Tagged: crwth
From the Wikipedia :- " Deck the Halls" (original English title: "Deck the Hall") is a traditional Yuletide and New Years' carol. The "fa-la-la" refrains were probably originally played on the harp. The tune is Welsh dating back to the sixteenth century, and belongs to a winter carol, Nos Galan.
The tune is that of an old Welsh air, first found in a musical manuscript by Welsh harpist John Parry Ddall (c. 17101782), but undoubtedly much older than that. The composition is still popular as a dance tune in Wales, and was published in the 1784 and 1794 editions of the harpist Edward Jones's Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards. Poet John Ceiriog Hughes wrote the first published lyrics for the piece in Welsh, titling it "Nos Galan" ("New Year's Eve"). A middle verse was later added by folk singers. In the eighteenth century the tune spread widely, with Mozart using it in a piano and violin concerto and, later, Haydn in the song "New Year's Night.
Originally, carols were dances and not songs. The accompanying tune would have been used as a setting for any verses of appropriate metre. Singers would compete with each other, verse for verse known as canu penillion dull y De ("singing verses in the southern style"). The church actively opposed these folk dances. Consequently, tunes originally used to accompany carols became separated from the original dances, but were still referred to as "carols". The popular English lyrics for this carol are not a translation from the Welsh."
The above version ( together with many other tracks ) is performed by Dr J.Marshall Bevil on the Welsh traditional instrument - the crwth. Linked below is a three part interview with Dr Bevil about the instrument:-
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Master of The Crwth - Digon o Grwth Part 1
Master of The Crwth - Digon o Grwth Part 2
Master of The Crwth - Digon o Grwth Part 3
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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
Dr. Jack Bevil demonstrates the Crwth at the 2011 West Coast Eisteddfod: Welsh Festival of Arts
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Duration: 00:02:26
AmeriCymru interviewed Nial and Cass about the album and their past and future musical projects. Please read on below.
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Americymru: Hi Nial and Cass and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. Please tell us more about your new album 'Oes i Oes'?
Nial – Thanks for asking us! Oes i Oes was originally going to be an album with a children’s focus – we were both inspired by the David Grisman and Jerry Garcia album “Not just for Kids” (I’m sure some readers will be familiar with this recording, and if not, I unreservedly recommend it!) This was the idea of a grown up album using material that was originally children’s. And that still might appeal to kids. So some of the songs are children’s songs or hwiangerddi – lullabies, nursery rhymes, and some other lyrics are semi nonsense and are from penillion, which is a traditional body of verses sung either to any tune that would fit, or used for Cerdd Dant. Some I remember singing at school. And though at pains to retain the traditional feel, we’ve sometimes been quite cavalier in our treatment, putting lyrics to different melodies and vice versa and even writing new music or lyrics if we thought it would be successful. It progressed from the original concept to some extent, but hopefully still retains a sense of the childlike.
Americymru: Care to tell us something about your musical backgrounds? What bands have you played in in the past?
Cass - I grew up in a family where singing and playing together was normal and learned tunes by ear as well as having classical violin, viola and piano lessons. Viola was my main instrument until I got a repetitive strain injury from playing it! Then I got interested in folk music at university and picked up the folk idiom on fiddle. I ended up researching Welsh folk music for a PhD and learned to play the crwth while I was at it, which is a medieval Welsh bowed instrument. First band I was in was a ceilidh band, then I joined Pigyn Clust in 1998 and Fernhill from 2000 to 2004. I released a solo album of crwth music (called 'Crwth') in 2004 and since then have mainly been playing with Nial.
Nial – Not many bands you’ll have heard of! Since the seventies I’ve played dance music – Ceilidh music and in pub sessions predominantly. Though I played in a punk band in art school I’d say I come more from the tradition than Cass does – I was taught fiddle by a traditional fiddler on Tyneside, dear J Forster Charlton, a real old boy from before the folk revival, and I played for years in his band, The Borderers. Musically I’ve always been interested in arranging, so I’ve usually had a hand in that aspect in the collaborations I’ve played in. Having played fiddle, mandolin, bass and guitar in various bands, I like to think I have an insider’s awareness of the possibilities.
Americymru: Is this your first musical collaboration? How did you come to be working together?
Nial – We’ve been playing together over a decade, and this is our second CD. Cass and I both moved into the area at around the same time. I was moving from Tyneside back to where I was brought up, and my parents lived locally. A friend of my mother’s told me about this girl who had moved in next door who played a strange instrument – crwth - in her garden. Then the girl turned up at my workshop with a problem with her fiddle and I realised who she was. I first started playing with Cass as a gun-for-hire accompanist, fairly infrequently because she was playing with Fernhill and Pigyn Clust at that time. But as we played more often, and as the material became more arranged, less extempore, we started to gig as a duo. At that time it was all instrumental, songs and singing came later.
Cass - Yes, singing is a bit more of a recent thing for me - other than in the bath, that is... I took a bit of persuading. Our duo was very convenient when I lived down the road and had very small children. I'd ring Nial to tell him the kids were down for a nap and he'd pop down for a couple of hours to practice. We had a lot of time to develop intricate arrangements, argue about chord progressions, rearrange the whole lot... that was the fun of it really. The records and gigs had to be done to justify the amount of time spent!
Americymru: Can you tell us more about the range of traditional instruments used on the album?
Nial – Well, strangely, the viola is only infrequently met in traditional music. When Cass first suggested it I needed no convincing as it’s used so effectively on one of my favourite albums of the eighties, “The Lasses Fashion” by the Scottish band Jocks Tamson’s Bairns. We used it very sparingly on “Deuawd”, our first album, too.
My guitar is steel strung, by the noted British luthier, Stefan Sobel, and is quite different in concept, constructionally and sonically from the Gibson and Martin models most luthiers follow. I notice his guitars turning up in the hands of top American players more and more frequently, most recently Darrell Scott. Where appropriate I try and play it with a hint of the harp in sound and lines.
Fiddle is THE most universal folk instrument, surely? Although the Welsh fiddle style is a broken tradition, it is thought that it was played in a lyrical and singing manner, with less decoration than, say, Irish fiddle playing. Cass often uses it as a second voice, and can sing while playing a different line. I’d need two heads to do that.
And finally, crwth is the instrument Cass is best known for. It’s a sound from another time, isn’t it? The medieval soundscape with drones and buzzes, not the clarity we seem to seek in instruments now. I think of its contribution as slabs of sound emerging with each bowstroke, the nearest any acoustic instrument comes to heavy metal guitar! But beautiful all the time in the way heavy guitar only rarely manages to be. Cass’s is a copy of a late 17 th C early 18 th C crwth in the National Library in Aberystwyth. It’s one of only a handful of surviving instruments.
Americymru: Cass...you recently edited an anthology of eighteenth century Welsh fiddle tunes, some of which appear on the album. Where can we find this book online and which tunes appeared?
Cass - Not that recently. 10 years ago now. It's called 'Alawon John Thomas' and is available from the National Library of Wales. www.llgc.org.uk and is an edition of a manuscript of tunes collected by a working fiddler called John Thomas in the mid-eighteenth century. There are over 500 tunes in the book which vary from dance tunes to song tunes to snatches of tunes by Handel - by no means all Welsh tunes. We used three tunes from the collection, 'Excuse Me', 'The Drummer' and 'The Key of the Cellar'.
Americymru: Nial....we learn from your website that you specialise in the making of 'Fine Crwths of single piece construction'. How long does it take you to make a crwth. How much could a first time buyer expect to pay for one of these superb instruments?
Nial - I trained as violinmaker back in the eighties, a proper apprenticeship, very rigorous. I became interested in crwths through contact with Cass – how could I not – and the violin background gave me the craft skills to be able to make, and make something which – hopefully - stands comparison with the highly developed violin aesthetic. They are made to sound as well as look good, though, of course. They’re a little quicker than violins - a few months - but the one piece construction (apart from the table), carved from one solid piece - does mean that as work progresses, there is all the time the worrying possibility that a slip could take out months of work! Price wise, I have to charge about two thirds of what a violin would cost, so starting at £4,000.00, $6140.00 with access to beautiful de luxe old wood extra on top of that.
Cass - Nial's crwths are the best of any I've ever seen, in look, sound and feel. Really beautiful.
Americymru: Why do you think that, historically, Welsh traditional music has been overshadowed in terms of its popularity by its Irish and Scottish counterparts?
Nial - That’s a really interesting question. I’m sure that Cass will have views on this. But…Certainly the late 18 th / early 19th century enthusiasm for Scottish country dance music and traditional melodies amongst the gentry was paralleled by Welsh music being played in the most fashionable circles in London, and enjoying the greatest praise for the beautiful quality of its melodies. But later in the 19 th century much damage was done to the tradition and a great deal was lost – when I say a great deal, I mean both music and the respect for traditional music. There were various factors at work here, but mention must be made of the enthusiastic takeup of Wesleyanism, and the doctrine that only hymns and religious music had legitimacy….bonfires of fiddles, the devils instrument, and hymns sung around the house instead of folk songs. By the time the eisteddfodau got going, much of the folk music of Wales was being forced into respectability and clinging to legitimacy only as a competitive art-music. And to a large extent that is the profile it has enjoyed on the world stage ever since. In comparison with, say, Irish traditional music, you have to remember that postwar, until the folk revival, playing Irish traditional music on a fiddle or whistle was deeply unfashionable, something sad old men did in a corner in a pub while youngsters shook their heads despairingly – but Irish music in the end prevailed, so, optimistically, maybe the Welsh revival is still to come. Certainly the media, broadcasting and the like do few favours for Welsh traditional music, and compare very unfavourably with what my VHF tuner receives over the water from Ireland ….both Radio na Gaeltacht and Clare FM play predominantly Irish traditional music for much of their output. Despite being a music station, Radio Cymru has only one program per week playing Welsh acoustic music, but only some of which is traditional, Radio Wales has the folk programme Celtic Heartbeat which, as the title suggests, does not play exclusively Welsh folk music. And it isn't even on the radar for television.
You then have a catch 22 situation whereby because there is no platform for Welsh traditional music, there is no exposure to it and the general populace are unaware of it, they do not demand it, and crucially, provide no market for it.
A broken circle.
So musicians in Wales either play what puts bread on the table – Radio Cymru’s rock output, much of which is unoriginal and derivative, but pays, or a select few play Welsh folk music for their own amusement in the corner of pubs. And good for them. Fewer still forge some sort of career out of it.
Outside Wales, folk enthusiasts are largely unaware of Welsh songs and tunes, and if pressed, might typify what they thought of as Welsh folk music as being “The Ash Grove” sung by a classically trained voice to sophisticated but unsympathetic harp accompaniment, a la the Eisteddfod. No matter how skilfully done, this sort of thing is not going to convert the unconverted…I’m not anti Eisteddfodau, by the way – I’ve attended and enjoyed many, from my kids school ones to the National Eisteddfod. They have great atmosphere and spectacle (especially the school one 
). Just that I think in the long term their contribution to the tradition and traditional music has not been a positive one.
Before closing though, I WILL emphasise the positive; exploring this overlooked area, overlooked for whatever reasons, means discovering neglected gems… and a heads up and respect for CLERA, the Society for the Traditional Instruments of Wales, who are doing as much as they can, with support for music and workshops. And as Cass says, let us not forget the progress of the last couple of decades.
Cass - I think Welsh music is definitely on the up at the moment in terms of public profile, thanks to CLERA, trac and a whole lot of bands that have been playing away largely unnnoticed for the last 40 years! I would say though, that the true measure of the health of a tradition is not how many bands and CDs are out there and how many people are aware of them. The true measure is how many people are actually playing and singing Welsh folk music for pleasure and passing them on to other people. That's the important thing and the child learning a song at school is as much a part of the tradition as the pub session or the band on stage. In fact, more so. There are certainly a lot more people playing Welsh music now than when I first got interested, nearly 20 years ago. It's always been an underground thing and I should think it always will be. I'm more concerned that it's passed on as community music within Wales than that people outside Wales know about it or that bands make a living.
Americymru: Any plans for live appearances?
Nial – Sadly no. This CD is sort of our swan-song, and it’s unlikely that we’ll be gigging it, or making another. Not from a Pink Floyd style acrimonious split – good e-copy though that would be! – but because Cass has some very good reasons, which I’m sure she’ll tell you about, and because for myself, I think that we’ve taken our collaboration as far as it’s going to progress. There’s also a distance problem now with rehearsal – we used to live only a couple of miles apart, now it would be a long car journey. And also, I kind of like the thought of going out on a high too. Think television comedy shows….by the time they’re on their eighth series, they are SO safe, formulaic, predictable…then you watch the rerun of the first series and realise how inspired and risky it was…once. Cease after the second series…it should be the law!
Cass - I''m taking a break from performing for the foreseeable future. I'm heading more in a spiritual than musical direction at the moment and putting my energies into church life. The reason I moved was that I felt called to the area we now live in, to support Christian youthwork and children's work. I'm in the process of working out where that call is going to lead me in the longer term! I think we've both moved on really.
Americymru: Where can people go to buy Oes i Oes online?
Nial – It’s a self produced and financed release, selling through Bandcamp, here Oes i Oes
Americymru: What's next for Cass Meurig and Nial Cain?
Nial - I’ll be playing fiddle for twmpaths ( Welsh ceilidh dances) with my band Aderyn Prin. I do so really enjoy playing for dancing. And the band’s pretty busy, which is good. Also I’ve been doing some gigs with my 15 year old son, Danny. He’s a great fiddle player. We’re “The Artists Formerly Known as Danny and His Dad”.
Cass - Musically, I'm writing hymns at the moment, metrical settings of Scripture to folk tunes. I'm also interested in storytelling, particularly Bible storytelling for children - I've trained in the Godly Play method which I like a lot. That takes up a fair bit of my time. I'm also appearing as a guest musician playing crwth and fiddle with Cerys Matthews in the opening night of WOMEX in Cardiff in October - but that's a way off! Not planning to do any other gigs at the moment.
Americymru: Any final message for our readers?
Nial – How about some musical recommendations? I don’t think Google and Amazon have Welsh folk music predictive advertising nailed as yet. So, here goes….People who liked Oes i Oes might also like Perllan , or anything else by the band Pigyn Clust, might like Cerdd Cegin’s recent release Medlar Pear , might like Dore by Bob Delyn, might like Fernhill’s Canu Rhydd , other Fernhill releases or anything else Ceri Rhys Mathews, Julie Murphy or the other Ferhill members are involved in. For a player wanting to learn some traditional Welsh music, Y Glerorfa’s Yn Fyw live recording is a great listen and has many excellent Welsh tunes, appealingly arranged and played. Readers might like our first album too – Deuawd .
Cass - And my solo album Crwth . Assuming your readers are listeners of taste and discernment? That's all. Enjoy!
Nial – Hwyl!
Greetings, one and all. I have made the MP3 files of crwth music on my page available to those who would like to use one or more of them at their sites. All I ask is that the source be cited.- Jack
http://americymrunet.jamroomhosting.com/j-marshall-bevil-phd/uploaded_audio
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
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9. Were you able to find compositions or music for this instrument? What kind of music was used for?
"The crwth was a folk instrument, and as such was not supported by a written musical tradition. Both the method of playing it and the music for it were traditionally passed down from father to son, and I gather that there was more than a modicum of guarded secrecy. Sorry, ladies, but the traditional belief was that it was such bad luck for a girl or woman to play the crwth that her so doing would literally wake the dead and send bodies from the churchyard wandering around the town. Morris relates an account of that view in his monograph. I personally do not share that view, by the way!
10. You've composed music for the crwth - is there a particular type or style of composition you think it best suited to?
"I prefer either re-created or adapted to composed in most cases. Everything at this site, for example, is music that was initially fashioned by some talented but anonymous folk artist who probably did not read or write a note of music. There is musicality in each of us, just as surely as there is a penchant for verbalizing. As far as actual composition is concerned, I’ve had in my head for years – decades, in fact - a multi-movement piece called “Twmpath Dawns” (“Dance on the Village Green”) for crwth and orchestra, but I’ve only committed a tiny portion of it to writing. That’s one of so many things on my to-do list for post-retirement. Its style is not at all original, but rather based on that of the dance and ballad tunes that I located in my research, although I’ve not actually copied any of the melodies."
11. How important is the crwth in the Celtic musical tradition?
"I would regard the crwth as very important, although I have come to consider the oral-aural tradition supporting both the playing of it and the music for it, along with music for other folk instruments and vocal music, as even more important, not only because oral-aural tradition is the foundation on which so much else in folk culture is built, but also because what exists only in memories is so volatile and easily lost. Instruments are concrete phenomena and hence more durable entities. That is part of why my doctoral dissertation was on the oral-aural processes in melodic transmission, preservation, and change rather than on an instrument."
12. Do you believe that the crwth can make a comeback? Does it have a place in the mainstream musical tradition?
"I think it already has made a comeback as part of the larger emergence of both popular interest and scholarly inquiry in Celtic music. As to whether or not it will attract a huge following, I suspect not. We must remember that, of all the music education programs in our schools, strings in general tend to be the smallest group in terms of participants. For example, in American public schools, band members outnumber orchestra members ten-to-one, although, interestingly, studies have shown that string players are more likely than wind or percussion players to keep playing their instruments after finishing their formal educations. In my son’s high school, there were four huge bands and one orchestra of modest size. Given the limited number, although usually the deep dedication, of string players, I suspect that the crwth attracts and will continue to attract a relatively small but intensely devoted group of adherents.
Technically the crwth is in general far less facile then modern orchestral string instruments, and it’s not supported by either the huge written musical tradition or anything even remotely approaching the instructional regimen that exists for them. It is best suited to the music for which it was created, which is but one enjoyable but narrowly circumscribed segment of the entire Western instrumental music repertory. Hence I suspect that, while someday the crwth may enjoy an even greater status than it now occupies as an historical instrument useful in, for example, certain movie soundtracks or period and/or regional compositions, it will never stand as an equal partner with the violin. This is certainly not to speak disparagingly of the crwth in any way. After all, within the continuum of its particular repertory it can provide its own accompaniment and in so doing perform a feat at which the violin is far more limited except in the hands of a few of the greatest virtuosi.
There always is the possibility, of course, that a composer will come along who specializes in writing for instruments outside the usual academic milieu. There, in fact, was such a composer in the last century. His name was Harry Partch. He even invented some special instruments, in some cases by adapting earlier designs, and I seem to recall that he wrote for some antique instruments such as the panpipes. To the best of my knowledge, he wrote nothing for the crwth."
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13. Other than on this site where can people obtain samples of your work?
"There is my personal website, which includes the main crwth page that’s linked on my Americymru page. For direct access to my online bibliography of publications and presentations, go to http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/pubpr.html.htm It includes listings for my studies in other areas as well as those on the crwth.
My other “crwth pages” are as follows:
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth02.html (performance advertisement)
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth04.html (thesis bibliography with additional references)
A copy of my thesis is available via university interlibrary loan from the Music Library of the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, 76203. Also, as I’ve previously stated, I make and mail copies for the cost of production and mailing. I plan to put the whole thing, with revisions reflecting what appeared in my running supplement of addenda, online eventually."
14. Do you give live performances or demonstrations with the instrument?
"Yes, I do, although not all that often. I’ve performed with a harpist at the Mucky Duck Pub in Houston, a location where entertainment often includes live Celtic music, and I’ve performed at wedding receptions and various fundraisers for the arts in the Houston area since the late 1970s. At one point I was with Young Audiences of Houston. Also, I was once on “Inside Area-5,” a feature news program in the Dallas area, not too long after completing my thesis. For more detail, see my performance advertisement listed above."
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3. Can you tell us a little about the history of the instrument?
We should remember, first of all, that crwth, which literally means protuberance or a swelling out , and probably refers to the rather hunch-backed appearance of both the most recent instrument and most of its forebears, denoted several different small, hand-held lyres that were used in western Britain at least as far back as the early eleventh century. The modern crwth, meaning the most recent instrument so designated, was one of the last of the bowed yoke lyres. That large and diverse species seems to have emerged around A.D. 900, when the bow crossed over both the Bosporus and the Straits of Gibraltar, entered Europe in a sort of pincers movement, and was applied to pre-existing European lyres that previously were plucked. It’s important to keep in mind that bowed instruments did not emerge along a single line, and that, in particular, the viol and violin did NOT emerge from the crwth and similar lyres when the yoke of the lyre was removed and the sides were incurved to facilitate bowing. Independent fingerboard lyres (that is, those with fingerboards but no yokes), including those with sides incurved for acoustic reasons, were developed as plucked instruments in the Middle East, perhaps as far back as around 3000 BC. One school of thought treats them as an entirely separate family from the lyres, calling them collectively the lute family. They, too, crossed over into Europe during the first millennium of the Common Era and later had the bow applied to them. It is from those that the viol and violin emerged. Unlike the viol and violin and their larger relatives such as the viol da gamba, violoncello, lyra da braccio, and double-bass viol, whose designs became standardized, the bowed lyres existed in many different forms in various regions of Europe and were used as instruments of the minstrels until the end of minstrelsy shortly after the close of the Middle Ages. After that, they were absorbed into the various local folk cultures, where a few of them survived in practice until fairly recent times. The Scandinavian talharpa , for example, could still be found in use as late as the early twentieth century, although it appears to have emerged prior to the advent of the modern crwth.
The modern crwth seems to have sprung from at least one and perhaps multiple closely related immediate prototypes within the Welsh folk culture, probably around 1500. It thrived there as a fiddle used at country dances and in some cases by ballad singers (the “newspapers” of the time and place) until around 1730. It seems to have been played most often as a solo instrument but on occasion in ensemble with the harp ( telyn ) and hornpipe ( pibgorn ). The crwth and pibgorn, along with dancing, were victims of the rise of the evangelical Protestantism, specifically Calvinistic Methodism, that swept Wales, much like the Great Awakening in America, in the 1730s and ‘40s. Large numbers of those instruments, along with decks of playing cards and other so-called implements of the Devil, were destroyed in what can be described most accurately as a mad orgy of religious fervor. The harp, due to its academic associations, suffered much less. The crwth and pibgorn survived, albeit in much smaller and diminishing numbers, in some remote locations for about a century beyond that time. According to oral tradition, the last of the old crythorion , one James Green of Bron y Garth, died in 1855.
With the establishment of musicology as a recognized discipline, initially under the leadership of German scholars, in the early twentieth century, came an interest beyond the dilettante level in old music and old instruments, including the crwth. Unfortunately, many of the early investigators were less than careful in their treatment of instruments outside the academic mainstream, and it was at that time that many erroneous notions regarding the crwth arose, including the view, representing misapplication of Darwinian biological theory, that the violin emerged when the yoke arms were removed from the crwth and the sides were incurved. Also prominent were romanticized, utterly unsupportable notions such as that of the crwth’s having been played at Stonehenge and elsewhere by the Druids. Still another error was that of superimposing academic performance technique, primarily that of the viol, onto the playing of the crwth. Much of the research since then, including mine, has been devoted to debunking earlier views and approaching the crwth and other folk music phenomena from within the native cultures as much as possible, not from some far-removed point in the academic mainstream.
4. How would you describe its sound?
"In brief, the sound is something of a cross between a fiddle and a bagpipe, especially when the tuning in paired fifths is employed. A tuning in paired seconds is still mistakenly regarded as standard. Initially it was reported by only one writer, Edward Jones, in his Musical and Poetical Relicks [sic] of the Welsh Bards , and then subsequent writers picked up on that and passed it along unquestioningly. The tuning in paired seconds is practical for playing chords, but very impractical for the playing of melodies. The tuning in fifths, with a dominant between the two roots or keynotes, has numerous precedents and parallels in the history of European string instruments, and turns the crwth from a dull, droning instrument into a reasonably nimble melodic executant with the ability to support its own melodies harmonically – in essence, a self-contained string ensemble. The tuning that I use is based on William Bingley’s report in A Tour Round North Wales . While Bingley almost certainly was in error in reporting the height to which the highest string was tuned, I suspect that he was more generally correct in reporting a tuning in paired fifths (for example G-g-D-d for the strings over the fingerboard). That is very similar to George Emerson’s report of the Scottish fiddle tuning G-D-g-d ( Rantin’ Pipe and Tremblin’ String ), a tuning that also used to be common among the old-time fiddlers here in America, especially in Appalachia, where chordal playing made possible by nearly flat bridges was once very common. Tuning in paired fifths, incidentally, differs from standard violin tuning in that the latter is in consecutive fifths (G-D-a-e) to facilitate mainly melodic playing.
5. Were you a violin or other stringed instrument player prior to discovering the crwth?
"Yes, I was a violinist. I still am, and one of my favorite activities is directing a group of youngsters in a string orchestra program. I’ve played my crwth with their chamber ensemble, or top group, on occasion, using my arrangements of traditional dance tunes, and we’ve all had a great time with that."
6. Was it difficult to move from the violin to the crwth? How different is playing the crwth, and how is it different?
"Yes and no, with regard to difficulty. At the time I was reconstructing crwth performance methodology, I had been away from the violin for over a year, so the shock was minimal. The biggest adjustment was learning to apply a lot more pressure to the crwth bow. A bow drawn across the strings at an oblique angle, rather than at a right angle as on the violin, will “ice skate” out of control, and also produce a thin sound, if it’s not pressed firmly. Pressing it firmly, of course, produces a tone that’s totally taboo on the violin – namely, a lot of upper partials and plain, old squeaks. That sound, however, was prized among crythorion . There’s an old Welsh adage that states in translation, “Let him who plays his crwth sweetly be hanged!” I have found going from crwth back to violin more of a challenge than going from violin to crwth. It’s easier to go after an instrument somewhat aggressively, as one must do with the crwth, than to approach it with the care, restraint, and meticulous finesse that one must use in playing the violin. I suspect the adjustment would be not quite so marked, at least in terms of right-hand technique, if I were a double-bass player."
7. How widespread is the crwth today? Are you aware of other crwth players, groups or crwth makers?
"I would say that it is more widespread now than it was when I began my research. More importantly, it is now more often viewed and played as the non-academic, folk instrument than it was, as opposed to the prevailing pre-1970s methods that were based on academic technique. Certainly the crwth, along with the bagpipe, penny whistle, and other traditional Celtic instruments, has benefitted from the enormous, almost exponential, explosion of serious, disciplined scholarly interest in, as well as the increased general popularity of, traditional Celtic music over the last thirty years or so. I have seen crwths advertised in a number of catalogs, including that of Lark in the Morning. I know that there are a number of makers both in the U.S. and the U.K. Anyone interested in obtaining one should have no trouble locating a maker on the Internet. Since I have my own, I have made no inquiries myself. Anybody interested in making an historically correct crwth of his or her own might find handy the appendix of my thesis, which includes detailed descriptions and diagrams of known originals and copies."
"That question makes me think that I need to write a tutorial on the subject. At the risk of sounding dreadfully conceited, which I’m really not, I’d suggest my thesis. I can provide copies, at production and mailing cost, to those who are interested. It does not include a tutorial on playing the crwth, but it goes into more detail than any earlier document that I know of in describing what appears to have been playing methodology. A summary of that can be found in my online abstract of “Some Observations Regarding Crwth Performance,” the URL of which is:-
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth03.html
I also would be happy to answer questions in e-mail, as in fact I’ve done on occasion over the years ( llywarch@earthlink.net saves the trouble of writing via Americymru). If there appears to be enough interest, I can eventually post some information online, but of course that cannot be done overnight. Having said all that, I should stress that the crwth has not been the focus of my musicological activity for over twenty years. During that time there may have been written one or more tutorials that are based on reliable investigations and that avoid advocating academic technique such as one would use with the viol or violin.As far as previous knowledge and skills are concerned, a background in playing strings is helpful, especially an understanding of how whole steps involve spaces between the fingers while half-steps do not, if one is a violinist or violist. If one is using the diagonal cross-torso hold that I prefer (holding it up like a violin makes working the drones very difficult), a background as a cellist could be useful, except that the distances between the points of contact on the strings are smaller. Probably the biggest problem regarding left-hand technique is that of extending the thumb sideways and plucking the drones. That gives the entire hand sort of a claw-like character that is totally alien to orchestral string playing. The thumb rests against the side of the instrument’s neck on the violin and viola, and it rests on the back of the neck of the cello or double-bass.Anyone seeking tutelage from any crwth player needs to find someone who is knowledgeable of the crwth’s history in performance, and particularly someone who does not treat it like an academic instrument. In other words, run for your life from anyone who teaches the crwth as merely the less agile cousin of the violin or viol!"
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1.What prompted you to make the decision to study Celtic music, and why did you specialize in the Crwth?
"I have been aware of my predominately Celtic roots almost ever since I can remember. As a small child, I used to listen to my great-aunt, who was born in 1871, sing some of the old ballads. She and my maternal grandparents, with whom I spent many idyllic childhood summer days, had a lot of the old-country expressions in their speech, even though they were born and raised in the American Midwest. My grandfather Marshall, while not a practicing musician himself, was a lover of fiddle music and owned several shellac-disc recordings of the Irish fiddler Patrick Gaffney in performance. I still remember playing “Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!” over and over, on my grandparents' “wind-up” 1915 Victrola that I now own along with the collection of records, most of which have survived several moves.
My investigation of the crwth started in 1965-1966, during my senior year in high school (S.P. Waltrip, Houston), when my studies in English focused on British literature. I volunteered to find out what Dylan Thomas was speaking of in “Under Milk Wood” with his reference to the crwth and also to parchs (ministers). Already being a violinist, I was fascinated with what I learned about the crwth, gathered more than enough information to mightily tax the patience of the classmates to whom I subsequently discoursed, but personally was left with far more questions than answers. Even from that quick, cursory investigation, I became aware of the many conflicting views about the crwth’s origin, its development, its function, and its place within the large and diverse chordophone, or string, family. Demands of college kept all the questions largely on the back burner for the next four years, except in the case of a research project that I did in my senior year, in connection with which the crwth came up again as a tangential issue. Unable to get it out of my mind and, frankly, being more than a little irritated over being unable to answer a lot of nagging questions to my own satisfaction, I took up the matter in earnest the following year in graduate school at the University of North Texas (1970-’71), as a semester project in my first musicological research seminar. The result was what even then I felt to be a less than satisfactory, seventy-page study that presented the often diametrically opposed views of earlier investigators such as John Hawkins, Anthony Baines, Kathleen Schlesinger, Hortense Panum, Karl Geiringer, Arnold Dolmetsch, and others. While my professor commended me heartily, I was still far from satisfied, so I deliberately spent an extra year and summer on my master’s degree in order to bring closure to something that had been bedeviling me for years. My research took me far beyond the University of North Texas Music Library and other American repositories to the British Museum, the National Library of Wales, Durham Cathedral Library, the library of Trinity College in Dublin, the Welsh Folk Museum in Sain Ffagan, numerous sites where important icons exist such as Worcester Cathedral and St. Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury, and the homes of a number of live informants across the water. The final product was a thesis that, even with substantial cuts, reached dissertation proportions before wrap-up and nearly drove me mad but, at the same time, was a pleasure to prepare. For a number of years after its presentation in 1973, I maintained a running, annually updated volume of addenda that took into account studies that came out after the completion of my thesis, until doctoral study and both teaching and research fellowships forced me, after more than a decade, to lay the matter aside. I still perform from time to time on the crwth, and I still occasionally run across something new in the way of valuable information, such as iconographic evidence. I have no illusions (or delusions) of having answered all questions once and for all, so it’s something to which I plan to return after retirement from teaching, probably sometime within the next couple of years."
2. How widespread was knowledge of the crwth when you began your studies? How difficult was it to obtain information/source materials?
"There was a fairly large amount of superficial knowledge, along with a huge volume of often contradictory theory about both the crwth’s origin and its place in the string family, particularly with regard to its relationship to the violin and its kin. Source materials were rather plentiful, but many of them were both brief and dated, even in 1966. Further, most of them treated the crwth as a side issue, relegating it to the category of curious anachronisms among string instruments. It wasn’t until I located the Meredydd Morris monograph, in the Welsh Folk Museum, that I found a whole book-length document on the subject; and even it, while of enormous value in terms of the place of the crwth in Welsh folk culture, was of limited usefulness in terms of technical matters. My reconstructions of both the genealogy of the crwth and the playing techniques were dependent on an understanding of the entire string family in general and fiddles and fiddling in particular.
As one who was still something of a novice investigator, I had to learn quickly how to pull the necessary strings to obtain access to materials that were in closed-stack holdings, which most of the British repositories were. Fortunately, my major professor had anticipated that and prepared for me a letter of introduction that helped greatly everywhere except the British Museum, where one stickler of a bureaucrat informed me that they did not accept recommendations from American professors, and that I needed to get a recommendation from, perhaps, Thurston Dart at King’s College, London. When I told him that such was quite impossible in light of Professor Dart’s rather recent demise (eliciting a giggle from a pretty girl behind the desk who did not care for the bureaucrat and later told me that she was so glad that he’d been caught in an error), I was told to go to the American Embassy. I later learned that such shenanigans were not official museum policy, but merely reflective of one small individual’s prejudice. At any rate, armed with my letter from the American Embassy, I ultimately gained entrance to not only the reading room but also the special manuscripts room of the British Museum, where ink pens are verboten and even turning a page with a pencil in one’s hand is a cardinal sin.
The Welsh Folk Museum was wonderfully accommodating, not only furnishing sources that I requested but also assigning two staff members to assist me during the several days that I was working there. Assistance with translating the archaic colloquial Welsh in a number of documents was of enormous help, and my assistants even tracked down some material that I had previously known nothing about, including the Morris monograph. In addition, I was allowed to examine, photograph, and measure each of the original instruments and reproductions in the museum’s holdings.
I would have hit an unyielding, insurmountable wall at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth had it not been for the assistance of a librarian who aided me with documents written not only in the characteristic backhand script of the fifteenth century but also in late medieval Welsh."
Clog Dance Music (solo crwth)
album: The Welsh Crwth, Its History, and Its Genealogy
genre: Folk/Traditional
"Yr Hen Wyddeles" (dual crythau)
album: The Welsh Crwth, Its History, and Its Genealogy
genre: Crwth
"Llanover Reel" (dual crythau via overdubbing)
album: The Welsh Crwth, Its History, and Its Genealogy
genre: Folk/Traditional
