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An Interview With Jack Bevil - Digon O Grwth/Master of the Crwth
We are very pleased to be able to present a second interview with Digon o Grwth/Master of the Crwth, Jack Bevil to coincide with this year's St David's Day celebrations. If you missed our earlier three part interview with Jack please go here . Jack Bevil will be lecturing and performing at this year's West Coast Eisteddfod on Saturday September 24th. Further details will be announced shortly. Hear Jack play a selection of traditional Welsh melodies on the crwth at the bottom of this page .
Jack: Thank you so much for your continued interest and for giving me the opportunity to perform and inform at the upcoming West Coast Eisteddfod. My last Eisteddfod was the 1972 Royal National at Haverfordwest, where I did my first ethnomusicological field research. It was also there that I got my first real, live experience with spoken Welsh, which was quite different from what Id gotten from books. During some of the time in September, Ill be moving around and giving impromptu performances as an itinerant crythor , or crwth-player. In addition, Im preparing a lecture-recital in which Ill lecture on the issues of the instrument itself, the origin and various meanings of the word crwth , reconstructed performance techniques (especially holding, tuning, bowing, and bridge placement), the crwths origins, and its place in early sixteenth- through middle nineteenth-century Welsh folk culture. The recital will consist of performances of pieces to illustrate some of the points made in the lecture as those points are made. The presentation is only in its early preparatory stages now. Ill send more detail, including a short video, later.
AmeriCymru: Care to tell us a little about the crwth for the benefit of any of our readers who may not be acquainted with the instrument?
Jack: The modern, or most recent, crwth was a small lyre -technically a bowed and plucked fingerboard yoke lyre, as shown in the picture below - that appears to have flourished in Wales from between ca. 1490-1510 until about 1740-50. It barely survived in practice, in rapidly decreasing numbers, from the mid-eighteenth century until shortly after the mid-nineteenth century.
The four main strings were drawn over a nearly flat bridge and a flat, fretless fingerboard. Those four strings were played with a bow held in the right hand, and they were stopped by the tips of the players left fingers. Two open, or unstopped, drone strings, also passed over the bridge, ran along the observers-left side of the fingerboard, and were plucked by the left thumb. 
Crwth with bow ( 1970 reconstruction )
Unlike the violin and the other academic orchestral strings, and like some of its predecessors, the modern crwth was a folk instrument, and it was one of the last of a long line of chordophones that underwent many changes over the centuries. Therefore, it never achieved the violins strict standardization of either design or performance practice. Crwth performance practice, in fact, appears to have varied greatly from shortly before the modern crwths emergence from prototypes until its extinction in practice by ca. 1860.
Crwth itself, which means a swelling out , appears to have been applied to a number of different yoke lyres from at least as far back as the eleventh century. Given the literal meaning of the word, it is likely that not only the modern crwth but also its predecessors shared a hunchbacked appearance. Crwth and its English equivalent crowd also were occasionally applied to modern orchestral string instruments such as the violin after the modern crwth became extinct in practice.
The prototypes of the modern crwth seem to have emerged in Continental Europe, where they were called c hrotta, rotta, rota, rotte, and rote throughout much of the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxons and later the Normans brought various prototypes of the modern crwth with them across the North Sea and the English Channel. During their first several centuries in the British Isles, those instruments and the modified forms of them that almost continuously evolved were usually known by their Continental names, and that practice evidently continued until some point late in the high Middle Ages (twelfth through fourteenth centuries), well after the emergence of the English term crowd , the surname Crowder (lyre-player, or fiddler) , and the Welsh term crwth . Chaucer (ca. 1340-1400), for example, mentions the rote in the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales (And certainly he hadde a murye note: / Wel koude he synge, and pleyen on a rote.).
Cruit was the Irish term for one or more of the early lyres, and it also seems to have denoted small harps in some cases. Other Irish designations of lyres were timpan and tiompan .
The lyres (as well as Medieval bagpipes) were also sometimes given the Latin designations choro and chorus , probably a reference to their abilities to play multiple notes simultaneously. Much later, the line Strike the harp, and join the chorus in the familiar New Year carol Deck the Hall, whose music was a dance tune known in Welsh as Nos Galan, or New Years Eve, may well have been a reference to the crwth, not a vocal ensemble. This looseness and complexity of nomenclature across several centuries is one of a number of issues that make inquiries and conclusions about the crwth and its forebears potentially very tricky.
The various small lyres were most often associated with the itinerant, lower-class minstrels until around or shortly after the close of the Middle Ages. That somewhat dubious distinction actually worked to those instruments advantage, because it helped them be readily absorbed into the folk culture, where they survived the demise of minstrelsy. By the fourteenth century, they had passed their heyday on the Continent. It seems that, over the next hundred to hundred fifty years, the last of the modern crwths forebears were confined to the English West Country and Wales, and that the final structural changes that distinguish the modern crwth - especially the anterior rather than posterior tuning pegs, the squared-off rather than rounded lower end, and the distinctive sloping or obliquely-positioned bridge took place in Wales, where the crwth was used at country dances and on occasion in the hands of ballad singers. It was sometimes played at the dances along with the pibgorn, or hornpipe, a capped-reed woodwind with a barrel made from the shinbone of a ram and a bell made from a cow horn. The telyn, or harp, also joined the crwth in performance on some occasions.
It is important to remember that while some of the modern crwths general lyre-like features give it a broad visual resemblance to some very ancient instruments such as the Hebraic kinnor of Old Testament times, the modern crwth, although old, is not a truly ancient instrument and therefore was not played by the Druids or other early inhabitants of Celtic Britain.
It is also important to note that the crwth was not an ancestor of the violin. Surviving iconographic evidence makes it clear that the huge split in the string family that resulted in the emergence of the independent fingerboard lyre - that is, the lyre with a fingerboard but no yoke - and in some cases the incurved sides also, took place not in Medieval Europe but in the ancient Middle East - hence al ud , from which came lute - perhaps as early as ca. 3000 B.C. That pre-dated by over three millennia the development of the chordophone bow, also in the Middle East. Therefore the incurving of the sides of the resonator, or sound-box, took place far from Europe, initially to facilitate plucking, for acoustical reasons, or both, not to aid bowing. The late nineteenth-century view that the violin emerged when the yoke was removed from the crwth and the sides were incurved to help with bowing was a misapplication of superficially understood Darwinian evolutionary theory and in most cases no knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern developments.
AmeriCymru: Why did the crwth disappear?
Jack: Ill preface my answer to that by stating that I, with regret, must face the fact that theres not a religion known to mankind that does not have at least one or two skeletons in its closet.
Evangelical Protestantism of the kind that was found in Wales, beginning ca. 1690 and gaining a solid toe-hold in the early to middle eighteenth century, in my estimation has to have been one of the most odious offenders in the history of Christendom, because it almost totally destroyed an indigenous culture within a very short time. In their works The Psychology of the Methodist Revival, Madness in Society , and The Treveca Letters, Sydney Dimond, George Rosen, and J. Morgan Jones, respectively, paint a shocking picture of the ways in which Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, and other leaders of the religious movement in Wales ca. 1735-40, whipped people up into emotional frenzies to the point of being capable of doing almost anything they were told to do. Recorded cases of markedly abnormal group and individual behavior abound, and lets keep in mind that those are only the documented reports that have survived over more than two hundred fifty years. Those reports become especially believable and troubling after one reads a passage in Ellis Wynnes earlier Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsc (1703; translated by Robert Davies as Visions of the Sleeping Bard , 1897), in which the author speaks of visions of people dancing on the hot pavement of Hell to the music of the crwth. Both the crwth and the pibgorn, due their associations with country dancing, often were brought to outdoor religious gatherings, broken or chopped to pieces, and burned after being declared implements of Satan. By ca. 1750-60, only a relatively small number of crythau (crwths) were left in scattered, remote locations. In the larger cities and towns, the violin eventually filled the void left by the crwth after having often escaped destruction due to its less rural, more academic associations. The telyn (harp), for the same reason, also fared reasonably well. By ca. 1850, after recurring waves of religious fervor, the crwth was all but extinct in practice, nearly wiped out in only a little over a century, along with the traditional dancing that it supported. According to a preserved oral account, the last of the old crythorion died in 1855.
AmeriCymru: You have mentioned what you call extinction in practice. What does that mean?
Jack: It simply means that the crwth stopped being played by anyone anywhere as far as can be determined. It does not mean that no specimens of the instrument survived, as simply extinct would. A small handful of instruments still survive, in most if not all cases without their more fragile original bows. Beginning in the early twentieth century, there was a revival of interest in playing the crwth, and a number of reconstructions and copies were made of instruments, as well as a few made from existing drawings. However, it wasnt until the late twentieth century that the revivalist players, drawing in many cases on musicological investigations, began changing from attempting to play the crwth like a viol or other salon instrument to playing it like the folk instrument it appears to have been. One could argue that the crwth now exists in practice for a second time, but the number of practitioners is tiny in comparison to what it once was, when there was at least one crwth in almost every village and when there were many adages in colloquial speech such as We are playing the crwth in its bag, meaning We are not giving her a fair chance, and An old crwth has a sweet voice, meaning He gets his way through flattery or Stop trying to flatter me! and My bows across the strings, meaning Im ready, and A crwth plays well on an empty stomach, but its player does not, a saying whose meaning is self-explanatory.
AmeriCymru: What happened to Celtic music in Wales?
Jack: You are correct in placing Celtic in quotation marks. As far as Celtic music in general is concerned, there is no universally accepted definition of Celtic music , so your question is somewhat difficult to answer. Also, the fact of there having been little if any ethnic purity anywhere on earth for many millennia, makes Celtic music arguably something of a specious term. Assuming the existence of music closely associated idiomatically with what are usually considered to be the Celtic regions, I would define Celtic music , in a way that is fairly broad yet not all-inclusive, as the stylistically distinctive music of the predominately Goidelic and Brythonic peoples of the European mainland, the British Isles, and the parts of the world to which large numbers of those peoples migrated, including but not limited to the American Southern Uplands, or Lower Appalachia. I make a point of excluding much of the modern popular music that is meant to sound Celtic, first because it has rarely if ever emerged within any of the cultures that I just cited, and also because it often consists of little more than stock motifs using anhemitonic pentatonic gamut segments - that is, scales containing five different letter-designated pitch classes and no half-steps, such as C-D-E-G-A-c. For the same reasons, I usually exclude most academic music that has Celtic allusions. I have heard some pieces that are very idiomatically Celtic, but I cannot call them truly Celtic music because they did not originate within a predominately Celtic culture. In other words, I draw a distinction between Celtic and idiomatically Celtic . Finally, I generally exclude much of what has been created in parts of the modern world by persons of Celtic ancestry. In some of those cases, that music may have a Celtic overlay (again, stock motifs and sometimes pentatonic underpinnings), but it usually lacks a full complement of distinctively Celtic traits, especially its melodic traits namely, tunes resulting from the interaction of the indigenous pentatonic scalar system and one of the structural norms (ballad tune, fiddle tune, lament, etc.) that produced melodies in their entireties. A ballad, for example, had its characteristic combination of scalar and morphological norms, as did other species. To make a long story short, the Scottish Lament for William Chisholm is representative of what could be called Celtic music, but Malcolm Arnolds S cottish Dances are not, except in the idiomatic sense. Likewise, Danny Boy, at least in its original form as played by the blind fiddler, could be called Celtic music, my Celtic Dreams, now in preparation, will be only idiomatically Celtic and Celtic by allusion, and a piece consisting of scarcely anything more than a ramble through one or more of the pentatonic gamut segments and perhaps a familiar stock motif or two is pseudo-Celtic and perhaps could even pass for Native American, Asian, sub-Saharan African, or African-American.
In comparison to much traditional Irish and Scottish music, as well as the transplanted Irish, Scottish, and Scots-Irish music of Lower Appalachia, the American Southern Piedmont (the lowlands between the Southern Uplands and the Atlantic coast), and other areas in the eastern part of North America, distinctively Celtic properties have been, with an occasional exception, generally in short supply in Welsh music for a long time. While the terribly destructive incursions of Evangelical Protestantism into Wales certainly did not help that situation, it would be unfair to lay all, most, or even very much of the blame at that doorstep. It seems that most of the distinctively Celtic properties had been missing from Welsh music for some time before the early to middle eighteenth century. Perhaps most strikingly, Welsh melodies found in early collections such as those of Playford have few pentatonic, or even incipiently pentatonic, properties. From more recent times, the great Welsh hymn tunes such as Hyfrydol, Cwm Rhondda, Bryn Calfaria, and Ebeneezer are heptatonic (seven-toned, major and minor scales such as C-D-E-F-G-A-B-c or A-B-C-D-E-F-G-a), not pentatonic, although the Irish hymn tune Slane, (Be Thou My Vision), from roughly the same period, is markedly pentatonic. Also, few Welsh melodies from the seventeenth century or later follow any of the established Celtic ballad-tune, dance-tune, or other morphological (melodic-contour) norms as closely as so many Scottish and Irish tunes do. As unpleasant as the likelihood, if not the probability, may be to some, most surviving Welsh music from prior to the eighteenth century is significantly less idiomatically Celtic than much Scottish and Irish music, and in many ways is closer to much English music from outside the West Country where, curiously, Celtic properties seem to have thrived until fairly recent times, at least if whats in the collections of Vaughan Williams, Sharp, and others is taken as indicative. Some of this disparity could have to do with the limited number of examples recorded in Wales by Welshmen in pre-twentieth-century times and most of the collections being the work of English auditors who may have corrected what they regarded as errors of scale and melody. However, I do not believe that all the difference can be thus explained away.
There also is evidence that there could have been incursions of non-Celtic idioms into the Welsh musical world perhaps as far back as the late Middle Ages. One document is particularly interesting. It consists of glosses, or inserted non-original material, in the Robert ap Huw manuscript, also known as British Museum Manuscript A dditional 14905 . The main body of the manuscript was a collection of etudes. The manuscript was later owned by Lewis Morris. He added some glosses that purportedly were copied from an older manuscript of un-cited date and origin.
Those glosses speak in very esoteric terms about what could have been a complex pentatonic scalar system, referring to the scales as keys and to notes that can be inserted into the characteristic minor thirds of the pentatonic gamut segments as recess notes. That discussion of keys seems to point toward what was, in the eighteenth century and probably even in the late sixteenth century, an old and established body of Celtic music theory and performance practice. The purported age of the information may be an exaggeration. Rather than belonging to the eleventh or twelfth century, it more likely belongs to the fourteenth century, when contact between Wales and Ireland, the likely source of the material, was more frequent. However, that also was the time when English and Continental incursions from the east and south would have been posing a threat to Celtic traditions, especially in Wales.
Prior to that time, musical knowledge was largely restricted to trained musicians and those in training, and it customarily was learned by memory, not written down. Threats from the east and south could have proven sufficient motivation for the limited written preservation of musical knowledge, although not enough to remove all esoteric terminology. The mention of recess notes could represent an awareness of how the seven-tone modes and scales of the Continent and England were making inroads into the formerly five-tone octave divisions of the Celtic world through the occurrences of additional tones within the characteristic minor-third intervals of the pentatonic system. Therefore the beginning of the end of distinctively Celtic music in Wales could date from near the end of the Middle Ages. Whether or not it did, idiomatically Celtic traits of scale and species-related contours clearly were far less common by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Welsh music than they were in the music of Scotland and Ireland, both of which were more remote from southern England, where the centers of both culture and power were. If the rise of Evangelical Protestantism had anything to do with the disappearance of distinctively Celtic traits from traditional Welsh music, the effect probably was limited.
Concerning the matter of the pentatonic system, see my article titled Scale in Southern Appalachian Folksong: a Reexamination, College Music Symposium (1986), 77-92. An online abstract is available at http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/scl01.html.htm.
AmeriCymru: Two years ago we asked you if the Crwth could make a comeback and you replied that "I think it already has made a comeback.....". Have there been further signs of this over the last two years? Any further encouraging developments?
Jack: Although two years is not long enough to justify a firm declaration of significantly increased activity, there seems to be an increase in website discussions and articles that at least touch on the crwth. Due to health issues, Ive not been able to keep abreast of that as much as Id have liked to, but googling crwth brings up more results than it did two years ago. I cant really quantify an increase in interest, but I can conclude that there has been at least some. With the growth of the Internet, knowledge undoubtedly is spreading, and in some cases thats almost certain to yield an interest in learning to play the crwth, as well as becoming informed about its origins and history, not only via the Internet but also through printed studies, both early and more recent.
AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?
Jack: Once again, I thank everyone for their interest in my work, and I look forward to seeing and meeting as many of you as possible at the West Coast Eisteddfod.
Those who want to look at some of the sources I have used might be interested in my online bibliography of documents dealing in whole or in part with the crwth. Ive listed my own works first, but they are greatly outnumbered by the studies of others on whose shoulders I have stood in many instances. The URL of that web page is http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth04.html . Also, the abstract of my Masters thesis of 1973 is online at http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth01.html.htm
