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"All histories of music need contexts, but some more than others. The relevant contexts, at least in western music, have been patronage (whether benevolent or commercial), cultural production and distribution, the audiences for which music has been written and performed, the needs and purposes it has served, and how continuities have been interrupted by musical or extra-musical interventions. It would not be an enormous step to think of Welsh music history in similar terms were it not for the sizeable adjustment needed because Welsh music has not consistently followed the path of the mainstream European tradition. There is no body of secular works in the art music category from before the mid-twentieth century that has gained sustained public interest or deserved serious analytical attention, so no claim can be made for Welsh music to have a composer-led history. It can therefore reasonably be asked why Wales should famously be regarded as a 'musical nation' and a 'land of song'. These could be dismissed as stock phrases of the type routinely tagged to national stereotypes, which gain currency by repetition, but it would be a mistake to pass over them too lightly. They deserve unpicking because they contain historical substance, and to an extent, have configured the way the Welsh have regarded themselves and how others have often described them"--
List of contents
1. Music in Welsh history Trevor Herbert; 2. Words for music: describing musical practices in medieval Welsh literature Helen Fulton; 3. Music in worship before 1650 John Harper; 4. Secular music before 1650 Sally Harper; 5. The eisteddfod tradition Rhidian Griffiths; 6. Women and Welsh folk song Wyn Thomas; 7. Instrumental traditions after 1650 Rhidian Griffiths, Trevor Herbert and Stephen P. Rees; 8. The Celtic revival Helen Barlow; 9. Musical communications in the long nineteenth century Rhidian Griffiths; 10. Nonconformists and their music Martin V. Clarke; 11. Professionalisation in the twentieth century Lyn Davies; 12. Composing Cymru: Art music since 1940 Nicholas Jones; 13. Traditions and interventions: popular music 1840-1940 Trevor Herbert; 14. New traditions: Welsh popular music into the twenty-first century Sarah Hill; 15. Singing Welshness: Sport, music and the Crowd Helen Barlow and Martin V. Clarke; 16. Postscript: Contemporary Wales, devolution and digitisation Trevor Herbert, Sally Harper and Sarah Hill.
About the author
Trevor Herbert has written extensively on the cultural history of instrumental music, especially brass instruments in various periods and social contexts, and co-edited the award-winning Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments (2018). He has also written on the cultural history of music in Wales. He was co-editor of the seven-volume Welsh History and its Sources series.Martin V. Clarke has published widely on the relationships between music, theology and religious practice, including the monograph British Methodist Hymnody: Theology, Heritage, and Experience (2018) and the edited collection Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2012). He was a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Listening Experience Database project.Helen Barlow researches around the intersections between history, music, literature and visual art. As a member of the Listening Experience Database project, she investigated the history of ordinary people's experiences of music. Her publications include Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (2013), co-written with Trevor Herbert.
Summary
Ranging from early medieval musical bards to pop music in the twenty-first century, this book describes Welsh musical practices and traditions and the forces that have shaped and directed them, probing the reasons why the idea of Wales as a 'musical nation' arose and became embedded in popular consciousness.
