and protest songs
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Dafydd Iwan
is a singer and composer from Wales known for his political activism during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and the campaign for the Welsh language by
Cymdeithas yr Iaith
,
the Welsh Language Movement
. He states that "songs have been a natural medium for expressing strong emotions and political protest for centuries, and here in Wales there is a long tradition of ballads with a strong social and political theme".
[3]
His song
Yma o Hyd
has now become a traditional song of Welsh defiance and perseverance, sung at international
Wales football
matches.
[4]
Traditional instruments
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Welsh triple harp.
Harp
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]
The instrument most commonly associated with Wales is the
harp
, which is generally considered to be the country's national instrument.
[5]
[
full citation needed
]
Though it originated in Italy, the
triple harp
(
telyn deires
, "three-row harp") is held up as the traditional harp of Wales: it has three rows of strings, with every
semitone
separately represented, while modern concert harps use a pedal system to change key by stopping the relevant strings. After losing ground to the pedal harp in the 19th century, it has been re-popularised through the efforts of
Nansi Richards
,
Llio Rhydderch
and
Robin Huw Bowen
. The
penillion
are a traditional form of Welsh singing poetry, accompanied by the harp, in which the singer and harpist follow different melodies so that the stressed syllables of the poem coincide with accented beats of the harp melody.
[6]
[
full citation needed
]
The earliest written records of the Welsh harpists' repertoire are contained in the
Robert ap Huw
manuscript, which documents 30 ancient harp pieces that make up a fragment of the lost repertoire of the medieval Welsh bards. The music was composed between the 14th and 16th centuries, transmitted orally, then written down in a unique tablature and later copied in the early 17th century. This manuscript contains the earliest body of harp music from anywhere in Europe and is one of the key sources of early Welsh music.
[7]
The manuscript has been the source of a long-running effort to accurately decipher the music it encodes.
[
citation needed
]
Crwth
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]
Welsh crwth, 1800?1825 .
Another distinctive instrument is the
crwth
, also a stringed instrument of a type once widespread in northern Europe. It was played in Wales from the Middle Ages. It was superseded by the
fiddle
(Welsh
Ffidil
), but lingered on later in Wales than elsewhere, although it had died out by the nineteenth century at the latest.
[8]
[
full citation needed
]
The fiddle is an integral part of Welsh folk music.
[
citation needed
]
Welsh bagpipes and pibgorn
[
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The
Welsh bagpipe
is a native Welsh instrument. A related instrument is one type of bagpipe
chanter
, which when played without the bag and drone is called a
pibgorn
(hornpipe). The generic term "pibau" (pipes) which covers all woodwind instruments is also used. They have been played, documented, represented and described in
Wales
since the fourteenth century.
[
citation needed
]
See also
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References
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