Welsh Journals

HANES Y DELYN YNG Nghymru/The STORY OF THE HARP IN WALES. By Osian Ellis. University of Wales Press, Cardiff. 1980. Pp. 91. £ 1.50 Well-produced, with numerous diagrams and pictures, this year's St. David's Day bilingual book makes a welcome addition to the history of Welsh music. It makes available to a wider public the author's lecture on a similar topic published by the Cymmrodorion in its transactions for 1972-73, together with material the author has gathered in the last decade. Though the origins of the harp and the crwth or crowd are dis- cussed well, the material in Professor Jarman's article on the crwth and harp (Lien Cymru, 1961) might have been drawn upon with more advantage to show several points, for instance that in the later middle ages the small Welsh horsehair-strung harp fought a losing battle, it seems, with the large brass-strung Irish harp. The first important point of the book is the author's discussion of the great changes in Welsh harp music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much of the book is concerned to interpret the music album copied by Robert ap Huw in 1613, the subject of interpretation by many distinguished scholars since its rediscovery in the mid-eighteenth century. Osian Ellis has the advantage of being a world-famous harpist himself, and his interpretation of the difficult notation of Robert ap Huw appears to make a good deal of sense. He shows, however, that Robert ap Huw's manuscript is a pointer to the loss of a large and interesting medieval musical repertoire, which had probably become obsolete by about 1600, replaced by the new musical fashions of western Europe, reaching Wales through the city and court of London. The second strong point of the book is the author's discussion of the revival of Welsh music during the eighteenth century, the work in the main of three harpists, Blind John Parry, Edward Jones, and John Parry, Bardd Alaw. Blind Parry's amanuensis was a lesser-known Welsh mu- sician, Evan Williams, and Osian Ellis has discovered a remarkable manuscript volume prepared by Evan Williams in 1745 for publication, which is the earliest description of how Welsh songs were sung to harp accompaniment. This led Osian Ellis to investigate the origins of the unique art of singing to the harp or canu penillion. The art has always been supposed to be of the greatest antiquity, but he concludes that the art in its present form, with its improvised descant above a harp melody, was not evolved until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. His third important point is the question of the Triple Harp (the large harp with three rows of strings, unlike the modern concert harp, which is the French harp and worked with pedals), the instrument de- fended by Welsh patriots as the Welsh harp par excellence in the later nineteenth century. Osian Ellis suggests that such harps were not made in Wales before the early-eighteenth century, and that they were in origin based on the Italian Baroque harp. It is perhaps not made sufficiently clear here that the Triple harp lost ground to the French harp in Wales, despite the spirited defence of partiots such as Lady Llanover. The historian will find a good deal of material in this book on Welsh society, for changes in music are reflections of wider cultural displacements