Welsh Journals

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forced by history, is an essential consideration.2 At a general level, change is reflected within the styles and structures of music, and more specifically within individual pieces and songs. An existing piece of music may therefore not always be the 'original' creation of its author, if such a thing ever existed. More likely, it possesses its own individual characteristics accumulated over a period of time. Bruno Nettl defines tradition as encompassing the different pro- cesses found in the history of a musical repertory, while transmission is the way in which a tradition is passed on.3 The two terms are some- times used colloquially to emphasize two sides of a culture: on the one hand its stability, on the other, its tendency to change. Leo Treitler maintains that compositions within an oral culture demon- strate many similar features,4 and stability in oral traditions has been accepted, perhaps unconsciously, as a positive value by ethno- musicologists. Nettl identifies four possible transmission models for any individ- ual composition, concluding that every repertory contains material that fits into such patterns: Type I: the composition, once created, may survive unchanged, more or less intact, during the transmission process. Type II: the composition may be transmitted and changed in a single direction, thus continuing its life in a different form from the original, but without prolific variants. Type III: the transmission process may produce many variants, some of which are abandoned and forgotten, while others remain a part of the culture. Some variants remain more or less stable, others change constantly. Type IV: in principle the process is similar to the previous example, but other materials (motives, structures, patterns) are borrowed from unrelated compositions and/or styles during the transmission process.5 However, the vocabulary of Western music is too limited to define musical units which are genetically related to each other, and this argues strongly in favour of familiarizing oneself with musical ter- minologies which are confined to specific cultures. The meaning of the Welsh term cywair (pl. cyweiriau), for example, is ambivalent within the repertory of cerdd dant. It may imply 'tuning' or 'scale', but can also be taken to mean 'consonance' or 'established pitch'. Rules or patterns within composition and performance maintain and even strengthen the cultural identity of a people, and material from outside its musical vocabulary may not be understood or accepted.