Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales

Abstract

There are many historical repertories of interest for which documentary evidence is scant. In such areas traditional models of musicological research, driven by notation, may be of limited use, and there is thus a need to develop alternative formulations for the relationship between the performance, the performer and the text. In this study, textual analysis and ethnographic comparisons of structurally similar performance cultures (namely, classical Greece and Rome and bardic traditions of south-eastern Europe and eastern Africa) are combined to examine one such tradition: the secular music of the bards of medieval and early-modern Wales. Contemporary accounts pertaining to this repertory are characterized by a systematic ambiguity in their description of speech and song, and a selective use of musical notation for instrumental but not vocal figuration. Comparisons with other musical cultures that share this ambiguity lead to the development of a model of performance that accounts for these textual features.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Phyllis Kinney, Meredydd Evans, John Potter, Carol Symes, and particularly Sally Harper, David Klausner and Richard Rastall for their investments of time and resources into this project and insightful comments on early drafts of this article.

Notes

¹Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ, 1984), 43–7.

²Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ, 1984), 43. Truax lays out both an initial definition of a soundscape as an acoustic environment and the first conception of acoustic space as a continuum stretching from unordered sound to human speech. His model places music in the middle of this continuum not on the basis of any mediatory role, but by virtue of its intermediate values of strictness in syntactical structure, temporal density of information, 'ambiguity of meaning' and size of acoustic repertory (Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ, 1984), 45). The transitional and mediating aspects of music's role in acoustic environments were then explored by Bruce Smith in his wide-ranging discussion of aural experience in Shakespeare's England, which explained the relationship in the terms quoted here. See Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, IL, 1999), 51.

³See, in particular, M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1993); Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, NY, 2007); and Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge, 2005).

⁴See, for example, Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, ed. Gerard Bhague (Westport, CT, 1984); Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985); John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge, 1986); and Leo Treitler, 'History and Music', New Literary History, 21 (1990), 299–319.

⁵This term comes from an early collection assembled by the harper and antiquary Edward Jones (1752–1824), published as Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards Preserved by Tradition, and Authentic Manuscripts, from Remote Antiquity; Never Before Published (London: printed for the author, 1784).

⁶This elaboration was most often delivered on the harp or on the six-stringed bowed lyre known in Wales as the crwth, although a late reference printed in 1592 in Sin Dafydd Rhys's Institutiones indicates that in less accomplished performances the lyrics might be accompanied simply by the rhythmic pounding of a staff on the floor by a little-regarded class of performer known as the datgeiniad pen pastwn (stick-end reciter/declaimer). See Sally Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym, Poet and Musician', 2007, Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym, University of Wales, Swansea, <http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/essays/sally_harper/index_eng.php>, accessed 2 March 2009.

⁷These manuscripts are the so-called 'Robert ap Huw Manuscript' and the 'Iolo Morganwg Manuscript' (London, British Library, Add. MSS 14905 and 14970 respectively). Many excellent articles exploring their provenance, use and contents have been published in the journal Welsh Music History. See, in particular, Welsh Music History, 3, Special Issue, ed. Sally Harper (1999), dedicated to the Robert ap Huw Manuscript, which contains an article by Paul Whittaker (pp. 252–70) on the tablature of the Iolo Morganwg Manuscript. See also note 21 below. For an introduction to medieval Welsh vernacular poetry and its manuscript sources, see Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff, 2000).

¹¹ Gramadegau'r Penceirddiaid, ed. Griffith John Williams and Edward John Jones (Cardiff, 1934), 346. English translation adapted from Sally Harper, 'Instrumental Music in Medieval Wales', North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 4 (2004), 20–42 (p. 29).

⁸Welsh shares this ambiguity with classical languages such as Latin and Greek, as discussed below.

⁹John Thomas Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age North Britain (Cardiff, 1997), li. The Gododdin is contained in the mid-thirteenth century 'Book of Aneirin' (Llyfr Aneirin; Cardiff, Central Library, MS 2.81), and while many aspects of the work's composition and preservation are mysterious, there is typographical and palaeographical evidence within Cardiff MS 2.81 indicating that the version that survives 'was an operation to rescue, from two if not more exemplars, treasured texts which had probably almost passed from oral currency and which were perhaps no longer entirely understood'. See Daniel Huws, Five Ancient Books of Wales, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, 1996), 12–13.

¹⁰Welsh in Canu Aneirin, ed. Ifor Williams (Cardiff, 1938), 3, 4, 12 (lines 56, 93, 294). English translations in Patrick K. Ford, 'Performance and Literacy in Medieval Welsh Poetry', Modern Language Review, 100 (2005), xxx–xlviii (p. xxxii).

¹²Ford, 'Performance and Literacy', xxxi–xxxii.

¹³The meaning of cainc gradually shifted from 'stem' or 'branch' (as in 'one cainc of a family tree') to 'piece of song, tune, or poem'. Y Geiriadur Mawr: The Complete Welsh-English, English-Welsh Dictionary, ed. Harold Meurig Evans, W. O. Thomas and Stephen Joseph Williams (3rd edn, Llandysul, 1963), 69; Harper, 'Instrumental Music', 23–4. Adrodd, though possibly related to the Old Irish word raidid meaning 'speaks, says, tells', is used ten times in the Gododdin in ambiguous circumstances that some have linked to the culture of the halls of the Welsh nobility. See Ford, 'Performance and Literacy', xxxiii, note 12. Similarly, the GPC (Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, ed. R. J. Thomas, Gareth A. Bevan and Patrick J. Donovan, 4 vols. (Cardiff, 1950–2002)) lists 'to give voice', 'cause audible effect' and 'sound, ring, &c. (e.g. of a trumpet, harp, bell)' as valid interpretations of the word lleisio; while gorchan may be related to the Old Irish fo-cain meaning 'sings to', though its use in the Gododdin is similarly ambiguous; see Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh, 1969), 151; Canu Aneirin, ed. Williams, 50, 52, 44 (lines 1257, 1322, 1104). Many modern translators attempt to evade these problems in situations where vocal connotations are prominent, either by translating the terms as 'lay' or 'lai', which is similarly broad but has perhaps unwanted connotations of Chaucer and medieval French song, or by tentatively noting that the word is a synonym of canu, for which the difficulties have already been discussed (see, for example, Canu Aneirin, ed. Williams, 322).

¹⁴The cywydd metre is characterized by the use of seven syllables per line, and is structured in end-rhyming couplets in which the final syllable is alternately stressed and unstressed, as in the English pairing of lovers-hers, and men-happen. See Joseph P. Clancy, Medieval Welsh Lyrics (London, 1965), 15.

¹⁵ A Guide to Welsh Literature, 1282–c.1550, ed. Alfred Owen Hughes Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes, 2 vols. (Cardiff, 1997), ii, 195.

¹⁶The most up-to-date collection of Dafydd ap Gwilym's work is the bilingual critical edition of the poet's works published online by Professor Dafydd Johnston and the Welsh Department at Swansea University in 2007 at <http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net>.

¹⁷Rachel Bromwich, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym', A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. Jarman and Hughes, ii, 95–125; Dafydd ap Gwilym: His Poems, ed. Gwyn Thomas (Cardiff, 2001).

²⁰ Gwaith Gruffudd Fychan ap Gruffudd ab Ednyfed, ed. Erwain Haf Rheinallt (Aberystwyth, 1995), 11 (lines 11–18). English translation adapted from Ford, 'Performance and Literacy', xxxvii.

¹⁸See, in particular, Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym'.

¹⁹Harper, 'Instrumental Music', 33.

²¹In particular, see Arnold Dolmetsch, Translations from the Penllyn Manuscript of Ancient Harp Music (Llangefni, 1937); Peter Crossley-Holland, 'Secular Homophonic Music in Wales in the Middle Ages', Music and Letters, 23 (1942), 135–62; Thurston Dart, 'Robert ap Huw's Manuscript of Welsh Harp Music (c.1613)', Galpin Society Journal, 21 (1968), 52–65; Claire Polin, The Ap Huw Manuscript (Henryville, PA, 1982); and the large amount of recent work reported in Welsh Music History, 3, Special Issue, ed. Harper; Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym'; and eadem, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (Aldershot, 2007), 135–59.

²²Including Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MSS 60, 62, 77, 155, and MS 17116B (Gwysaney 28), fol. 68^v.

²³Crossley-Holland, 'Secular Homophonic Music in Wales', 142. The translations of these terms are very approximate, and some scholars have suggested that the most useful way to read them is as indications of 'release' and 'tension' respectively. Greater detail can be found in the glossary of Welsh Music History, 3 (1999), Special Issue, ed. Harper, 299–307; and in Paul Whittaker's recent discussion of harmonic forms in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript, 'Harmonic Forms in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript', Welsh Music History, 7 (2007), 1–34.

²⁴The Robert ap Huw Manuscript had come into Morris's possession at some time before 1742, and at the bottom of p. 22 a note in his hand ascribes the 24 clymau cytgerdd to a (now lost) book by Penllyn. However, to date no additional evidence has been found to support or refute this claim. For more information on the clymau cytgerdd, see Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym', 10, 61–2.

²⁵Paul Whittaker, 'British Museum Additional Manuscript 14905: An Interpretation and Re-Examination of the Music and Text' (MA dissertation, Bangor University, 1974); Peter Greenhill, 'The Robert ap Huw Manuscript: An Exploration of its Possible Solutions' (typescript, Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies, Bangor University, 1995-); Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650; eadem, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym'.

²⁶ Kaingk, Bragod (Robert Evans and Mary-Anne Roberts), self-published CD (2004); Two Worlds of the Welsh Harp, William Taylor, Dorian Recordings DOR-90-260 (1999); Music from the Robert ap Huw Manuscript Volume I, Paul Dooley, self-published CD (2004); Pekka Toivanen, The Pencerdd's Toolkit: Cognitive and Musical Hierarchies in Medieval Welsh Harp Music (Jyvskl, 2001), with accompanying CD.

²⁷Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales; and The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1978), 239; idem, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O'Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982), 103–4.

²⁸Several of the tracks on William Taylor's CD Two Worlds of the Welsh Harp (for example, the recordings of the Kaniad bach ar y gogower, Kaniad San Silin and Kaniad ystafell) exceed ten minutes in length, with musical development (as it is conventionally understood in Western classical music) drawn out over such prolonged periods as to render it nearly unrecognizable as such.

²⁹Cf. Records of Early Drama: Wales, ed. David N. Klausner, Records of Early English Drama, 18 (London and Toronto, 2005), 159–76, 349–64.

³⁰Harper, 'Instrumental Music', 22–3.

³¹ Records of Early Drama: Wales, ed. Klausner, 354; original Welsh on pp. 163–4.

³²Harper, 'Instrumental Music', 30; Records of Early Drama: Wales, ed. Klausner, 354.

³³ Records of Early Drama: Wales, ed. Klausner, 363–4. See also Bethan Miles, 'Swyddogaeth a Chelfyddyd y Crythor', 2 vols. (MA dissertation, Aberystwyth University, 1984), ii, 555, cited in Harper, 'Instrumental Music', 31.

³⁴Although Peter Greenhill has suggested that some or all of them might actually be in the set of clymau cytgerdd beginning on p. 22 of the Robert ap Huw Manuscript. Greenhill, cited in Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym', 49.

³⁵ Records of Early Drama: Wales, ed. Klausner, 163–4, 176.

³⁶The Robert Evans and Mary-Anne Roberts duo Bragod has experimented with sung recitation of verse to the accompaniment of the crwth, and while the historicism of their vocal performance is informed by little more than a familiarity with Celtic folksong and the caricature provided by the Englishman Andrew Borde in his First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547; repr. London, 1870), likening a Welshman's voice to the 'hussyng of a homble be' (p. 126), the results are tantalizing. See p. 24 of the notes accompanying the Bragod CD Kaingk.

³⁷Cf. Harper, 'Dafydd ap Gwilym'; Daniel Huws, 'Dressing Women in Tunes', Welsh Music Studies: Bearers of Song: Essays in Honour of Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney, ed. Sally Harper and Wyn Thomas (Cardiff, 2007), 145–88.

³⁸Karl Reichl, 'Turkic Bard and Medieval Entertainer: What a Living Epic Tradition Can Tell Us about Oral Performance of Narrative in the Middle Ages', Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Vitz, Regalado and Lawrence, 167–78 (p. 170).

⁴⁴Hesiod, Theogony, ed. Martin Litchfield West (Oxford, 1966), 115. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richard Lattimore (Ann Arbor, MI, 1959), 159; Gregory Nagy, Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore, MD, 1990), 21.

³⁹William Beare, The Roman Stage (3rd edn, London, 1964), 15.

⁴⁰'Dicunt in tenero gramine pinguium / custodes ovium carmina fistula.' Horace, The Odes of Horace, ed. Betty Radice and Robert Baldick, trans. James Michie (Harmondsworth, 1964), 254.

⁴¹Ovid, Tristia, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (London, 1924), x.59, 200.

⁴²Beare, The Roman Stage, 229.

⁴³John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (New York, 1998), 28.

⁴⁵Potter, Vocal Authority, 11.

⁴⁶Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. Edward Capps, Thomas Ethelbert Page and William Henry Denham Rouse, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler, Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols. (London, 1920–2), i, I.x.27, 173.

⁴⁷Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. Edward Capps, Thomas Ethelbert Page and William Henry Denham Rouse, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler, Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols. (London, 1920–2), I.viii.2, 147.

⁴⁸Beare, The Roman Stage, 223.

⁴⁹As in, for example, the editions of Beowulf published in quick succession by Seamus Heaney (New York) and Roy M. Liuzza (Peterborough, ON) in 2000. One illustrative case in point occurs in lines 1159–60, where Heaney translates 'Lēod ws āsungen / glēo-mannes gyd' as 'The poem was over / the poet had performed' (p. 83) while Liuzza opts for 'The lay was sung, / the entertainer's song' (p. 89). Such ambiguities also abound in other monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature, such as Widsith and Deor. For a nuanced and informative introduction to the issue, see Jeff Opland, Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry: A Study of the Traditions (New Haven, CT, 1980), esp. pp. 29–30 and 230–56.

⁵⁰Albert Bates Lord and Mary Louise Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 25.

⁵¹Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (London, 1987), 24.

⁵²Catherine T. Gray, 'Patterns of Textual Recurrence in Kiganda Song', International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 23 (1992), 85–100 (p. 87).

⁵³Catherine T. Gray, 'Compositional Techniques in Roman Catholic Church Music in Uganda', British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 4, Special Issue, ed. Peggy Duesenberry (1995), 135–55 (p. 137). See also Peter Cooke, 'Music in a Ugandan Court', Early Music, 24 (1996), 439–52.

⁵⁴Roderic Knight, 'Music in Africa: The Manding Contexts', Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, ed. Gerard Bhague, Contributions in Intercultural and Comparative Studies (Westport, CT, 1984), 53–90 (p. 75).

⁵⁵In particular, the balo, a 19-key xylophone, and the kora, a 21-stringed harp-lute.

⁵⁶Knight, 'Music in Africa', 73.

⁵⁷Catherine T. Gray, 'The Ugandan Lyre Endongo and its Music', British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2 (1993), 117–42.

⁵⁸Catherine T. Gray, 'The Ugandan Lyre Endongo and its Music', British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2 (1993), 138.

⁵⁹Catherine T. Gray, 'The Ugandan Lyre Endongo and its Music', British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2 (1993), 129.

⁶⁰Fritz Bose, 'Law and Freedom in the Interpretation of European Folk Epics', Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 10 (1958), 29–34 (p. 34); Peter Cooke, 'A Preliminary Study of Bagpipes in India: A Work in Progress', International Council for Traditional Music: UK Chapter Bulletin, 17 (1987), 28–37 (pp. 35–6).

⁶¹Milman Parry, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, ed. and trans. Albert Bates Lord, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and Belgrade, 1953–4), ii, 52.

⁶²Analysis performed by the author 'by ear', that is, without the use of sound-analysis software (though with the benefit of absolute pitch).

⁶³Wayne Howard, Samavedic Chant (New Haven, CT, 1977), 173–96, 251–454.

⁶⁴Wayne Howard, Samavedic Chant (New Haven, CT, 1977), 38–40.

⁶⁵Phyllis Kinney, 'Narrow-Compass Tunes in Welsh Folksong', Canu Gwerin, 9 (1986), 12–29 (p. 12).

⁶⁶Phyllis Kinney, 'Narrow-Compass Tunes in Welsh Folksong', Canu Gwerin, 9 (1986), 12–29 (p. 12).

⁶⁷Though none, unfortunately, are in the form of the cywydd deuair hirion; Phyllis Kinney, 'Narrow-Compass Tunes in Welsh Folksong', Canu Gwerin, 9 (1986), 13.

⁶⁸ The Literary Remains of the Rev. Thomas Price, ed. Jane Williams (Llandovery, 1855), 21.

⁶⁹'Creide's Lament for Dnertach', trans. Daniel F. Melia, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry, ii: The Major Germanic and Celtic Texts in Translation, ed. Daniel G. Calder et al. (Cambridge, 1983), 61–2 (here, line 4).

⁷³Adapted from John ab Ithel Williams, Dosparth Edeyrn Davod Aur, or the Ancient Welsh Grammar (Llandovery, 1861), 37–8. Although old-fashioned and rather overly precise in the grammatical terms assigned to Welsh concepts that unsurprisingly defy easy classification (for example, translating tromleddf as 'gravisparsison', talgronn as 'rotundison' and lleddfon as 'sparsison'), Williams's edition remains the only published version of this text that presents Welsh- and English-language versions side-by-side for easy comparison.

⁷⁰Gwyn Jones, The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (Oxford, 1977), 31–3.

⁷¹Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 86.

⁷²Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, 82.

⁷⁴ Gramadegau'r Penceirddiaid, ed. Williams and Jones, xviii–xx.

⁷⁵Peter Crossley-Holland, 'The Robert ap Huw Composers', Welsh Music History, 3 (1999), 183–205 (p. 189).

⁷⁶William Taylor, 'Robert ap Huw's Harp Technique', Welsh Music History, 3, Special Issue, ed. Harper, 82–90; Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650, 135–55.

⁷⁷Richard Taruskin, 'High, Sweet, and Loud', Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford, 1995), 347–52 (p. 351).