Shaping musical performance culture in a minority language context: The Gwynn Publishing Company’s Welsh and English song-translations

ABSTRACT

This article examines the catalogue of a prominent twentieth-century Welsh musical publishing company, the Gwynn Publishing Company, in its first decade. The act of performance as it connects to the development and evolution of culture informs the discussion, and the company’s director William Sidney Gwynn Williams, along with writer and translator Thomas Gwynn Jones, are considered as agents of both translation and the musical performance culture. The article discusses texts published by the company as well as individual translation strategies used, shedding light on the motives and objectives of these cultural agents. This, in turn, enables an exploration of how a flexible translation approach can be used by agents of minority language cultures to contribute to an ongoing process of performance of national identity and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Song-translation
• minority language
• Welsh
• publishing
• performance culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For detailed catalogue information, see Appendix VIII of Jones (2008), which lists all works published by the GPC from 1937–66.

2 “Domestication can be a revolutionary force, because it means paying close attention to the features and culture of that language, and creating in it” (translation my own).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elen Ifan

Elen Ifan is Lecturer in Welsh at Cardiff University. Her current research is focused on the relationship between words and music, and the way in which the intersection of these arts can influence artists, their works, and wider cultural expectations. In light of these research interests, she has published an overview of the field in Welsh, as well as articles on the cultural significance of Welsh song-translation in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition and the musical context of canonical Welsh texts.