Crwth, which literally denotes a swelling-out or hump, came to be a Welsh generic term for several small lyres beginning no later than the tenth century, and it probably was a reference to the hunch-backed appearance of the yoke, or upper frame, that prevailed all the way through the modern form.

The lyre is one of the three large, diverse groups within the string instrument, or chordophone, family. Lyres and zithers have strings whose planes are basically parallel to the soundboards. That sets both groups apart from harps, whose string planes are more or less perpendicular to the soundboards. Therefore both the autoharp and the harpsichord are zithers,not harps, and the Estonian talharpa and the Finnish jouhikantele are bowed lyres, not bowed harps.

Unlike zithers, many lyres have yokes to which the strings are attached near the instruments upper ends. Yokes can be either open or split. Some split-yoke lyres such as the crwth were equipped with fingerboards, while others such as the jouhikantele were not. Some open- and split-yoke lyres with and without fingerboards were bowed, while some were plucked. Others,such as the crwth, were played both ways.

Lyres of the crwth subclass prior to ca. 1500 were neither native nor unique to the British Isles. They were known on the European mainland by names like chrotta, rotta, rotte, and chorus. The last of those terms also sometimes denoted the bagpipe. In England the lyres sometimes were called by their Continental names. Chaucer, for example, mentioned play[ing] upon a rote in the prologue to Canterbury Tales. In addition to crwth, prominent British Insular terms were crowd(e) and crowth. In Ireland, members of the crwth subclass were sometimes termed crottach and cruit, although the latter

In sum, crwth, crowd, and related terms designated possibly numerous different instruments that often were in stylistic flux and whose lifetimes often overlapped each other over about 900 years.

Except for a few specimens representing the modern crwths immediate predecessor, only fragments of its ancestors survive. Reconstructions of earlier forms are based partly on those fragments and partly on written descriptions but mainly on paintings, drawings, carvings, and sculptures that have to be assessed carefully. For example, a drawing in a Durham Cathedral Library manuscript shows a twelfth-century lyre with drones. However, there is no evidence of drones being consistently associated with the crwth subclass over the next two hundred years. That leaves us to conclude that two tangential drones with four central strings were experimented with at least as early as around 1100, but were consistently present on newly-emerging crwths and crowds only from the middle to late fourteenth century.

The typical crythor, or crwth-player (or, in England, crowder or crowther), from before the early to middle fifteenth century was an itinerant, lower-order minstrel who supplied music at social functions, often on the estates of the landed gentry. British minstrelsy gradually died out over a period of about a hundred years, ca. 1380-1480, due to many of the minstrelsi nvolvement in civil unrest. The instruments of the minstrels, along with some of their practices and music, then were absorbed into the folk culture. Therefore, after around 1480, the crythorion, or crwth-players, were less and less often traveling minstrels and more and more often resident fiddlers for their home communities.

The second stage of the modern crwths life stretched from around 1600 to about 1730. During that time, there probably was at least one crwth and one crythor active in or near almost every Welsh village; and the crwth, its music, and dancing to its music were regular features at fairs, weddings, holiday events, and other festive gatherings.

One type of crwth music was used for competitive solo dancing. Each contestant in turn would enter the room or outdoor dancing area to a processional piece, often carrying a broom across his shoulders, and executing a stylized step that became more and more intricate. The musician then would change to a different piece to which the dancer performed his most ambitious steps, sometimes leaping over a tall, lighted candle, as referred to in the nursery rhyme Jack, Be Nimble. The music changed back to the processional for the dancers exit.

The second stage of the modern crwths life stretched from around 1600 to about 1730. During that time, there probably was at least one crwth and one crythor active in or near almost every Welsh village; and the crwth, its music, and dancing to its music were regular features at fairs, weddings, holiday events, and other festive gatherings.

The crwth also sometimes accompanied ballad singing, a common way of disseminating news in the days before widespread literacy. An example of a ballad tune is this variant of Diniweidrwydd, meaning innocence.

The modern crwth sometimes was played with the pibgorn, a capped-reed woodwind with a barrel made from the leg bone of a ram and a bell and a mouthpiece made from the shell of a cows horn. A capped reed is not held between the players lips. Instead, the player blows into a cap at the top of the barrel, and the reed is located at the base of the cap and vibrates as the airstream passes by it.

Occasionally the crwth was also played in ensemble with the harp, or telyn. An example of crwth, telyn, and pibgorn playing together is my arrangement of The Fox, a reel based on a ballad tune.

Slightly overlapping the middle period of the modern crwths lifetime was the third and final one, beginning around 1720 and continuing until the mid-nineteenth century when, according to oral accounts, the last of the old players died.

During that time, dancing and ballad-singing fell out of favor due to the evangelical movement, which condemned so-called worldly pastimes.The religious movement reached the height of its intensity between ca. 1730 and 1740. That decade was followed over the next hundred years by recurrent episodes of zealotry. During each of those events, crwths, playing cards, and other so-called implements of the devil were discarded and often chopped to pieces and burned en masse in village squares. Only a fraction of traditional Welsh music was written down by musically literate auditors, only some of those records found their ways into print, and editors of publications often corrected folk music according to academic rules and models.

Regarding performance technique, older men traditionally taught the younger men and boys without benefit of methods, books or written collections of etudes or other pieces. Sorry, ladies, but crwth playing was not gender-neutral. In fact, Meredith Morris, in 1920, reported an old Welsh belief that a girl or woman playing the crwth would cause the dead to rise from their graves and wander around the village or countryside. The only contemporaneous written descriptions we have of the playing of the modern crwth are more poetic, picturesque, or travelogue-like than technically precise. Most were written late in the instruments lifetime by non-performers from outside the indigenous culture.

Reconstructive efforts from before the middle to late twentieth century suffered from the investigators almost exclusive orientation toward academic music, models, and methods in the days before modern ethnomusicology. Those investigators also were unaware of evidence that has since been found, analyzed, and integrated into newer assessments of the crwth, its music, its ancestry, and its social function. Finally, few lengthy studies from before the 1970s addressed the crwth alone but rather either ignored it or treated it as an inconsequential, primitive figure in the history of string instruments.

Lets now consider the modern crwth from a post-1960s perspective. That instrument, henceforth called simply the crwth unless the need for clarity dictates otherwise, has four strings over a flat, fretless fingerboard. Those strings are stopped by the players left fingers and normally are bowed. Two other strings are drawn off to the observers left side of the fingerboard and function as unstopped drones plucked by the players left thumb.

There are two reported tunings of the crwths strings, both from very late in its life. The more widely publicized tuning is one in which the bowed strings are tuned in octaves separated by major seconds. That tuning was reported by Edward Jones, in his Musical and Poetical Relicks [ sic] of the Welsh Bards, published in 1784, after a description in National Library of Wales Manuscript 168.C.

In 1800, William Bingley published A Tour Round North Wales, in which he reported a tuning of the bowed strings in octaves separated by fifths,. That report often has been either dismissed out of hand or described as an unusual tuning, due largely to the way in which most investigators have simply passed along Joness report, both uncritically and sometimes without citation of source, thereby fostering the idea that the tuning of the bowed strings in octaves separated by seconds was much more commonly used than the tuning described by Bingley, when, in fact, there originally was only one record of each tuning.

My experiments in 1972 repeatedly bore out earlier declarations of the impracticality of tuning the highest string to B above the treble staff. However, accurate identification of individual tones without mechanical assistance requires perfect pitch, which even most trained musicians do not have. I suspect that Bingley had at least reasonably good relative pitch, heard the intervals fairly accurately, observed that the highest string was tuned quite high, and then either estimated the individual pitches incorrectly or simply notated the intervals arbitrarily to create a visually balanced illustration on the page.

The tuning that I use for the bowed strings is based on Bingleys report, but with pitches at lower levels to allow the tuning of the highest, or rightmost, string. I further suspect that Bingley erred in his notation of the pitches of the drones after mistaking the interval of a fourth above the drones for a fifth. Fifths and fourths are easily confused with each other, especially when other fifths, other fourths, and also octaves are being heard at the same time and in the same key. Raising the pitch of the drones a step each allows them to function as parts of both tonic and dominant chords. It also matches Joness report of drones tuned a fourth below the lower pair of bowed strings. Finally, with regard to tuning, we must recall that the crwth as a folk instrument was subjected to more variation of technique than was acceptable for academic instruments. Therefore, it is very possible, if not likely, that the tunings reported by Jones and Bingley were only two of perhaps several that commonly were used by different performers.

Lets now consider the crwths other principal parts. All strings connected to a wooden tailpiece that was fastened to an end-button by a gut retainer. The strings also were drawn across a bridge whose upper edge was only slightly curved. The slight curvature allowed both the bowing of all four strings over the fingerboard at once and the bowing of groups of two adjacent strings.

Ill now demonstrate the normal plucking and bowing of the strings, the bowing of only two strings at once, and the plucking of strings over the fingerboard.

The crwth bridge has three legs. The long leg on the observers left goes through the corresponding sound-hole, rests against the inside of the back of the resonator, and conducts vibration from the strings directly to the back of the instrument, thus acting as a sound-post. It also takes some of the downward pressure off the flat soundboard, which is not as strong as the convex soundboards of the violin and its kin.

The body of the crwth, including its neck, was carved and chiseled from a solid block of either maple or European sycamore. The soundboard and fingerboard were separate pieces.

The crwth had no separate sound-post and no bass-bar, and playing it above first position was difficult and quite possibly never done. For those reasons, the crwth lacked the power of tone; the expressive range; the three-to four-octave melodic range; and the rich, almost vocalistic, timbre of a well-made violin, viola, cello, or double-bass.However, due to its flat fingerboard and nearly flat bridge, the crwth could function as a self-contained, harmonizing string ensemble more easily than individual orchestral bowed string instruments can. Also, the crwth was potentially much more agile melodically than earlier investigators gave it credit for being. In fact, when one uses the tuning in octaves and fifths, the crwth has nearly the same first-position melodic range that the violin, viola, and cello have. This is shown in the following rendition of the hornpipe Nos Galan, meaning New Years Eve but better known today as Deck the Hall.

The crwth was tuned by turning either pegs or wrest pins installed frontally near the top of the yoke. One seventeenth-century drawing shows T-shaped pegs. Surviving pre-1850 crwths and most copies and reconstructions are equipped with metal harp wrest pins that are turned with tuning keys. To the best of my knowledge, no pre-1850 crwth bows survive, although there are numerous reconstructions. Written descriptions, icons, and the history of the bow all point toward different bow designs employed in connection with both the modern crwth and its forebears.

By the end of the modern crwths life, two common bow designs were those involving 1) the Medieval curved stick with the hair drawn across most of its arc; and 2) the pike-nosed bow with frog, which appeared around 1620 and, by 1680, was equipped with various devices for adjusting the tension of the hair. Some icons showing late pre-modern crwths reveal that a third bow featured a straight stick with hair drawn between a nearly squared-off tip and a block mounted part-way along the stick. What could have been the short-nosed bow mentioned by Gruffydd ap Dafydd ap Howell is represented by a sculpture on a beam in the roof of the nave in St. Marys Church, Shrewsbury.

Written reports, literary references, and old sayings about the crwth point toward preference for an abrasive tone and the loudest possible dynamic level in performance. Therefore it is almost certain that the bow was pressed hard against the strings, and probably drawn diagonally across them near the bridge, most if not all of the time. Diagonal bowing with heavy tracking near the bridge would have produced the desired sound and also could account, at least in part, for the sloping bridge that appears to have been a consistent feature of the fully-developed modern crwth. Ill now illustrate the preferred sound, with the bow at an angle across the strings, by playing the jig Ceiliog y Rheddyn.

Although a loud, abrasive tone was usually preferred, the crwth was capable of some differences in both dynamics and timbre. Ill now illustrate those differences with another jig called Ffarwel, Ned Puw, a variant of a ballad tune by the same name. The original ballad tells how Ned Puw ventured into a haunted cave and was never seen again. Note the echo effect, suggestive of a cave, on the repetition of musical phrases.

The modern crwths immediate forebear was customarily held at either the shoulder or the chest, in some cases supported by a neck-strap. That holding method, which is shown in a panel on what probably was part of a cupboard at Cotehele Manor, in Cornwall, indicates that at least some of the earliest modern crwths were held in the same way. Holding at the shoulder could reflect the influence of the bowed rebec, which, like the pre-modern crwth, was an instrument of the lower-order, itinerant minstrels. Although I am a violinist, I have found it difficult to hold and play the modern crwth at the shoulder. Both that method and holding at the chest cause problems with plucking the drones. Holding at the shoulder is also made difficult by the modern crwths straight-across, or squared-off, lower end. The rounded lower end of the modern crwths parent form makes the shoulder position more comfortable and practical, allowing the player to make small adjustments more easily.

Crwths and crowds of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sometimes were held at the neck or shoulder, with the top of the instrument pointing downward, as represented in the 1397 misericord carving in Worcester Cathedral. It is unclear whether or not they also were sometimes held upright on the players laps at that time. A painting from around 1400, on an interior wall of the chapter house at Westminster Abbey, shows a musician holding his instrument upright against his left knee, but he is shown preparing to play, not actually playing.

I have found the most workable holding for the modern crwth to be the modified upright position that you have seen me using today. This method, which may have emerged late in the instruments lifetime, would explain the disappearance of the earlier, rounded lower end that would not have been needed for holding it that way. Also, by allowing the crwth to roll from side to side, the rounded lower end could have been a disadvantage to one using this cross-torso hold.

Still another change distinguishing the modern crwth from its predecessors is the apparent relocation of the pegs or wrest-pins. Rear-mounted devices, which icons suggest were present on some earlier instruments, are workable while tuning with the bow if the crwth is held up with its lower end at the chest or shoulder. However, frontal tuners work better if the crwth is held either with the upper end on or near the players lap, as shown in the Worcester sculpture, or facing away from the player, either vertically or obliquely upright, with the lower end on the lap. A cross-torso hold also would have worked nicely with the diagonal bow travel and sloping bridge that together enabled production of the abrasive tone. A vertical upright hold does not work as well with diagonal bowing, because it forces an awkward, uncomfortable bow stroke. It also forces a backward bending of the left wrist, which in turn adversely affects finger action. The cross-torso position allows the wrist to be straight and relaxed and the fingers to move smoothly, and the sloping bridge facilitates diagonal bowing with a more natural stroke. In addition, the holding position in combination with the tuning in octaves and fifths lets both melodic and harmonizing notes fall easily and naturally under the fingers.For these reasons, I almost always use the upright cross-torso hold, although I occasionally hold the crwth both at the chest with a strap and, as now, at the shoulder.

A workable variation combining the seated cross-torso hold with the strap-assisted hold is a standing cross-torso hold with a neck-strap. That position, which I have used with some success allows the player to move around while providing some advantages of the seated cross-torso position, although not the same high degree of stability.

Ill now touch on the most important points concerning the modern crwths place in the history of the string family. Middle Eastern instruments with independent fingerboards emerged as far back as ca. 3000-2500 BCE. Their descendants became the ancestors of the lute, the rebec, the mandolin, the guitar, the viol, and the violin. The incurved resonator was an invention that emerged for either aesthetic or acoustical reasons, not to aid bowing. Around the seventh or eighth century of the Common Era, the bow was developed in the Middle East and applied to some independent fingerboard lyres. Within two centuries, both those instruments and the bow had entered Europe.

The emergence of native European lyres, harps, and zithers paralleled Middle Eastern developments. The Greco-Roman kithara, lyra, and testudo are examples of ancient European lyres that experienced a revival in Carolingian civilization and later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.. Like the evolution of Middle Eastern lyres, the emergence and later revival of the European lyres of classical antiquity were separate lines of development from that leading to the crwth.

Other lyres appeared to the north of Greece and Rome from the early Middle Ages until past the tenth century. Developments often were experimental and followed numerous disparate lines, not all of which survived.

From their earliest appearance in Europe, ca. 900, the bow and fingerboard was applied to some native yoke lyres. Thus emerged the European bowed fingerboard lyre with yoke.

We can conclude, from both literary references and icons, that a distinct crwth subclass began emerging from the earlier European lyres in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The following two hundred years, from which more evidence has survived, saw experimentation with bows, fingerboards, numbers of strings, bridge design and placement, other structural features, and probably playing methods. Those events paralleled, but were separate from, those that produced the viol and later the violin and its kin.

By ca. 1400, the two-plus-four string configuration, and probably the bridge with one long leg, were present on at least some members of the crwth subclass, even though older designs were still around.

The final events setting the modern crwth apart from its parent form evidently began about 1500, and they may have continued for some time after that. Those events, not necessarily in the order here named, were: the likely movement of the tuning devices from the back to the front; the squaring-off of the previously rounded lower end that may have prompted Gruffydd ap Dafydd ap Howell to mention a wheel-like front; the standardization of the slightly wider, sloping bridge; the transition from a quasi-academic minstrels instrument to a true folk instrument; the initial building of the new crwths dance and ballad music repertoire around a core of minstrels music; and the confinement of the new instrument to Wales.Although it is hard to be certain on all points, the Cotehele sculpture seems to show most of the final structural changes.

The last part of this presentation will address, through three stories with musical examples, the place of the crythor, or crwth player, in traditional Welsh culture from the early through the final years of the modern instrument. Each story is a variant of a popular folktale.

RHYS CRYTHOR:

In the early sixteenth century, when the modern crwth was replacing its parent form, there lived a curious character now known only as Rhys Crythor, that is, Rhys the crwth player. He was an outstanding performer and the winner of the crwth competition at the 1525 Eisteddfod. Rhys was both eccentric and short-tempered. One day, he rode into town with both the mane and the tail of his horse clipped extremely short. While he was prepared for the people to laugh at him, he was surprised and angered when they laughed at his horse. Later that afternoon, he noticed that the town stable was unattended, so he went inside and located the horses of several of the towns leading citizens. Shortly thereafter, the owners of the horses walked into the stable and were horrified at what they saw. Each horse had its cheeks deeply slashed from the corners of its mouth to the bases of its ears.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Rhys laughed hysterically, wiping his knife on the front of his shirt. Yes, my horse is a funny sight, indeed. Look, even your horses are laughing at him!

THE OLD CRYTHOR:

It was commonly believed that some crythorion had supernatural powers. One such person was an old man who was active during the seventeenth century. He would often appear at a fair in Pembrokeshire during an afternoon, disappear as surreptitiously as he had come, and then be seen in Cardiganshire that same evening. Such rapid travel was unheard of in the days when traveling a distance of only ten to fifteen miles usually took all day or all night. With his long, white, flowing hair and beard, the old man looked like the ghost of some ancient Celtic sage. He often sang, to the accompaniment of his crwth, eerie songs in which he predicted peoples misfortunes. His most chilling prophecy, delivered at a wedding feast, was also his last:

This is my song of final farewell,
For after I have finished and departed,
You shall see me no more;
And your rejoicing for these young people is premature,
For I see nothing but dreadful tragedy for them
And much grief for their friends and loved ones,
And that before the next setting of the sun.

The next morning, the young bride was found strangled to death in her bed. Her husband was suspected of the horrible deed but was never found, and the old crythor was never seen again.

JAMES GREEN:

During the early to middle nineteenth century, there lived near Bron y Garth a certain James Green, who died in 1855 and was, according to oral accounts, the last of the old crwth players. Once, when he was walking into town to play at a dance, Green found himself face-to-face with an irate bull that had strayed from someones pasture. With the bull in hot pursuit, Green retreated up a tree and seated himself on a limb. The furious bull tossed its head and stamped its feet below. To pass the time until the bull left, Green began to fiddle, whereupon the bull gave a terrified snort, turned, and ran.

Stop! cried Green. Ill change the tune! - but the bull soon disappeared around a bend in the road. Ill close now with a quotation from Meredith Morris and one more tune:

To have lived beyond [this time] would not have been good for the health of the last of the crythorion, and it was well that he slumbered and slept. May his shade be mightily comforted when the zephyr playeth upon the crwth of the old yew tree.

DR. J. MARSHALL (JACK) BEVIL is a retired string music educator, a musicologist, and a composer. He holds the degrees M.Mus and Ph.D, both in musicology, from the University of North Texas, with dual specializations in oral-aural traditions, especially those of Celtic Britain and the Celtic diaspora (particularly the American Southern Uplands), and British national music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Sullivan through Vaughan Williams. In addition to his teaching, research scholarship, and composition, he also acts on occasion as a forensic musicologist, or consultant and expert witness in copyright and intellectual property disputes. His masters thesis, The Welsh Crwth, Its History, and Its Genealogy, involved three years of research and writing, including the summer of 1972, which he spent in Britain. Although completed in 1973, that document and its companion sound recording, which together ultimately reached dissertation proportions, remain standard reference material on the crwth. Since completing his masters and terminal degrees, Dr. Bevil has made presentations on the crwth, including both broadcasts and a paper read at a chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society.

Online links of possible interest include:
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth01.html.htm - thesis abstract
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/disab.html.htm - dissertation
abstract
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/pubpr.html.htm - list of
publications and presentations
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/tnc02.html.htm - post-doctoral
investigation, question of music played during the Titanic disaster
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/ku2009.html - post-doctoral
investigation, linguistic basis of British national musical style, ca. 1870-
1920
www.scoreexchange.com - compositions online (under Browse / B