Wales has a rich musical heritage, and although many of its traditional instruments are not commonly heard, there are still musicians keeping the folk tradition alive, arranging and performing melodies that have been popular for centuries.
Celebrating its musical roots helps confirm Wales' distinctive culture. As we enjoy the tunes, dances and instrumental forms that have delighted us for generations, we can become part of the tradition as it moves forward.
The fiddle in Wales
Wales has a long tradition of fiddle playing and its music was popular with the great Romany familes of Wales.
Three people who were renowned for playing both harp and fiddles were Cornelius, David and Adolphus Wood. Unlike the harp there is no unbroken tradition of fiddle playing in Wales, but because the players wrote down their tunes the repertoire has been preserved. We don't know how the fiddle actually sounded so have no idea of styles. Many manuscripts from 18th and 19th centuries contain tunes which appear very similar in style to contemporary classical or popular music.
The pibgorn in Wales
The pibgorn is a simple reed instrument once popular with shepherds and cattle drovers.
It is made up of a wooden pipe and the horns of a bull. One horn is used as a mouthpiece and another to form a bell end which helps amplify the sound. The pibgorn consists of six holes for the fingers and a thumb hole at the back, similar to a recorder, giving a range of 8 notes. It was used for playing dance music and passing the time on the cattle droves. Pibgorns are rare instruments, although they can be made to order by specialist instrument makers. The musician Stephen Rees, who plays with the folk group Crasdant, continues his work in bringing the pibgorn sound to new audiences.
Welsh Triple Harp
The Welsh triple harp ("telyn deires") is a type of harp using three rows of strings instead of the common single row. The Welsh triple harp today is found mainly among players of traditional Welsh folk music.
History
The triple harp first originated in Italy and appeared in the British Isles early in the 17th century. In 1629, the French harpist Jean le Flelle was appointed ‘musician for the harp’ at the King's court. Flelle played the Italian triple harp with gut strings. The triple harp was quickly adopted by the Welsh harpers living in London during the 17th century. It was so popular that by the beginning of the 18th century the triple harp was generally known as the "Welsh harp". Charles Evans was the first mentioned Welsh triple harpist. He was appointed harper to the court in 1660, where his official title was ‘His Majesty's harper for the Italian harp’. A description of the Welsh triple harp is given by the harpist John Parry (1776–1851) in the preface to the second volume of his collection, The Welsh Harper (London 1839): The compass of the Triple Harp, in general, is about five octaves, or thirty-seven strings in the principal row, which is on the side played by the right hand, called the bass row. The middle row, which produces the flats and sharps, consists of thirty-four strings; and the treble, or left hand row, numbers twenty-seven strings. The outside rows are tuned in unison, and always in the diatonic scale, that is, in the regular and natural scale of tones and semitones, as a peal of eight bells is tuned. When it is necessary to change the key, for instance, from C to G, all the Fs in the outside rows are made sharp by raising them half a tone. Again, to change from C to F, every B in the outside rows is made flat, by lowering it a semitone. When an accidental sharp or flat is required, the performer inserts a finger between two of the outer strings, and finds it in the middle row. Many experiments have been made, with a view of obviating the necessity of tuning the instrument every time a change in the key occurred. Brass rings were fixed near the comb, but those rattled and jarred; in short, every attempt failed until the invention of the Pedals. …
The skill of harp making in Wales had all but been lost for some 60 years until John Weston Thomas (MBE), a talented wood and metal worker, revised the craft, making celtic, chromatic and triple harps until his death in 1992. He passed on his skills to three apprentices: Allan Shiers, Brian Blackmore and Alun Thomas, his son. Alun still makes triple and celtic harps in his workshop just outside of Fishguard. Brian Blackmore also makes triple harps, whilst Allan Shiers went on to make concert harps and found Telynau Teifi Harps.
Playing Techniques
Among the most important and characteristic playing techniques for the Welsh triple harp is that of "unisons". The effect of unisons is obtained by playing the same note on both the outside rows using the right and left hands in rapid succession. Thus a progression of "e.g.", C-D-F-E, is achieved by playing CC-DD-FF-EE.
Modern Players
After the early 20th century, triple harps were almost completely abandoned in Wales in favour of the modern pedal harp. Preservation of the instrument and the playing style has been attributed to Nansi Richards (1888–1979), who learnt to play from Gypsy harpists in the Bala area at the turn of the century.
Crwth
Origin of the name
The name crwth is originally a Welsh word, derived from a Proto-Celtic noun *krotto- ("round object"[1]) refers to a swelling or bulging out, of pregnant appearance, or a protuberance, and it is speculated that it came to be used for the instrument because of its bulging shape. Other Celtic words for violin also have meanings referring to rounded appearances. In Gaelic, for example, "cruit" can mean "hump" or "hunch" as well as harp or violin.[2] Like several other English loanwords from Welsh, the name is one of the few words in the English language that is written without one of the five standard English vowel letters. The traditional English name is crowd (or rote), and the variants crwd, crout and crouth are little used today. In Medieval Latin it is called the chorus or crotta. The Welsh word crythor means a performer on the crwth. The Irish word is cruit, although it also was used on occasion to designate certain small harps. The English surnames Crowder and Crowther denote a player of the crowd, as do the Scottish names MacWhirter and MacWhorter.
In this article crwth denotes the modern, or most recent, form of the instrument (see picture).
History
A variety of string instruments so designated are thought to have been played in Wales since Roman times at least. Continuous, clear records of the use of crwth to denote an instrument of the lyre (or the Byzantine bowed lyre) class date from the 11th century.[citation needed] Medieval instruments somewhat resembling the crwth appear in pictures (first in Continental Europe) as far back as the 11th century, shortly after bowing was first known in the West. In Wales, the crwth long took second place to the harp in the musical hierarchy.[3]
Physical description and playing technique
Crwth being played by Cass Meurig, using a neck strap
The crwth consists of a fairly simple box construction with a flat, fretless fingerboard and six gut strings, purportedly tuned gg´c´c´´d´d´´. The original report of that tuning (Edward Jones, Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards; London: 1784), from which most subsequent others appear to draw their information, uses arbitrary pitch designations for illustrative purposes. Jones also states that the tuning procedure began by tightening the highest string as much as possible without breaking it, subsequently tuning the others to it intervalically. Such was not an uncommon practice in the days before standardized pitch and was, in fact, mentioned in other manuals on string instrument playing.
While Jones's report was widely read and used as the basis of a number of subsequent accounts, and therefore today is often considered to be evidence of a standard tuning, it is more likely that a variety of tunings were experimented with and in some cases employed, as was and still is the case with many other string instruments, particularly those within folk cultures. A second tuning, reported by William Bingley (A Tour Round North Wales; London: 1800), features the drones tuned in octaves, with the strings over the fingerboard tuned in paired fifths rather than seconds. However this tuning is almost certainly derived from later violin playing and is impractical given that the crwth is equipped with a flat bridge and therefore designed to play all six strings simultaneously.
Traditionally the soundbox, or resonator, and a surmounting yoke in the shape of an inverted U (see picture of player), were carved as a single unit from a block of maple or sycamore. The soundboard, or belly, a separate piece (the upper surface, nearest the strings), was most often made of deal or some other soft wood, and the bridge was usually made of cherry or some other fruitwood. Two soundholes, or circular openings about an inch to an inch and a quarter in diameter, were cut into the soundboard to allow pulsating air from the soundbox to escape and strengthen the tone. The two G strings (to use Jones's terminology - see above) ran parallel to the fingerboard, but not over it, so those strings were used as fixed-pitch drones which could be plucked by the player's left thumb. The remaining strings, which were tightened and loosened with metal harp wrest-pins and a tuning key or wrench, were usually bowed with a horsehair and wood bow. One characteristic feature of the crwth is that one leg of the bridge goes through a soundhole (see picture of player) and rests on the back of the instrument (the bottom of the soundbox). Although it has been conjectured that this is a primitive attempt at a sound post, or anima, something the instrument lacks, it is equally likely that it is designed to take some of the downward pressure of the tightened strings off the soundboard. Since that piece is flat, unbraced, and usually made of soft wood, it is much weaker than the belly of a violin.
All surviving pictures of crwth players show a playing position with the lower end of the crwth braced against the chest, supported with a strap around the player's neck (see picture). The sound of the crwth was described by medieval poet Gruffydd ap Dafydd ap Hywel as 'in the hand a hundred voices' (yn y llaw yn gan llais'), referring to the rich sound of six strings sounded simultaneously in harmony. Along with the harp and timpan, the six-stringed crwth was one of the three main string instruments of the Welsh according to the medieval Triads, and an instrument of the aristocracy with its own native repertoire and a strict examination system though which a master crwth player had to pass. A three-stringed version also existed which required less skill and was played by minstrels.
The tone of the crwth is softer and rougher than the modern violin, and has a comfortable melody range of an octave by the use of third position, although it is possible to reach an octave and a half by the use of higher positions. Its sound that goes well with the timbres of the harp and pibgorn (hornpipe). For all its technical limitations, the crwth has great charm, and is much more than a historical curiosity. Research over about the last thirty-five years, and particularly experimentation with tunings, have shown it to have been much more versatile and facile than was once assumed, although it definitely was not a prototype of modern orchestral bowed string instruments, which emerged from an altogether different branch of the complex string family tree. Historically, it represents the logical end of a line of development, not an early stage of another.
Welsh legends
There are a number of legends in Wales related to Crythor Du or "The Black Crwth Player", the most notable of which is "Y Crythor Du a'r Bleiddiaid" or "The Black Crwth Player and the Wolves", where a player escapes attack from a pack of hungry wolves by playing in turn forcefully, melodiously and gently. Another legend has a player and his servant dying of cold in Beddgelert, noted by Welsh antiquarian Edward Llwyd. There is also the "Cave of the black crwth player" near Criccieth, which is said to have been the inspiration for the tune Ffrawél Ned Puw or 'Farwell Dick the Piper'. (from "Crythor Du" at cy.wikipedia.org)
The crwth today
A number of modern reconstructions of the crwth have been made; makers include Guy Flockhart, Nial Cain, Michael J. King, Hank Taylor and Gerard KilBride. A handful of folk musicians are reviving the tradition of playing this instrument, among them Cass Meurig (who also plays with the groups Fernhill and Pigyn Clust), Bob Evans (Bragod), Dan Morris (Cilmeri) and Sedayne. The repertoire of surviving crwth tunes is very small, although many other traditional tunes can be adapted for the instrument and new tunes are being written for it. It is also used by a number of early music groups including Cancionero. The world's first CD of crwth music, Crwth by Cass Meurig, was released in 2004 by the Fflach:tradd label.
Folk music
Folk music includes both traditional music and the genre that evolved from it during the 20th century folk revival. The term originated in the 19th century but is often applied to music that is older than that. Certain types of folk music are also called world music.
of time.
Starting in the mid-20th century a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. The most common name for this new form of music is also "folk music", but is often called "contemporary folk music" or "folk revival music" to make the distinction.[1] This type of folk music also includes fusion genres such as folk rock, folk metal, electric folk, and others. While contemporary folk music is a genre generally distinct from traditional folk music, in English it shares the same name, and it often shares the same performers and venues as traditional folk music. Even individual songs may be a blend of the two.
Chyruk Victoria
Chyruk Victoria
