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The Role of Robert ap Huw in the Creation o/Lbl MS Add. 14905 PAULWHITTAKER This article attempts to find answers to various questions about the musical content of Lbl MS Add. 14905, the unique Welsh harp tablature known as the Robert ap Huw manuscript (c.1613).1 Did Robert ap Huw intabulate aU or part of this music? Did he copy all or part of it from another source, and if so, how familiar was he with the material as a practising musician? Was he able to exercise an editorial role in his writing? Many previous investigators have given thorough descriptions of the manuscript as a whole, including a valuable article by Stephen Rees and Sally Harper in a previous issue of this journal.2 I am here particularly concerned with the musical text of the manuscript, which extends from pp. 15-101, with an interruption for the diagram on p. 35 explaining aspects of the tablature. It is immediately evident that the whole of this text bears the stamp of Robert ap Huw's individual style of writing. With one exception (discussed below), the page layout is uniform, as is the method of intabulation. Particularly noticeable are various non-musical features, such as the wavy line that often indicates the end of a section of text, the spiral and cross signs, and rubrics such as 'ffordd' ('continue as before'), which mark repeated and abbreviated sections. The musical text falls into five divisions, which are fairly well defined by their content and also by the fact that they are separated by inter- ruptions in the intabulation. These divisions are: the gostegion the clymau cytgerdd the first group of caniadau the profiadau and other single-section pieces the second group of caniadau The first and second groups of caniadau are, but for two pieces in each group, stylistically distinct. Were it not for these four excepUonal