The project wanted to explore issues around indigenous language, culture and identity, looking at how music carries language while also transcending language across the globe.
It was a completely new cultural experience for Irish singer-songwriter Lauren Ní Chasaide.
“I’d never done a song-writing residency before, and culturally I didn’t know anything about Wales,” she says. But one thing quickly emerged for her. “At any given time, the Welsh people in the group would want to break out in four-part harmony,” says Lauren. “Is that a national thing? It was fascinating!”
Jordan Price Williams was one of the Welsh contingent (and, presumably, one of the four-part harmonisers). He studied classical double bass at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and is one of the best folk multi-instrumentalists of his generation.
“The main thing that came out was finding common ground in our varying heritages,” he says. “Everyone who plays traditional music within the British Isles likes to think of our individual traditions as being unique, and they’re really not. Everyone has a jig or reel or hornpipe.
"But in Wales the music is different, and I think it’s because in Scotland and Ireland they carried on playing their music across the 19th and 20th centuries, so it carried on being developed. When the Methodists moved into Wales in the 19th century, people stopped playing traditional music. So the music has been preserved in an earlier form.”
Not everything was lost, though: there were still plenty of triple-harpists and clog dancers around to pass on their knowledge. Cerdd dant – the uniquely Welsh art of singing an improvised counter-melody over a harp tune – remained in rude health. The medieval harpist Robert ap Huw (c1580-1665) had thoughtfully written down a manuscript of harp music, which preserved the bardic tradition from centuries before (the music has been painstakingly recreated by the duo Bragod, incidentally).
The Welsh Folk Song Society was duly set up in 1906, and its tune-hunters set off on safari into the rural heartlands, collecting and notating songs, a job continued by the St Fagans National Museum of History during the 1960s and 70s.
Meanwhile in Ireland, a new ‘Celtic folk’ idiom was being created by Irish bands like The Chieftains, The Bothy Band and Planxsty. Thanks to them, and a huge audience in the Irish diaspora in America, Ireland became the dominant force in Celtic music.
Wales had a bit of catching up to do. In 1976 the Wales Tourist Board, as it then was, put together a quartet of top Welsh folk musicians to fly the musical flag at the Festival Interceltique de Lorient, a vast annual gathering of Celtic musicians in Brittany.
The band wrily named themselves Ar Log (it means ‘for hire’). At Lorient they met another Irish folk behemoth, The Dubliners, who encouraged the Welshmen to stick together and turn professional.
Ar Log continued to expand - in 1983 the musical polymath Stephen P Rees joined. He’s both an academic – he teaches music at Bangor University – and a gifted multi-instrumentalist who went on to play a central role in the Welsh folk music revival, later forming another seminal Welsh band, Crasdant. For their source material, the Welsh revivalist dug deep into Welsh musical history. They toured the world, establishing a solid ground on which Welsh folk could build.
“For people of my generation it was very important because it was something we didn’t seem to have, and therefore we tried to make it,” says Stephen.
In the 1990s he helped to set up Clera - The Society for the Traditional Instruments of Wales - which revived interest in old instruments like the crwth - a bowed lyre – and a shepherd’s pipe called the pibgorn. The whole idea of ‘traditional folk instruments’ is a bit moot: Irish music happily absorbed the banjo and bouzouki into its repertoire. But the old instruments found a voice in new music.
“You do what you can with what you have,” says Stephen. “And if you’ve got a revivalist bent, which I and many of my colleagues did, then you want to work out how these instruments sounded and how they worked. The great thing about the pibgorn is you can integrate it into a group, just about. It’s not a great idea to do that with the crwth: it’s a solo instrument, and it’s great for accompanying a solo singer.”
Stephen also co-founded trac (Folk Development for Wales) to nurture young talent. “It’s a new way of transmitting traditional music - through group workshop teaching, as opposed to the oral tradition from father to son, and so on,” he says.
The result is a new generation of young Welsh musicians who are fantastically literate in the music of their cultural past, but totally unafraid to rip up the rule book. For instance, Jordan Price Williams draws a lot of inspiration from the former mining village where he grew up, Cwmafan, in the South Wales Valleys.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3Lnqpnm5%2BifKKuzq6raJulocG2vsRoqainpKh6orrDZqqhp5%2BpwG7DxKWqoWWWpLmsecyuqqKb