Welsh Journals

The Music and Arts Clubs-What are they ? By WALTER DOWDING THE industrial revolution and the Methodist revival between them crippled, while they did not destroy, the age-long Welsh culture and forced it into new, sometimes not wholly satisfactory channels, viz., the National Eisteddfod and Gorsedd of the Bards, the competitive Drama movement. In consequence, life in Wales, particularly in the south, has indubitably been coarsened in the last 200 years-and weakened in its cultural fibre. Last year a new, vigorous art movement in Wales semi-crystallised in The Welsh Federation of Music and Art Clubs." It may, or may not, be of vital significance for our time. Has the moment arrived when, instinctively, Welsh people are groping for a way back to a more civilised, cultured existence, or is the new movement in the arts, symptomised by the mushroom growth of Music and Arts Clubs all over the country, merely evidence of another wave of emotional escapism, this time in the arts rather than in religion or politics ? One cannot answer this question satisfactorily without an under- standing of how the clubs have come into being. In general, one may say they are partly a result of the pioneer work of the National Council of Music-particularly the work done during the long years of unemploy- ment partly, they are a result of the music, drama and art work at the half dozen or so educational settlements-work also initiated and formed during the black and bleak inter-war years. If this analysis be correct, then one may prophesy, with some confidence, that the Music and Arts Clubs have come to stay. Some existing clubs may disappear, some new ones-one hopes-arise, but it seems clear that a new and popular art movement has been successfully midwifed by a few keen people, and is likely to grow, rather than decay, at least for some time to come. Evidently the Clubs themselves think this, since they have now entered into association in The Welsh Federation of Music and Arts Clubs." There is no question of the Clubs being, literally, a movement." So far, it is largely undirected and capable of many changes in direction, and it might be well before it gathers into a main stream, clearly set in its course, that we should examine its possibilities.