Welsh Journals

buzzing bray harp, and we must acknowledge that there is no simi- larity between his technique and any other harp technique, except perhaps that for the Irish wire-strung harp. The page containing the 'alphabet' consists of three columns written by Robert ap Huw himself and an additional column of inter- pretation, written by Lewis Morris along with his humble admission, 'these modern notes are only my guesses'. There is a column to the left giving the names of the different figures, a central column giving examples of the figures using the tablature found elsewhere in the manuscript, and a third column explaining the figures using staff notation and triangular note heads, which are sometimes black, sometimes white. As we shall see, the names of the figures, the shapes of the note heads, the direction of the stems and the black and white aspects of the heads all contribute to a unified technique, which exploits the subtle differences in weight between specific fingers, dif- ferences in the angle of the nails striking the strings and differences in the amount of sustained buzzing allowed for each and every note. Figure 2 (pp. 88-9) is my own interpretation of page 35, prepared in collaboration with Robert Evans, grouped according to ascending patterns, descending patterns, single notes and miscellaneous patterns. The triangular note heads are not all shaped in the same way, and as Paul Whittaker has previously shown, these correspond to different fingers used to play the figures.1 Krychu y fawd ('wrinkle the thumb'), no. 11, requires the thumb; interestingly, the next pattern on the list, ysgwyd y bys ('shake the finger'), no. 12, requires the finger, or more properly, any of the fingers. The note heads show three different patterns from that used for the thumb; these are likely to represent the index (second), middle (third) and ring (fourth) fingers. At the top of Figure 1, we find the figure taked y fawd ('thumb choke'). According to our scheme, the fingers used are two and three. Why would it be called the 'thumb choke'? Because the thumb is used to damp the string played by the second finger. Notice that the first of the two note heads is blackened; the second is white. This is because the first note is damped, or 'choked', and the second is allowed to continue sounding. No. 7, haner krafìad ('half scratch'), uses identical pitches, but notice that the note heads are different. If we keep our fingering consistent with the information found in ysgwyd y bys ('shake the finger'), fingers three and four are intended here. We know that, again, the first note must be damped and the second is to be allowed to continue ringing. This is the key to its name: three plucks the first note; four plucks the second note and then slides up one string as a 'scratch' to damp the note three played. The two figures, while seemingly identical in sounding the same