The Welsh bowed lyre

Welsh music tradition, both classical and popular, was effectively oral until the 16th century. There are descriptions from time to time which shed some light on early music in Wales, usually from churchmen such as the 6th-century monk Gildas, who contrasted the declamatory style of the king's bards with the tuneful music of the church, or Venantius Fortunatus a half century later, who wrote that the Britons played the crotta, a vernacular name for an early unbowed ancestor of the crwth, itself a descendent of the lyre. Most important of all are the extended descriptions of instrumental and vocal music in Wales by the 12th-century cleric Giraldus Cambrensus (Gerald of Wales) which include for the first time accounts of the music-making of ordinary people.

Music and poetry were sister arts, and poetry was generally declaimed or sung to an instrument, usually the harp, although two other instruments, the crwth (crowd) and the pipes also had high status. The medieval laws describe bardic training which was long, highly regulated and predominantly oral. Accredited bards were expected to be accomplished in cerdd dant ('the craft of the string') which often involved declaiming the genealogies of their patrons, praise-singing, prophetic poetry and elegies.

Occasionally an eisteddfod (a competitive session of poetry and music) would be held to award degrees to poets who had passed the bardic examinations. By the 16th century the hierarchical bardic system was deteriorating, and an eisteddfod was held in 1523, followed by another in 1567, in an effort to regulate bardic practices and stop, or at least slow, the system's decline. About this time some of the secrets of the bardic profession which had previously been passed on orally began to be noted in treatises which contain much valuable information, although no written music. There are references to music manuscripts, but as far as is known the earliest extant notation of secular music in Wales is 'Musica neu Beroriaeth', written in 1613 but containing much earlier material. The manuscript is now in the British Library (GB-Lbm Add. 14905).

The notator was Robert ap Huw (1580-1665) a harper and poet from Anglesey in north Wales, and his manuscript of music of the bardic order written in tablature has given rise to a good deal of discussion regarding its interpretation. From the late 1720s it was passed around among antiquarians and scholars, until in 1844 it went to the British Museum. Interest in the manuscript has continued to the present day, and the crouther Robert Evans has for many years been engaged in researching the problems involved in deciphering the tablature and performing the music. In the process he has acquired immense knowledge of the poetry, the music and the environment in which they were rooted. The booklet which accompanies the CD Kaingc (Bragod, rec 2004; see www.bragod.com for ordering details) is a little gem in which Robert Evans shows how the music in the Robert ap Huw manuscript is solidly based in the European musical tradition as it developed from Pythagorean theories through Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville et al, but he also shows the ways in which it is unique:

. . . it is not a single melodic line like plainsong; a single line for which an instrumental accompaniment has been found like a troubadour song; the interweaving of many freely-moving lines like a madrigal; or a melodic line moving against a drone as in pibroch, the formal music of the Scottish pipes. What the treatises describe, and what we find in Robert ap Huw's tablature is music made by separating, contrasting and carefully combining or mingling notes of the scale, which have been divided into two sets, cyweirdannau and lleddfdannau, fixed and movable strings.

There have been numerous theories and explanations of the Robert ap Huw manuscript, but this is the most convincing, being put forward by a scholar with special knowledge of the harp and the crwth who is also a performer. As well as the masterly essay on cerdd dant, there are discussions of the instruments used and the history and repertoire of the period. Many CDs...