Peter Greenhill: Discussions On The Music of The Robert Ap Huw Manuscript

DISCUSSIONS ON THE MUSIC OF THE ROBERT
AP HUW MANUSCRIPT
EXCERPTS FROM ONLINE DISCUSSIONS
PETER GREENHILL
Here is a collection of my contributions over the years to discussions on a wide
assortment of topics relating to the astonishing treasure that is the Robert ap
Huw manuscript and its music, updated to January 2020. The scope here is very
broad-ranging since the music comprises the main substance of our knowledge
about what was produced on medieval stringed instruments in Northern Europe.
It is therefore the point to which the historical problems relating to those
instruments – harps, bowed and plucked lyres and psalteries, in their solo and
accompaniment capacities - need to be referred. The excerpts here are drawn
from posts on the Yahoo! groups: apHuw, WireHarp and Anglo Saxon lyres, and
have been re-ordered under the main headings and subheadings below. The
headings follow the same pattern as the titles of my series of dissertations (see
here) on my reconstructing of the music, which these posts amplify. For Paul
Dooley’s CD of a selection of my reconstructions of the pieces in the manuscript
see here.
Public attention to medieval Northern European music has been overshadowed by

the popularity of the Southern tradition – of estampies and troubadour songs for
example – during the 250 years that the tablature of the manuscript was
presenting its barriers as the greatest challenge in the study of musical history,
but hopefully now the Northern tradition is in the process of resuming its rightful
place in the popular imagination.
I am very grateful to the many contributors to the discussions which have

prompted these posts of mine, for the stimulation of the new perspectives and
information they have brought and for the patience they have shown in working
through issues which are often complex and involved. Respecting privacy I have
duly removed references to other contributors’ names in this collection of my
posts but I must acknowledge my indebtedness particularly to the stalwarts of
online discussion on the music: Chris Ridgway, Gorwel Roberts, Ben Dijkhuis and
Pat Yarrow.
CONTENTS
Methodology
The importance of accuracy and precision in the translation of the manuscript
Errors in the manuscript
The competence of modern scholars of cerdd dant
The relationship between cerdd dant and folk music
Beauford’s Irish tablature
The Iolo Morganwg manuscript
Provenance
The significance of the manuscript
The origins of the music tradition
The mythological and artistic background
The extent of the Welsh tradition
Peter Greenhill: Discussions
Monasticism and string-playing

Secular schools
Musical Arthuriana
The loss of the tradition
The home of Robert ap Huw
Instruments
The meanings of ‘telyn’
The nature of various types of harp in medieval Wales
The timpan and the crwth
The accompaniment lyre
The solo lyre
The harp psaltery
Reed pipes
Tuning
The organization of cerdd dant harmony: triadic and tetradic harmony
The emergence of the double tonic in my translations of the tablature
The origins of cerdd dant harmony and the double tonic
Their relationship to ecclesiastical chant
Perspectives from ethnomusicology
The music of the spheres
The relationship of the Cantigas de Santa Maria and other medieval music from
Continental Europe to double-tonic harmony
The carrying forward of double-tonic harmony
The relationship of Breton music to the double tonic
Tuning and intonation in cerdd dant
Recent advances in intonation, cyweirdant and tyniad
Avoidance of the tritone
Tro tant
Tuning sets for early harps in Wales, England and Ireland
Tuning sets and the church modes
Pedrylef Wyddel
The emergence of modern triadic harmony
Technique
The fingering movements
Playing cerdd dant on the metal-strung harp
Playing cerdd dant on the crwth
Playing cerdd dant on the timpan
Playing cerdd dant chords on the lyre
Metre
Cerdd dant mesur patterns in folk music
An ancient affinity with the measures
The I O symbols
Understanding the measures
Rhythm
Repertory
Y Ddigan y Droell
The profiadau
The gostegion
The cainc compositional form
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The clymau cytgerdd

Caniad Pibau Morfydd
Cwlwm Alban
Verse
Expression
The three types of musical ethos
Meditative music: suantraí
Music for sorrow: goltraí
Festive music: geantraí
Music for war
Expression in The Four Temperaments
Review
The revival of the music
The typeset copies of the Robert ap Huw manuscript
A proposed summary of contributions
The relationship between cerdd dant and piobaireachd
Vocal lamenting
METHODOLOGY
THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY AND PRECISION IN THE TRANSLATION OF THE

MANUSCRIPT
May 9, 2013
“Should we assume that all harpers who played the same music, even in ap
Huw's own time, performed it with exactly the same gestures, no matter their
own personal difficulties with the gestures and regardless of other influences on
their repertoire?”
This is a really important issue, which needs to be answered by the records.

There's a mention of the need to learn at the beginning 'blethiadau oll' - all
plethiadau - and another of the need to learn 'blethiadau yn warantedig' -
warranted plethiadau, with the implication that they had been secured by being
written down, as in a warrant. Page 35 in the manuscript serves as such a
document. So it was expected that the fingering movements would be learnt
properly. The same was true of the pieces - once they were composed, the
licensed performers had to learn them and be tested that they knew them - the
performers' status, advancement and the performance fees they could demand
depended on success in the tests. A passage in the Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan
regulations that governed the licensing of musicians explains the difference
between composition and the reproduction of a composition in performance: (in
translation)
“A professor of string music should compose clymau and caniadau himself

under warranty and to be kept by a professor of the skill and the learning
that warrants it, and not those who play it …
… And there is a great difference between composers and recitalists,

because composers know how to compose everything and recitalists play
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something which he (the composer) composed before, because he who

composes that which was never composed (before) and which none of the
recitalists of music knows what it is, that one deserves the praise and the
honour because of it, and he who follows the art and does not know how
to compose anything may be compared to an animal, in praising the
braying of a donkey compared to the nightingale, or, on the other
hand, the loudest loud sound. Therefore it is not he who plays loudest who
is considered wise in learning.”
Seemingly in ignorance of such passages, an entire doctoral thesis was once

written suggesting that the performers might have had discretion in playing the
pieces, that they might have been allowed to radically deconstruct and
recompose them, but without looking into if this was actually the case or not.
Music was tightly regulated by the licensing system, to protect musical standards
on a nationwide basis and to preserve the pieces correctly. There were unlicensed
musicians but it was made as difficult as possible for them to actually make a
living from it. If picked up whilst travelling they could be arrested and prosecuted
for not having a license. I expect that folk music could have been flourishing but
only without much money changing hands except if it was undercover.
The 'bible' on the historical documents relating to music in Wales is David

Klausner's gargantuan Records of Early Drama: Wales (Toronto, 2005), which is a
phenomenal achievement, given the huge number of documents. We're very
fortunate that there's a vast amount that's known about the bardic institutions of
music-making in Wales, so it's always best to check the records before assuming
that something isn't known and needs to be worked out.
Because of all the regulations, we can have some confidence that the people who
first recorded the pieces that Robert copied into the manuscript were trying to be
faithful to the original compositions. Part of the purpose of writing them down in
the first place may have been to 'warrant' them to provide exemplars against
which disputes about what comes next in a piece could be settled. The pieces are
certainly recorded with great precision in the detail. Most pieces are so cohesive
within themselves that you can see they were composed to be difficult to alter - if
you change a bit here you have to change lots of other bits elsewhere or break
the whole narrative logic of the piece - the story it's telling.
This is great that the manuscript is so precise, even giving a lot of fingering
detail, because this is the most intimate contact we could ever have with these
people from the distant past, who lived in a culture so very different from the one
we've got now. And the fact that their music institutions, standards and practices
were so very different from ours makes the contact all the more valuable.
Jan 9, 2014
Returning to the subject of the accuracy of playing the pieces, here's another
reference to the separation in cerdd dant between composition and performance,
from about 100 years after that one I quoted a while back. Robert Peilin
defined the recitalists of string music as those who “play what the composer has
earlier composed with tune and measure”.
It's not ideal if we change a piece then, or if we mistake how it was. In the Sixties
people were still having to guess at all the basics of the music - note
identification, note placement and note duration. When I started on the
manuscript I refused to accept that 'we can never know', that all we can do is to
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guess at those things. It was only when I'd learned all the pieces off by heart (it
took a few years!), when I knew which bits of the tablature relate to other bits,
and which bits don't, that I was in a position to really start nailing the music.
Those of you who've heard my translations, from my recordings or Paul Dooley's,
will have noticed how clear and how tuneful (really hummable) the melodic lines
that have sprung out are, and how the measures weave the tunes and the bass
harmonies together reliably. This is what the evidence I've found indicates as to
how the pieces went, and whenever I go back to the more complex pieces I fall in
love with them all over again. I've got enormous respect for the composers but
I've got just as much for the performers, who managed to memorize vast
quantities of music. Tellingly, the most prized pieces were the most difficult ones
to hold in memory. They have traps in them, tempting you to take wrong turns.
They sometimes have variations which hinge on just a single tiny change. They
sometimes take abrupt new paths, taking you over a cliff. They sometimes almost
stand on the spot, going nowhere. They sometimes have mysterious inserts,
episodes which seem to have come out of the blue. They play with our
expectations - often the expected happens, and often the unexpected happens.
They lead us into a labyrinth.
The other route we have into traditional classical music in medieval Europe is
Andalusian music. The contrast could hardly be greater - it has almost nothing in
common with cerdd dant. The flexibility in performance you always find in
Oriental classical music - nauba, maqam, raga - is just one of the differences. I
suppose in cerdd dant the autonomy of bardic organization - the independence
from patrons - must have helped the development of composing. In Andalusian
music the musicians were employees of municipal authorities, and further east
they were in service to the Emir, hence the emphasis always on performance.
All the differences surely mean cerdd dant could never have been a product of the
great diffusion of Arabic learning northwards from Spain that began in the 11th
century. And Wales is a good central point for us to have a sample of it
from, flanked by England with its triadic polyphony on one side and by Ireland,
which was thought to have been the source of the system, on the other.
I hope these thoughts kindle interest in the music itself, and not just in the
technical details of how it was produced. I know I'm endlessly fascinated by the
twists and turns of the pieces, and by what those meant to the cerdd dant
musicians and to their audiences. It's all so extraordinary, that so much
treasure could ever have become lost.
May 13, 2016
Well said …. And of course there are ethical issues involved in playing what you
like to play, if you take that to the public. Let’s take Edward Jones and his Caingc
Dafydd Broffwyd and break it down into the steps he took. He made guesses as
to what the tablature symbols might mean and what the music that the tablature
captured might have been like, to arrive at something he himself at the time
found at least acceptable and perhaps delightful. We can see now that he was in
the wrong time signature and the wrong tuning, with the wrong accenting and the
wrong note values, although he had the order of the notes correct.
Then he added notes to bolster the chordality. Then he went to town on the
whole concept and composed eight flashy variations on what he had initially
created, to create a long virtuosic piece most suited to his instrument: the triple
harp. So far so good, given that he wasn’t disregarding any firm evidence which
had been uncovered by that time which contradicted his initial guesswork. He was
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playing what he liked, although I imagine he had had it in his mind from the
outset that he could make commercial use of what he had created.
He then published his score (pp. 70-72 of ‘The Bardic Museum’ 1802)
accompanied by the explanations: “A Sacred Theme”, “Majestic”, “The above
Subject, was taken from a curious musical Manuscript of the 11th century; and
probably the Tune is of a much more ancient date”. By using the words ‘theme’,
‘taken’, ‘subject’ and ‘tune’ in the small print he has perhaps narrowly avoided
presenting to the public his creation as a statement of fact about the music
represented by the manuscript; nevertheless his creation has been and is still
commonly taken to be a statement of fact about the old music. “That’s how it
was” many people think today. The public are accustomed to taking statements
of fact by perceived authorities on trust.
If we play what we like but present it to the public as from the manuscript
without qualification, many will take the music they hear as fact. Similarly, if we
present opinions or guesswork about it as bald facts, many will take those on
trust too. The consequences can be terribly damaging to everything to do with
the music, especially when the trust begins to falter.
Oct 9, 2015
Yes indeed, the cerdd dant tablature drew on all sorts of elements in other
tablatures, and it may very well have been devised to record the old tunes
because of fear of their extinction. Another possibility that occurs to me is that
they were recorded to warrant the pieces, i.e. to provide an authoritative
reference in writing. Either way, the tablature was devised close to the extinction
of the tradition, so we can indeed be confident that it had been an oral tradition
apart from the catalogues of the pieces’ characteristics: the title, the measures,
the cywair and some details of the strains, and the written explanations of
composition and playing technique and so forth.
That said, the tablature is a unique combination of elements and all of its
elements don’t occur in other tablatures. It was specifically designed - I don’t
think ‘tailored’ would be a strong enough word here - to successfully capture
everything that the experienced cerdd dant harper needed to know about a piece.
It was a highly specialized idiom and that required a highly specialized tablature,
one that was idiomatic to the technique and structure of the instrument, in order
to be successful.
As far as we know, the cerdd dant tablature was not used for any other music,
with the sole exception of the Johnson’s Medley fragment in the Iolo MS. As to
whether the intabulator of that had it in mind to create or record a harp
arrangement of the piece or not, or whether he was just experimenting to see
what he could capture of the piece in the harp tablature, perhaps with didactic
aspirations, I think it’s hard to say. But either way, his intabulation of it shouldn’t
be taken as implying it had ever been part of the cerdd dant repertory, when its
origin is known to lie outside that. And the appearance of its title in the Lleweni
tune list shows that in a Welsh context in the 1590s it was part of an influx of
English dances, ballads and lute tunes; that is, of Elizabethan popular music. In
Wales, then, it was perceived as what it was and not confused with cerdd dant. I
think it’s true to say there was a cultural collision going on, in the wake of
Elizabeth’s strong reaction to the Counter-Reformation. That put heavy pressure
on Welsh patrons of the arts to disassociate themselves from their heritage and
adopt the new fashions. But that’s another story …
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Oct 19, 2015
These are very important issues you’ve raised here … . By viewing them through
the Statute regulations, the clymau cytgerdd emerge as very different indeed
from the rest of the repertory. As the clymau in the manuscript are relatively
simple to play, one would expect a requirement to know them all to appear early
on in the apprenticeship ladder laid out in the Statute, but this isn’t the case. It’s
an odd thing, and a very telling thing, that knowing all the 24 clymau cytgerdd is
only required at the disgybl pencerddaidd level in the 1523 versions of the
Statute and at the level of winning the silver jewel in the 1567 versions. Knowing
the 24 difrau only appears in the 1567 versions, and at the pencerdd or athro
level. This doesn’t fit with an interpretation that they were performance pieces
such as the caniadau, the clymau ymryson and the gostegion were. It does fit
with composition, which also appears in the Statute syllabus (1567) high up and
late in the hierarchy, at the level of the pencerdd in relation to his elevation to an
athro, a professor, and not before that level. The pencerdd must, if he is a
telynior: ‘dangos kerdd gvarantedic oi waith e hvn yn bennkerddiaidd ac yn
athrawaidd val y bo kydwybodus i bennkerddiaid a doethion varnv ai ddewisso yn
awdur ac yn athraw ar i gelfyddyd’ (present a warranted cerdd (instrumental
piece) of his own work, in pencerdd- and athro-like style, so that it may be
possible in the judgement of penceirddiaid and wise men to judge whether he
may be selected as an awdur (author, composer) and athro (professor) in his
art). The athro was the producer of instrumental compositions, as is apparent
from later in this passage.
The clymau cytgerdd are well suited to being used as a means by which the
principles underlying composition could be illustrated by the athro, as they do
indeed focus on those principles: how measure and variation interact at the core
level.
There are hints of something similar in piobaireachd, where a teacher made much
of his living by teaching pupils actual pieces, but would it have been wise for him
to teach them composition as well? That wouldn’t be to his advantage, unless it
was to his sons or heirs. There is one piece - A' Ghlas Mheur - The Finger Lock -
which for a long time has particularly interested me, partly because it's on the
common cerdd dant measure Corffiniwr. Amongst the lore about it is an odd
comment by John Johnson of Coll (1836-1921, an authority on the Rankin pipers
to MacLean) that it was “used as a puzzle by the old pipers”.
That intriguing statement is amplified by this account by Henry Whyte in a 1907

book on the Rankin pipers:- “Rankin kept this tune from his pupils. It was a
common practice then for masters to compose a tune which they would not learn
to any of their pupils. Such a tune was called a port-falaich, or hidden tune.
Rankin reserved this one as his port-falaich”. The concept of a hidden tune is a
difficult one to account for in terms of functionality. I can only think that it was a
compositional aid, and therefore not to be passed on to pupils else it would aid
them to compose and therefore compete against him. This piece is, as it has
come down to us, fully worked-up, and yet it has some peculiarities which are
slightly suggestive of the clymau cytgerdd.
As it happens, an understanding of the clymau cytgerdd in relation to composition

has become terribly important in recent years to the entire study of cerdd dant.
In view of the Statute it would be a mistake to assume that the clymau cytgerdd
were a series of exercises to encourage the novice performer to improvise.
Perhaps it was such a misunderstanding of the role of the clymau cytgerdd which
then got transferred and applied to the rest of the repertory and led to a series of
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claims that the music in general was largely improvisatory. Those claims conflict
with the Statute account of the clear distinction between those who would
compose a piece - the athrawon - and all those who, without that qualification
and skill, would subsequently perform it. An understanding of this affects how the
manuscript is treated today, in that if one believes the music was improvised it
would matter little if the performer of today doesn’t manage to reproduce the
actual pieces in the manuscript but just takes a stab at them. A ballpark approach
to interpretation, one where not being able to figure out the identity of the notes,
their number and their ordering, when each was played and how long it sounded,
gets glossed over.
Sep 14, 2019
The training for harpers that you ask about: most of what we know is from the
16-century Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan, which focusses on the acquisition of the
repertory by apprentice string players: harpers and crythors, as they advanced
up through the various grades. There were requirements too for those apprentice
poets who accompanied themselves on strings. It was an oral tradition of course
so I expect, as used to be the case with piobaireachd, that teaching was by
verbal explanation backed up with demonstrations of particular points.
Memorisation and recall skills would have been extremely important, for bardism
was the product of a preliterate society, in which efficient oral means of cultural
storage and transmission had had to be developed, for law, genealogy and all
lore. So accuracy of recall had high status. That is why the Statute concentrates
on the need for the harpers under training to be able to demonstrate the quantity
of pieces they could play, rather than on the quality or the creativeness of their
playing. It was the composers that deserved the greatest respect for it was in
composition that the creativity lay.
As has always been the case with the apprentice system, the training was spread
over many years during which the apprentice would be practicing his craft and
also, after the initial phase, being paid for it. That is to say, it was in-work
training, along the modern lines, but entirely oral and directed by the single
teacher one was apprenticed to. It needed dedication and had none of the
freedom and informality of folk music traditions but the students must have been
inspired not just by ambition but by curiosity and love of the art, as is always the
case amongst musicians of course.
Sep 22, 2019
No, there was no requirement for apprentice harpers to compose. Only after
apprenticeship was long finished and one was already a pencerdd who now
wished to progress to being an athro was it a requirement that one submit a
composition. If it was judged to be good enough to be accepted into the repertory
one would become an athro: a professor and a producer of compositions. A
pencerdd of the harp was the head of all the harpers in a particular gwlad – a
district – but he could stay in that privileged and important role without becoming
an acknowledged composer as well. And there’s an argument I’ve put forward
that composition might not have been encouraged amongst those below the level
of pencerdd, for which see my post here on October 19th 2015. Of course it’s
difficult to say how rigidly the rules might have been followed, especially as most
harp players, many of them female, would have been amateurs outside the
profession. But their compositions, if they created any, would not have had a way
of being accepted into the professional canon.
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Once a piece had been accepted it would become ‘warranted’, which word, in the
time of the Statute, implies documentation. So I suggest that the title and some
details of the piece would be entered in registers, and that the tune lists we have
are examples and copies of those very registers.
The idea of all this, obviously, was that the repertory was of a guaranteed quality,
and that would have been important because people of a certain standing, above
a certain income level even, were under obligation to host and to pay the touring
harpers who would often be strangers to them, from far afield. Details of about
320 pieces, all of really substantial length, are to be found in the records, so
perhaps at any one time there would have been around 500 or 600 of them in
total, in Wales as a whole. That’s an enormous amount of music, to be held in
collective memory in the days before musical notation was used. What a loss!
Nov 10, 2016
About artistic liberties. I hope that most of us who read here will be clear that my
work addresses the whole of the tablature in the manuscript and that there aren’t
parts of it which I haven’t been able to translate. But I will just emphasize those
points since the impression persists amongst some of the public that the
manuscript is only partially understood and so performers need to take artistic
liberties and fill in bits that aren’t understood. Hence there’s one online review of
Paul Dooley’s CD of my translations which wonders if he became slightly
wandering at times. The CD was made to illustrate on current understanding what
the actual music was that led to the intabulation, and not to illustrate what can be
produced using the tablature as a prompt for artistic composition.
And by ‘what the music was’ there I do mean the intabulated Welsh pieces and
not what harp music in Ireland at the time might have been like. I offered my
interpretations to Paul to record and I’ve shared my recordings and scores with
him not because he’s in Ireland - earlier I’d made the same offer to Robin
Williamson here in Wales and to Ann Heymann in America. In the light of the
Welsh traditions about string music in medieval Ireland and the fact that the
intabulations are the earliest harp music in existence, it may very well be that
these tunes give the best guide to what harp music would have been like in
medieval Ireland, but that would be a separate thing, a bonus if you like. My
prime purpose was this music, which happens to have been Welsh. And as I’ve
said before: Wales is a good central point for us to have a sample of it from,
flanked by England with its triadic polyphony on one side and by Ireland, which
was thought to have been the source of the system, on the other. And we’re so
fortunate that the music was of a type that lent itself so readily to being taken
down in written form with all the detail the tablature provides, and that we have
enough of the intabulations to expose any misreadings of the symbols and how
they fit together.
Nov 10, 2016
Yes I think you’re absolutely right … about the seriously incomplete tunes. It’s
Gosteg y Lwyteg for sure and Caniad Suwsana probably (at p. 55) that are so
incomplete that it’s pretty much anyone’s guess as to how they would have
continued. Possibly the same for the passage common to all the profiadau
immediately before the Pwnc. In my ‘Melodic Formulas’ article I introduced the
ways in which variations are commonly formed, but there are places in pieces
where the next section could never have been predicted from what came before.
Section V of Caniad Suwsana is a splendid example. So I reckon any new
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composition in the cerdd dant idiom would be a real test of a composer’s

inspiration?
Nov 10, 2016
Thanks for the encouragement … . The offer to Paul was exclusive, as it had been
to Robin and to Ann. It was a big ask, at that time anyway, in 1994, to expect
any professional musician to make such a major change in direction, to take on
such a responsibility and invest the time it takes to learn the techniques and the
tunes - it had certainly taken me a long time. For that reason I don’t have
immediate plans to add to what is already published but more will come out with
Paul’s thesis and Paul Whittaker’s book. … As for myself, I’ve been busy
concentrating on the writing-up of the evidence that supports it all, in order to
ensure that my translations are valued and not dismissed as the output of just
another musician having a go. That has had to be my own priority, whilst Paul
has done well to invest a lot of his time in learning, recording, performing and
promoting the music. It's a vocation for us both, and Paul Whittaker also.
ERRORS IN THE MANUSCRIPT
Jan 9, 2014
Given that Robert evidently copied at least the clymau cytgerdd from a prior
intabulation, I think the issue we most need to be concerned about here is our
confidence levels in how accurately the final intabulations capture the pieces as
they were when they were first intabulated, rather than just Robert's errors?
You can detect some errors by analysing the fingerings and their contexts in the
text. Looking now at my list of these errors in the appendix (pages 3 and 4) to
my dissertation on technique, 110 columns of the text contain an error, giving an
error rate of less than 1%. That's remarkably low. It tells us that everyone
involved was taking great care to get it right.
Other errors can be detected in a similar way, by looking at the harmony or the
melody in context. In particular, the rubrics - the instructions in red - and the
various symbols used to indicate where the text has been abbreviated have
sometimes become confused.
Do see Paul Whittaker's deeply-probing article: ‘The Role of Robert ap Huw in the
Creation of Lbl MS Add. 14905’ / ‘Swyddogaeth Robert ap Huw yng
Nghreadigaeth Lbl MS Add. 14905’, Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth
Cymru, 6 (2004), 62–86/ 87–103, for more detail on all this.
Whenever an error shows up, the same procedure used to reveal the error can be
used to suggest the correct emendation, and either Paul Whittaker or myself has
done that in each case. Offhand, I can't think of a problem that's definitely about
errors that's still ongoing.
It's important that people can get assurance on the reliability of the source
material, because lack of reliability is a charge that gets muttered where there's
an inclination to hush up the whole subject. That can even go so far as claims
that the manuscript must be a fake because music could never have been so
sophisticated as early as this. Nearly 300 years on from the ms. coming to light,
there's still - couldn't you just guess it? - a resistance to having to rewrite
the basic history of music because of it.
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Coming back to raga … , I've lived in India and here in Wales I … oscillate wildly
between raga and cerdd dant in my affections, always wondering why and how
our species could have gone in such opposite musical directions. To me, that's
just about the biggest question around.
THE COMPETENCE OF MODERN SCHOLARS OF CERDD DANT
Jan 10, 2014
That difference, between cerdd dant and the music of the 'Silk Road tradition',
was a fascination for Peter Crossley-Holland also. And Raga was a particular
interest of his - he made early field trips to India, Ladakh, Sikkim and Tibet,
recording and questioning classical musicians there about the deep significance of
their music. He was a great polymath, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA.
There's a statement on the net that's been around for a few years now about the
modern history of interpreting the manuscript, which has needed taking issue
with:
“Past efforts have uniformly tried to represent the music in classical staff
notation and have struggled to play it on a modern piano -- an instrument
several hundred years in the future, from Robert ap Huw’s standpoint.”
This is an unfair mischaracterization. I've used the harp. So has Paul Whittaker.
So too has Osian Ellis CBE - world famous as a harpist, not as a pianist. Peter
Crossley-Holland was taught by Mabel Dolmetsch, on a harp made by Arnold
Dolmetsch. Some recordings of Peter's were broadcast on the radio in the 1950s.
Mabel played from the manuscript on harp, Arnold played from it on the crwth.
The Dolmetsch legacy has continued, on harp, with Alan Stivell's recordings of
Arnold's translations and Robin Huw Bowen's recordings of Arnold's and Peter's
translations. Going back earlier, there were yet more harpists involved, principally
John Parry and John Thomas. In fact I don't think I'm aware of anyone involved
who has either used the piano in their researches into the music or has presented
it on the piano. I wouldn't rule it out, but if anyone has used the piano in their
research they've kept it pretty quiet.
I'm sure it's important, when assessing the significance of earlier contributors
such as Peter and the Dolmetsches, to be clear that their focus was more
promotional than investigative, and that they may well have been making the
right decision, to concentrate their energies on getting the subject out from under
the carpet and into the limelight, in the days when the manuscript was otherwise
being completely hushed-up. I think that Arnold Dolmetsch's reputation, for just
one example, suffered a bit because of his commitment to the music, and that he
deserves a lot of credit for having had the courage to stick with the challenge the
music presents to the orthodox view of the history of music.
Jan 11, 2014
Yes. Thurston Dart was an organist … . Yet we are all indebted to him for being
the first to realise (published in 1968) that the blocking of some of the notes on
page 35 indicates their damping and that there might be a fingering code
contained in the directions of the note stems. Although, as the principal figure in
the early music revival following Arnold Dolmetsch, he was at the manuscript for
a long time, he got the code wrong, and that makes me think he could never
11
have experimented on a harp with the fingerings. If he had it would have only
taken a few minutes for him to realise the correct reading of the code.
But again, there's no mention of the piano. The early music movement from the
first, following the lead of Dolmetsch, enthusiastically embraced the importance
of reviving early instruments, as had Bunting of course. Surely there's never been
a time when a statement such as “medieval Welsh musicians never played the
piano” has been called for?
Jan 13, 2014
It [the statement about medieval Welsh musicians never having played the piano]
is actually on the same webpage as that bit about all previous interpreters
struggling to play it on the piano. But I'm happy to point out that research on
cerdd dant has a long history and that there is now, happily, a large accumulation
of work done and of incremental progress made. You and I both know this well of
course, but I worry that newcomers get misled by some of the more recent
publicity out there into thinking it's almost virgin territory.
Nov 3, 2014
I made my wire-strung [harp] in 76-77.
May 7, 2016
To supply the context for the Dolmetsches, it was Sir Henry Walford Davies who
got Arnold Dolmetsch going on the manuscript. Walford Davies’s interest
stemmed from the early 1920s when he was Professor of Music at Aberystwyth.
He was one of the founders of the Dolmetsch Foundation. Other professors in the
University of Wales who got involved later were D. E. Parry Williams and William
Mathias. Parry Williams’s writing on it was eventually published at Bangor in 1999
as part of the book titled Early Welsh Music. It is essentially a short literature
review, focusing particularly on Arnold Dolmetsch and Peter Crossley-Holland’s
first writing on it from 1942 but on no material subsequent to 1942 (as is the
case with W. S. Gwynn Williams’s 1962 references). John Lloyd Williams was
another Welsh academic involved in the time of Walford Davies and the
Dolmetsches, and of course Henry Lewis, Professor of Welsh at Swansea, who
edited the first published facsimile of the manuscript in 1936. The Early Welsh
Music Society in Llangefni published the Dolmetsch recordings and Arnold’s 1937
essay, and its papers are now in the archives at Bangor.
Jan 29, 2018
Textual criticism of the sources is a topic that hasn’t come up here but I’d like to
stress its importance and to provide some reassurance that that work has not
been overlooked, to allay the fears of any who might feel that the subject is not
on a firm footing. The primary sources have prompted a great deal of detailed
textual critical commentary. As regards the main source, the manuscript itself,
here is a list in date order of the main specialist studies that have addressed the
codicology and palaeography of Robert’s contributions and of each of the
subsequent additions to the manuscript as it exists today.
12
Henry Lewis, Musica: British Museum Additional Manuscript 14905, facsimile

edition (Cardiff, 1936), v-x.
Claire Polin, ‘Observations on the ap Huw Manuscript’, Music and Letters, 60

(1979), pp. 296-304.
Claire Polin, The ap Huw Manuscript (Henryville, 1982), pp. 35-45.
Stephen P. Rees and Sally Harper, ‘Aspects of the Palaeography and History of
the ap Huw Manuscript’, Welsh Music History, 3 (1999), pp. 54-67.
Daniel Huws, ‘Notes on the Robert ap Huw Manuscript’, Welsh Music History, 6
(2004), pp. 46-54.
Paul D. Whittaker, ‘The Role of Robert ap Huw in the Creation of Lbl MS Add.
14905’, Welsh Music History, 6 (2004), pp. 62-86.
Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 135-142.
A second facsimile edition was published in 1987: Wyn Thomas, ed., Musica: The
Robert ap Huw Manuscript (Godstone, 1987).
There is also: Paul Whittaker, ‘The Tablature of the Iolo Morganwg Manuscript,
(British Library, MS Add. 14970)’, Welsh Music History, 3 (1999), pp. 252-270.
For critical editions of the many primary documents relating to the musical
tradition see Bethan Miles’s 1983 M.A. thesis ‘Swyddogaeth a Chelfyddyd y
Crythor’, Aberystwyth, and for the same in relation to the administration of the
musical tradition see Einir Thomas’s 2001 Ph.D. thesis ‘Astudiaeth destunol o
Statud Gruffudd ap Cynan’, UCNW, Bangor.
As most here will be aware, in addition to the above there is a large accumulation
of modern investigative studies of the content of the sources; it stretches back to
Robert Dowd’s 1950 M.A. thesis ‘British Museum Additional Manuscript 14905’,
New York. The historiography of the subject is well documented, there are plenty
of bibliographies and citations available which include these items and of course
there have been many discussions of these studies here in this group and
elsewhere.
It should be noted that the evidence is conclusive that the manuscript is not a
forgery and that the music text it contains does indeed represent the eisteddfod
tradition: it is not that Robert or his sources faked the pieces. There have been
attempts to dismiss the subject on those sorts of grounds but it cannot be
dismissed so easily, and neither can the great body of modern scholarship that
has been built up. My suggestion is that those who have tried to dispose of the
subject in these ways or who have claimed the music to be simplistic and
primitive or who have claimed the tablature to be insoluble might do well to look
at what these claims reveal about – um - their personal insecurities and
prejudices. Yes, the music is old and yes, the music is Welsh, but those are not
justifications for sweeping it under the carpet, they are reasons to rejoice.
I imagine everyone here agrees, so my main purposes in this post are to provide
the references to the textual studies above, in case anyone wants to explore
those further, and to reassure people that that work and its importance has not
been overlooked. The study is on a firm footing.
13
Sep 24, 2019
Isn't it the case also that such full and complete harmony wasn't supposed to
exist back then? I've found that to be a mental stumbling block for people who
have studied musical history.
Yes, I’ve heard it said (and actually by a music professor!) that the manuscript
must be a forgery because of that. It isn’t a forgery.
There shouldn’t, according to mainstream music history, be accompaniment that

is comprised of root position triads, let alone all inversions. Nor chord extensions
i.e. chords that extend the triad one or more steps of a third above or below the
triad. Nor any other system of homophony, one which goes beyond what has
been conceived of in the modern era, such as this double-tonic system of
adjacent tetrads or the double-tonic intonational system itself. Nor a system that
integrates seconds as consonant in a triadic system. Nor a system in which the
treble can run counter to the accompaniment to create dynamic harmony. Nor
compositions that can be anything like 25 mins long. And so on and so on. It does
indeed up-end the history of Western harmony.
The choice here for music history as a discipline is either to reveal fully-fledged
ethnocentric arrogance and stick with ignoring cerdd dant, or, with humility and
respect, to fully engage with it even though it confronts us as a late-comer from
left field.
Sep 26, 2019
Yes, holy houses are difficult to throw. A good saying! [from The Netherlands]
Actually, cerdd dant is not the only oral tradition of triadic music that threatens to
subvert the belief that triadic harmony was the inspiration of the European
culture of written composition. In Spain the late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century popular tradition of rasgueado technique involved triadic
accompaniment on the strummed five-course guitar. See Thomas Christiansen,
‘The Spanish Baroque Guitar and Seventeenth-Century Triadic Theory’, Journal of
Music Theory, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 1-42, from which I quote (p. 2):
“It is usual for folk and rock guitarists today to think of the songs they
accompany in exclusively chordal terms; the same turns out to have been true for
17th-century guitarists, for whom chords became independent and autonomous
compositional constructs that could be inverted and juxtaposed freely. This
chordal mentality allowed them to test and exploit harmonic relationships with far
greater license than was available to keyboardists, whose practice was heavily
constrained by contrapuntal exigencies.”
One wonders if in Southern Europe the use of strumming to achieve triads had
long been the case in popular traditions of accompaniment on the forerunner of
the guitar: the lute, as had been the case on the strummed Northern European
lyre, and if that has implications for the speculations about the nature of medieval
harp accompaniment to Continental song.
Sep 26, 2019
Indeed. Cerdd dant had its own tonal system, as I’m always keen to stress, and it
needs to be treated and experienced with sufficient humility for us to enter into
14
its own terms. The manuscript and the whole subject has been the victim of the
prejudice of the European imperialism that in music has tended to coalesce
around baroque and romantic art music. Two arrogant examples here:
“These rude lessons are such in their melody as might be expected in ages when
not music only, but when all the arts, in our countries, were in a state of infancy.”
William Bingley, 1804.
“It was a crude attempt at rhythmitonal art, and anything more different from the
cultivated music of Europe down to the close of the seventeenth century could
scarcely be imagined.” Margaret Glyn, 1909.
And it’s very regrettable that imperialist attitudes still linger on, where and in so
far as the existence of this music continues to be disregarded.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CERDD DANT AND FOLK MUSIC
May 10, 2014
The main sources [for early Northern English hornpipes] are collected in John of
the Green: the Cheshire Way by John Offord 2008 and The Master Piper: Nine
Notes that Shook the World by Matt Seattle 1995. See my dissertation on rhythm
pp. 86-108 for the connections to the music in the manuscript. It's hard, and very
unwise indeed, to have any confidence at all in any interpreting of the tablature
that gives music that doesn't tie in at all to the groundswell of early folk music, so
this connection of parts of the manuscript with dance music has been a vital part
of the validation of my translations of all the pieces in the manuscript.
There's no way, you see, that the pipers and the players of the three-stringed
crwth and what have you would have been playing music that was entirely
unrelated to that of the eisteddfod tradition, and their music - the folk music -
can not have also died out completely without leaving a trace - folk traditions
aren't like that. Cerdd dant didn't exist in a vacuum, yet other interpreters would
have us believe that, to judge from their products!
I know I would never, even for a moment, have been prepared to put forward
any interpretation of the ap Huw unless and until it had passed the test of
bedding-in to the wider context.
Hooray for folk music!
Oct 7, 2015
About Johnson’s Medley - I’m sure it lies outside of the cerdd dant repertory, and
also what else that repertory relates to. Whoever intabulated the Medley was
simply and interestingly applying the tablature to music that it was not designed
for, and not in order to make a claim that it was part of the cerdd dant repertory
I think.
I think it would help here if I outline the broad perspective on what music I’ve
found cerdd dant does relate to in the folk and art-music fields. Once you’ve got
the music you can compare it with other sources, and my decipherment of the
Robert ap Huw manuscript made it possible to identify the strong affinity with the
old hornpipe tradition known from the Welsh Marches, Northern England and the
border country between England and Scotland. By old hornpipes I mean the
15
extended variation sets for pipes or fiddle in various time signatures that make
much use of semiquavers, common in 17th and 18th century collections such as
Dixon, Marsden and Wright. What we now write as semiquavers were generally
written then as quavers by the way - values have been halved. All the double-
tonic traditions that still exist in the British Isles comprising reels, jigs and slip
jigs are a continuance of that but generally they’ve lost the semiquavers and the
great length the variation sets used to have - up to about 18 strains. These
elaborations must have been generally squeezed out by the faster tempo, the
plainer style and the fewer strains that characterize the playing of the reels and
jigs that make up the modern traditions of double-tonic music. Northumbrian
piping still retains the elaborations amongst some players, and there are hints of
it in Ireland with jigs that used to be played ‘the piece way’ as it was called
(notably The Humours of Glen and - less clearly - Nóra Críona). A confusion is the
two sets of variations attributed to the harper O’Carolan: When She Cam Ben She
Bobbit and Cock Up Your Beaver. These are very much in the old hornpipe style
and their figurations suit the pipes or fiddle but not the harp.
The connection between medieval classical cerdd dant and the folk tradition of the
old hornpipes has massive implications for the history of folk music throughout
the British Isles apart from Southern England. It means the elaborate old
hornpipe tradition must have been present and strong in the Middle Ages
alongside cerdd dant, and its semiquavers and its variation sets will not have
been, as has been thought, a later development in response to baroque music.
Where late renaissance/early baroque composers such as Hugh Aston wrote
elaborate hornpipes they would have been drawing on an already existing fully-
fledged folk tradition which was in the process of informing the development of
baroque music as part of the mix involved.
It’s particularly the private manuscript collections of musicians who were deeply
embedded in living tradition, such as George Skene, David Young and William
Dixon, that reveal the full extent of the length of the sets and the density of the
semiquaver use. They clearly weren’t tempted at all to abbreviate pieces in the
way that many collections made for publication presented pieces. Arguably it’s
the ever-increasing reliance by musicians on printed sources that’s largely
brought about the ‘abbreviated’ style ousting the elaborate style. Yet the old
variation sets were, at their best, simply superb music - with their rhythmic
dynamism and the playfulness of their variations.
Anyway, as regards cerdd dant, it could not and demonstrably did not exist in
limbo, disconnected from the instrumental folk music of the day. But baroque
music headed off in a different direction, one in which the key factor in all of this
- the double tonic - was absent.
Oct 9, 2015
As I say, Northumbrian piping has kept the variation sets and the semiquavers
going, and a little of it has come down in Ireland through Patrick Kelly and Willie
Clancy. The spirit of the improvisation involved was there with Michael Coleman. I
don’t know offhand what remnants have come down through tradition in English
and Scottish fiddling today, but I’m happy to just draw attention to the
importance of the changes that have happened. The elaborate style will be very
old. Perhaps the modern style is as well.
Oct 9, 2015
16
What I’m referring to is the early long variation sets of double-tonic ‘dance’ music
loaded with semiquavers, in various time signatures: 2/2 or 4/4, 6/8, 9/8 and
3/2. It’s not entirely clear if, when played in that elaborate form, the pieces were
danced to or not. There were dances called the hornpipe, but we don’t know the
steps of those days and so we can’t judge if the hornpipe was danced to the
slowish tempo of the elaborate style of the tunes or the faster and short
‘abbreviated’ style we have today. In those days the word ‘hornpipe’ was applied
to all those time signatures apart from the 6/8 jig. The 9/8 that we know today
as the slip jig is like a jig-and-a-half and in the same way the 3/2, unfamiliar
today, was like a reel-and-a-half (per bar). More needs to be done to see if the
old Irish distinction between jigs for listening and jigs for dancing might once
have applied to the whole tradition. If it did then the elaborate style would have
been not for dancing but for listening and for the joy of playing - i.e. pieces
plenty long enough to get your teeth into, and hence a medium for inspiration.
We know the elaborate style primarily from piping and fiddling. I imagine that the
music goes back to early wind and bowed instruments as well as song. The first
bowed instrument for it I expect was the crwth trithant, but the word ‘hornpipe’
suggests of course pipes with horn end-bells (and perhaps horn mouth-caps too)
as the primary instruments. The use of horn implies amplification and includes
bagpipes and mouth-blown pipes, with single or multiple chanters, and drones -
there’s a wide range of possibilities there, not just single-chantered hornpipes like
the pibgorn often was. All you need is a second chanter with one hole in the right
place and you can play a double-tonic harmony accompaniment. I say this to
quash any expectation that ‘hornpipe’ necessarily means just a simple single
pipe. It only implies loud ones, primarily for outdoor use. A good din!
All this relates to the common folk. If indeed, as some Welsh records imply, pipes
could also be of high status and associated with music of the court, then perhaps
a proto-piobaireachd was in existence early on, as I’ve suggested as a possibility
in my article on the solo lyre. But piobaireachd variation is made essentially out
of changing the gracenotes, and in dance sets variation is made out of changing
the tune, so they are very different propositions from one another. Here I’m
talking about folk music, because of its relationship to cerdd dant, in which again
the variations were made by changing the tune. Piobaireachd is the odd one out
here.
Oct 10, 2015
I don’t know what’s online … , but I recommend ‘The Master Piper: nine notes
that shook the world’ by Matt Seattle, which presents the Dixon MS. and that’s a
particularly central source and with excellent commentaries putting it all into
context, in various editions, with some input from Roderick Cannon too. They are
there in the classics like Playford and Oswald but it’s been only in recent years
that this whole area has had general attention drawn to it, starting really with a
series of articles by Roderick in 1972, and later there was John Ward’s article I’ve
mentioned, and now I think interest has rather snowballed. I’m not an expert on
it so I don’t know the latest stuff but I’ve liaised with Roderick on it over the
years, especially about the rhythms and the harmonies, and with Barnaby Brown
also.
Oct 11, 2015
The dance in a folk-music context shouldn’t be confused with the formation

country-dance hornpipe of the ballroom, taught by the dancing masters as
17
recorded in the country-dance books of the 18th century. It would have been
energetic and individualistic, not polite. John Ward suggested it might have been
like what the poet Keats experienced in Cumberland in 1818:
“They kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary,

and whiskit and friskit, and toed it and go’ed it,
and twirl’d it and whirl’d it, and stamped it, and sweated it,
tattooing the floor like mad … ”
That’s more like it!
With both the original music and the original dance of the common folk, an
overlay was created by polite society for the drawing room and the ballroom. So,
we have to penetrate through those false images if we want to get back to the
reality of the indigenous oral culture that gave rise to those images of it. In terms
of music, that means we look to the double tonic, long variation sets,
semiquavers and vigorous rhythm on vigorous instruments, and of course sources
from the North and the West.
Nov 10, 2018
You’re absolutely right … to distinguish between the cerdd dant tradition and
music for folk dancing. The folk instruments referred to in the Statute are the
louder ones: the pipes and the crwth trithant, so it wasn’t usual for the harp to be
used for folk music. It’s very lucky that one dance piece for the harp [Y Ddigan Y
Droell] is in the manuscript, from outside the classical tradition. But all the pieces
in the manuscript relate closely to double-tonic dance music so I don’t think that
the possibility of dancing to any of those pieces can be ruled out on rhythmic
grounds. It would have been very different if the music had turned out to be
related to ballad airs which of course at slow tempo can easily lend themselves to
de-emphasis of accent, to rubato and to elaborate ornamentation – all the
features which are inimical to dance and to the strongly-accented percussiveness
of cerdd dafod with its cynghanedd.
The one thing that can be said for certain about dance in the cerdd dant tradition
is that in the time of the princes there would have been no room for it in the royal
halls – things were pretty cramped in there!
Nov 11, 2018
Thanks … Those links are helpful.
Thinking now more about dance, there has been some uncertainty about the
precise usages of the early English dance term ‘measure’, first recorded in 1509,
as to when and where it referred to the sequence of steps to an individual strain
of music or to the entirety of the dance steps of a whole dance. The term is
thought to have originally been borrowed from the vocabulary of the Continental
basse dance. It would have been a helpful coincidence then, if indeed coincidence
it was, that the English term for dance units of multiples of four bars in duple
time was the same as the Welsh one for musical units of, most commonly,
multiples of four bars in duple time. Wherever lay the derivation of the English
term, the shared term once established would have reflected the commonalities
in the characteristics of the English court dances of Tudor times and Welsh cerdd
dant.
18
I don't believe this implies that cerdd dant was commonly danced to though. Just
that it's another factor that underscores the connections between cerdd dant and
some dance music - that is, the double tonic stuff - and that the classical tradition
of a region always resembles its folk one.
Nov 12, 2018
Thanks. Yes indeed, it seems that in English there was no single meaning of
‘measure’ as a musical term - it had at least a couple of usages, so it’s very
helpful to learn from you that in Italian early on it had those two and was used
for a dance step as well. How about a musical strain in Italian then, as in Welsh?
In English in respect of the measures of the London Inns of Court I’ve read it was
“hardly ever used for the title of a piece of music by itself” (quoted by Ian Payne,
The Almain in Britain c. 1549-c.1675 (Aldershot, 2003), p. 39, n.3) which implies
there is at least one early example of it referring to music rather than to dance.
Later of course that became commonplace, as in “A Scottish Measure” for a tune.
Nov 13, 2018
Yes, the Welsh word [mesur] does come ultimately from the Latin, along with the
English, the Italian etc.
It was used in the sense of musical metre in cerdd dant and cerdd dafod, and I'm
wondering if that had been the case in Tudor London as well, along with dance
metre. Nowadays in English 'measure' has been dropped in favour of 'metre' and
to some extent in Welsh 'mesur' has been displaced by 'mydr', so I think it
probably is significant that in the Tudor period 'mesur' and 'measure' were in use
together, and that the English use of 'measure' in dance might not have had to be
a Tudor import from Italy.
BEAUFORD’S IRISH TABLATURE
Feb 29, 2016
It [see Joseph C. Walker: Historical memoirs of the Irish bards (Dublin, 1786),
pp. 104-5] has been discussed briefly and very sporadically, by Charles Burney
1787, François-Joseph Fétis 1872, Johannes Wolf 1919 and Paul Whittaker 1974.
Paul wrote that it is important and I agree. I expect that once its characters have
been placed in their proper context (I’m not aware that they have, even yet) so
that those factors that prompted their formation have been identified, it would be
easy to assess the possibility of the item being spurious.
The presence of horizontal bars above characters which in a lower row lack them
is of course a feature of some alphabetic music notations, including the ap Huw,
in order to denote their octave level. That the lowest of the three rows here
continues at the lowest level across columns 10, 12, 13 and 16 rather than being
raised to the middle level, as it would tend to be in the ap Huw tablature, gives
the impression that this was conceived with greater emphasis on part-writing in
mind than we find in the ap Huw. Perhaps its originator had vocal polyphony in
mind – literally three separate voices – rather than the homophony of cerdd dant,
so it’s not immediately apparent why Beauford writes that it is ‘evidently’ set for
the cruit or psaltery, especially since he states it appears to be a psalm tune. But
given that he had had sight of ‘the Welsh notation’ as he puts it, through
19
Burney’s book, the ap Huw tablature may explain Beauford’s opinion that this was
for a stringed instrument. It may also, of course, account for the timing of
Beauford supplying this to Walker.
Anyway, I believe it continues to await the attentions of specialists in Irish

palaeography?
Feb 29, 2016
Certainly, it would be a mistake for us to underestimate the huge strength of the

national pride involved at the time, including in the minds of Beauford and
Walker, as shown, and eclipsed, by Burney's vituperative review of Walker's
book, which surely breaks all records! It is truly horrible.
So there would have been plenty of pressure, and perhaps motivation, to find or
create an Irish counterpart to the ap Huw, which was already having quite an
impact.
Mar 7, 2016
I think Beauford's tablature should be viewed in the context of a debacle which

took place later.
Someone took thirteen columns of Caniad Pibau Morfydd (the section from
91.5.11 to 91.6.3 , as Paul Whittaker has identified) and radically transfigured its
alphabetical characters into the corresponding characters of Iolo Morganwg's
spurious ‘coelbren y beirdd’ alphabet, albeit with some modifications to the latter.
John Parry, Bardd Alaw, included this as an example of the notation of the
manuscript in his introduction to his collection The Welsh Harper (London, 1839),
pp. 4-5, which he claimed was written in ‘the ancient Bardic Alphabet’. The
relevant section of Parry’s writing is reproduced in the 1870 edition of The
Myvyrian Archaiology, p. 1207, quoted at the start of the essay on ‘The Musical
Notation of the Ancient Britons’ by John Thomas. The Myvyrian of course carries a
modern typescript of the correct notation of the manuscript, so here contained in
the one book is the absurdity of the contradictory characters, apparently
undetected by Thomas. A shambles!
None of Beauford’s symbols match Iolo’s except for the one which Beauford
interprets as the note C, which is the same as Iolo’s symbol for the letter C: viz.
‘‹’. That has to make one wonder if Beauford’s tablature prompted Iolo to devise
his ‘bardic’ alphabet, which was loosely drawn from Ancient Greek. Beauford was
published in Walker 1786 and Iolo is thought to have devised his alphabet around
1791. There is then a possibility that the ap Huw tablature as represented by
Burney in 1782 (pp. 110-114) inspired or prompted Beauford four years later,
who in turn may well have inspired Iolo, who certainly did inspire Parry’s
misrepresentation of the ap Huw. But rather than dwell only on the comedy of all
this, we might do well to reflect on how dire the consequences can be whenever
nationalist competitiveness sets in between music historians.
I think the most relevant part of Beauford’s writing to the ap Huw isn’t his
tablature but his account of the performance of the elegy, in Walker pp. 277-8:
“In ancient times, after the interment, the favourite bards of the family,
seated on the grave or sepulchre, performed the Connthal or Elegy; which
they repeated every new and full moon, for the first three months, and
20
afterwards generally once every year, for persons of distinction. The Elegy
was more regular than the Keenan, both in respect to its poetical
composition and melodious cadence; though I have not been able to
obtain any pieces of this kind, of a very ancient date, nor the music
pertaining to them. However, several families, both in Wales and this
country, retained the custom to the close of the last century; and it is
frequently alluded to in the Irish ballads and poetical romances.”
That the musical performance of the elegy, the marwnad, might have continued
in Wales to the close of the seventeenth century is later than one might otherwise
suppose. And it’s interesting that Beauford dates the demise in Ireland to the
same time.
THE IOLO MORGANWG MANUSCRIPT
Sep 21, 2018
Good point … . There’s certainly reason to doubt the authenticity of the

intabulations in Iolo’s manucript, so for that reason when I set out in 1972 to
identify the music that was entabulated in Robert’s manuscript I decided to take
care to disregard Iolo’s manuscript in that enterprise. And as it turned out there
was enough material in Robert’s to enable me to pin down the meaning of each of
the symbols and of each of the symbol complexes. I didn’t ever need to resort to
the material in Iolo’s, and my translations of Robert’s are safer than they would
be if they had taken account of Iolo’s. Je ne regrette rien.
Paul [Whittaker] set out the case for accepting Iolo’s in his article ‘The Tablature
of the Iolo Morganwg Manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 14970)’, Welsh Music
History 3 (1999), pp. 252-270. I myself feel doubt still remains, and I don’t seem
to be able to rustle up enthusiasm for its contents. I still have a vivid memory of
playing it through many many years ago and being unimpressed, by its musical
quality and by the fact that I could too easily imagine Iolo or his source having
sight of Robert’s manuscript and fabricating extra material from what they
understood and what they misunderstood of that. Remember the monkeying with
the ap Huw tablature that turned up in John Parry Bardd Alaw’s book, where a
portion of the tablature had been translated into Iolo’s invented bardic alphabet,
and the relationship between his bardic alphabet and Beauford’s Irish tablature? I
think caution is the best policy here.
After Robert’s manuscript came to light frustration and embarrassment about the
loss to tradition of everything indicated in all the cerdd dant records began to
mount. How could this be handled in front of the public? Be frank? Or cover it up,
by not mentioning it and by using the available Welsh folk music and baroque
music as a fig leaf? It didn’t take long for the decision to be made: in 1742 in
John Parry Dall’s ‘Antient British Music’ the cover-up began. Parry and Evan
Williams, Parry’s amanuensis, along with the author of the book’s preface, had all
had access to Robert’s manuscript yet it is not named, the loss to tradition is not
discussed and the claim of bardic antiquity is made for the collection of tunes in
the book. This is the early background to Iolo Morganwg’s relationship to the
subject; not a happy one.
Sep 22, 2018
To notate Johnson’s Medley in tablature basically you would take your source –
written or played - and simply write the letters of the notes in the appropriate
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place above or below the central horizontal line. The fencing – the flags and grids
– to indicate note values go at the top here. Paul W’s point is that the B-flat that
the piece requires is not marked as flat in the seven places in which it occurs in
Iolo’s ‘Medle’ and so it seems that its author understood that the round B in the
tablature of the ap Huw manuscript which is not marked as flat there indicated B-
flat rather than B-natural, a fact which wasn’t known by Iolo and his associates
but had been in the cerdd dant tradition. In its turn, that implies that the
originator of Iolo’s tablature was a member of the tradition. It’s a strong point. An
alternative explanation perhaps is that its author wanted his product to resemble
the ap Huw tablature closely and so took his prompt from it concerning the note
B and wrote it as ‘round’ B rather than ‘square’ B, thus avoiding diverging from
the ap Huw material by adding a flat symbol. It’s mainly used in the ‘Medle’ in
Iolo’s tablature in conjunction with the note G and the ap Huw manuscript has
examples of chords involving that combination.
Yes, of course the Iolo manuscript is, as you put it, worth a look. I have
reservations about it on many grounds and so I feel a great deal of further
investigation would need to be done before a conclusive resolution could be
achieved, if that’s even possible. In the meantime I suggest it’s important to keep
in mind that Robert’s document is from around 1613, Iolo’s is from 1800 or later
and the Rhys Jones one that Iolo refers to as his source hasn’t as yet come to
light.
By the way, I have a massive amount of admiration for Rhys Jones as a

connoisseur of cerdd dafod. His Gorchestion Beirdd Cymru published in 1773 is a
fantastic achievement, a collection of the most wonderful feats in terms of
metrics, and that means sound, that are to be found amongst the old poems. His
access to sources and his judgment in making the selections – simply wonderful.
PROVENANCE
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MANUSCRIPT
Oct 18, 2005
What is this music and where is it from? This is the court music that the Celtic
regions were so famous for in the Middle Ages. It’s the music that the Celtic harp
made possible, where a melodic line could be added above chords. The chords
must have been drawn from the lyre-accompaniment to poetry, and with the
addition of melody a fully instrumental music came into being. Incredibly, this
one manuscript is the only source left to us. Actually, I think it’s about all we’ve
got of ancient classical music from Europe. The Andalusian music of the Moors
was entirely different. This is based on harmony – isn’t it? – rather like the
classical music from Europe from the last few centuries of course.
Jan 13, 2014
That's right … - secular instrumental music wasn't usually transcribed. Apart from
dances, the cerdd dant in the ms. is probably the only secular instrumental music
we have that dates back to the Middle Ages. This is why the ms. is historically so
incredibly important. So very very much has to hinge on what it has to tell us.
As regards listening music (as opposed to dance music) this is what we have to
go on as the guide to secular instrumental music, in Northern Europe at least.
And it has ramifications for our understanding of what the nature of secular vocal
music was. Also, I'm not sure it's right that all the pieces in the ms. should be
22
labelled as secular, or as exclusively secular. Even if they were, there are still
ramifications to be drawn out for Church music.
Looking at the broad scope of things, in a broad way, we can discern and
distinguish two classical traditions - the Silk Road one and this one, with the
possibility of there having been a third in SubSaharan Africa (as indicated in
Uganda perhaps?).
Notice the difference between what I've just drawn out here and the way in which
the ms. is currently 'filed'. It tends to come under the heading of 'Harp Music'. It
then gets put in a subcategory: 'Welsh Harp Music'. It then gets put in a further
subcategory: 'Early Welsh Harp Music', by which time only the most hardened
haven't peeled off. The manuscript is the victim of typology.
And I often catch myself lazily explaining it as Early Welsh Harp Music with a full
stop. I'd be very interested to hear whether others find themselves thinking of it
in that narrow way, and if people are happy with that.
Jan 14, 2014
… One would be very hard put indeed to make out a case that the 6-stringed
Northern European accompaniment lyre was used for some other kind of music,
one which was not based on cyweirdant and tyniad, because cerdd dant is the
nearest historical pointer. There are enthusiasts who, over the last 10 years or
so, have started up on the instrument and are playing improvisational monody,
often pentatonic, but they are doing so on the assumption, I think, that 'nothing
can be known', and they perhaps haven't thought of relating cerdd dant to it.
Meanwhile, I've been very happy to take cerdd dant as a means of solving the
puzzles of Beowulf and the like.
I wouldn't worry that the traditions about the music being of the Irish type mean
it couldn't have been widespread across Europe. In the Dark Ages the influence of
Irish culture stretched across the Continent, as far east as the Ukraine and as far
south as Italy. Ireland was, arguably, the main centre of learning, outside of the
Byzantine Empire and Muslim Iberia. It's the Dark Age pre-eminence of the
projection of Irish culture that makes the Welsh traditions about it, including
Gerald's, so credible, and cerdd dant so extremely interesting historically.
Jun 12, 2018
Can I put in a plea here for the ap Huw ms. as the most relevant indicator of the
music of the accompaniment lyre across Northern Europe? Firstly, there was
overlap between the cerdd dant tradition and the accompaniment lyre which was
still being used in Iolo Goch’s time, mid-fourteenth century. Secondly, there
would have been a wide geographical overlap: the Novgorod psaltery technique
implies that chordal, triadic accompaniment was what was played on that
instrument’s forerunner: the Norse lyre. Remember that alliteration is what binds
the early poetry of the Germanic, Norse and Celtic languages together and marks
their poetry, including Beowulf, out as highly distinct from the poetry of Southern
Europe.
Hucbald’s ninth-century, six-stringed lyre tuning was hexatonic not pentatonic,

and that is all the direct evidence that we have on its tuning in Northern Europe.
That scale is entirely compatible with the cerdd dant modes and their harmony.
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My experience is that pentatonicism suits monody – it’s easy to sing – and

particularly vocal lamenting, and music based on a notional drone and on
Pythagorean intonation. Cerdd dant – instrument-based – is an entirely different
approach to music-making, with its seven-note chords, its tetradic harmonies, its
partial tempering of fifths and its highly structured forms. The Balkans is where
pentatonic music thrives today in Europe, and the dramatic appeal of its
emotional immediacy and spontaneity is enormous, but that’s a far cry from the
music of the refined medieval courts of Northern Europe.
Nov 25, 2018
I think it’s unlikely that the six-stringed Northern European lyre was tuned
pentatonically ...
Dec 11, 2018
[snip] “… one wonders why we'd expect a pan Northern European lyre playing
tradition influenced entirely by Welsh lyre playing …”
I don’t think that’s really the right way of looking at these things. It’s more
helpful to talk in terms of interchange, sharing and commonality, if not before the
Migration Period then at least after the Norse trading routes had become
established, and certainly during the time of the Hanseatic League. I’ve already
mentioned the six-stringed lyre and the double tonic as factors that were
widespread but I’ve also identified some Old Norse terms incorporated into the
cerdd dant vocabulary. … was saying recently here in regard to the relevance of
the Kravik lyre to the Western Isles that Norway was a different culture and a
different country, but the Outer Western Isles only ceased to be Norwegian in
1266.
You can read more about the broad contextual relevance of cerdd dant, and
about some of the questions you raise, in my ‘Discussions’ file at
https://www.scribd.com/document/321067721/Peter-Greenhill-Discussions-on-
the-Music-of-the-Robert-ap-Huw-Manuscript, particularly the section on ‘Playing
Cerdd Dant Chords on the Lyre’.
Apr 22, 2015
Claire Polin compared her reading of Caniad Suwsana and a song published in the
19th century called Susanna and concluded that Robert ap Huw knew the song
tune, despite a lack of correspondence between them. Peter Crossley-Holland
observed correctly that neither this nor any of the other three recorded variants
of the song Susanna has any significant features in common with the piece in the
ms.
I expect Claire Polin was having difficulty in coping with the enormity of the loss
of the tradition. Certainly, she was hoping there might be a piece in Wales or the
Continent that could be used as a crib to solve the ms., as it looks as though she
thought it was unsolvable otherwise. This was back in the 1970s you see, and she
was stuck.
Apr 22, 2015
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… I think Claire Polin was put on the wrong track in the first place by thinking
Suwsana was not a historical name in Wales, when, significantly, Gruffudd ap
Cynan had a daughter of that name, born c. 1095, who was, also significantly,
the mother of the famous Gwenllian ferch Madog wife of Rhys ap Gruffudd, but
who also had an elder sister: another Gwenllian born c. 1085 wife of Gruffudd ap
Rhys.
It is that in the ms. we have two titles sharing names with two of Gruffudd ap
Cynan's daughters, and with two of his granddaughters: the Gwenllian ferch
Madog mentioned above and Gwenllian ferch Owain Gwynedd.
Claire Polin imagined a 'Shakespearean' provenance for Caniad Suwsana, but she
was way off-beam in the associations here.
A distant relation of mine wrote an opera about Gwenllian - I'm not sure which
one - probably ferch Madog.
Apr 23, 2015
With the Hun Wenllian tunes from the 18th and 19th century, these are after the
ms. came to light and will have been prompted by it, as Jones's Cainc Dafydd
Broffwyd was. There was understandable frustration and embarrassment from the
outset that the cerdd dant tradition had disappeared and that the manuscript was
not understood. The whole thing was a two-sided coin for Welsh culture: the huge
excitement of the discovery of documents about ancient music but also the
embarrassment that so much had been lost coupled with the inability to make
sense of the tablature and to recover any of the music itself. It tumbled Welsh
music authorities into a very peculiar, awkward situation.
Apr 23, 2015
Well, if some haven't [yet come to terms with the shock 300 years ago of records
of a vanished musical culture turning up], that would be understandable. It's not
an easy thing to digest, that so much of so much value was abandoned, or that
so little has been done about it since. It wouldn't be so difficult if the music
wasn't up to much.
Apr 24, 2015
Yes, viewed in that sort of a way Wales has an awful lot to take pride in here. A
vast amount of music recorded, a substantial chunk of which has survived in
Robert's manuscript, and records at least of several hundred pieces which haven't
survived. Plus explanations of how the music worked and how its production and
performing were maintained. Along with 17 1/2 thousand bardic poems,
compared to 3 1/2 thousand Irish and Scottish ones. It all amounts to a fantastic
legacy.
Apr 16, 2016
Having just been thinking about the papers of the late Frans and Roderick, I’ve
just learned of the passing of Gwyn Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Welsh at
Bangor University. He tutored me in Early Welsh Literature in the early 1970s and
greatly encouraged my interest in the Robert ap Huw manuscript. He was already
25
an expert on the whole bardic tradition: cerdd dafod and cerdd dant, and very
kindly indeed took the time to authoritatively translate the old texts that relate to
the music in the manuscript for me and for Paul Whittaker too. Later he
encouraged me to publish my work on the impact of my translations of the
manuscript on the performing of the poetry. I recommend his book: Eisteddfodau
Caerwys / The Caerwys Eisteddfodau (Caerdydd, 1968), published by Gwasg
Prifysgol Cymru. It’s bilingual and a thoroughly charming and insightful account
of everything surrounding the 16th century eisteddfodau. It contains some
important facts that he unearthed, such as a 15th century notice of the existence
of degrees for poets which significantly predates the extant copies of the Statute
of Gruffudd ap Cynan which go into full detail on the degrees.
I recall the late Tony Conran once explaining that - as he frankly put it - there’s
far too much early Welsh material and not enough people to go round. Every time
someone is lost it’s a big loss.
Apr 17, 2016
I’m sure we all value your contributions. This is a difficult subject, standing as we
do in the area between what is known, what can be known and a vast expanse of
what can probably never be known. But that makes it exciting as well as
precarious of course. Communication and dialogue generally helps research and
companionship makes all work so much pleasanter. …
Jan 24, 2016
And surely it is that what early music has to offer that’s of the most value to us is
wherever it had what we don’t have today: not just different instruments but
different music institutions, standards and practices. A different mindset where,
as … is saying, personal expression wasn’t foremost, but where the artwork itself
and all it represents and contains had precedence. And it’s through music that we
can get the most intimate connection with what it was like to be alive here long
ago: how that felt when it was a very different place and a very different
experience. This particular corner of Europe may well be the only place on Earth
where the broad outlines - the general thrust - the flavours - of the indigenous
vocal and instrumental music haven’t been carried forward from the Middle Ages
into modern times in an obvious way. So here is the opportunity to expand our
understanding rather than to duplicate it.
THE ORIGINS OF THE MUSIC TRADITION
Jul 15, 2017
That’s right – Edward Bunting was very keen to eke out whatever he could from
the cerdd dant tradition about harp playing in medieval Ireland, for his book with
its ambitious title: Ancient Music of Ireland. But he wasn’t the first to notice the
Irish influence in the names of the measures: the first observation we have on
this is the simple statement in a mid-16th century cerdd dant document that the
measures are in the Irish language. There’s a provisional analysis of the names in
Sally Harper: ‘So How Many Irishmen Went to Glyn Achlach?’, Cambrian Medieval
Celtic Studies 42 (2001), pp. 1-24. The Old Norse and Old Irish terms that I’ve
identified in the measure names leave no room for thinking that the list of
measure names might have been a late confection. There is no doubt that there
was an early Hiberno-Norse component in the formation of the list, and that
26
points to Dublin, which in turn calls to mind the traditional accounts of Gruffudd
ap Cynan and of Glendalough in connection with the music, and of course
Gerald’s identification of Ireland as the source of the music. So there is a core to
all these accounts which is certainly authentic, and it may well be that many of
their details are accurate, perhaps even including some of those in the pedrylef
wyddel account I was talking about before.
There are two possibilities here for the initial development of the cerdd dant
system of harmony: either it had been developed in Ireland recently enough for
the memory of that to be carried forward in tradition to Gerald’s time, or Gerald
was reflecting merely a memory of a time when Ireland was musically pre-
eminent and unchallenged by Scotland, in which case the system might not have
been invented in Ireland within a few centuries of Gerald’s time. That would leave
both the timing and the geography of the initial development very open-ended.
Possibilities there are that medieval Ireland inherited it from a pre-Christian Celtic
culture, perhaps a pan-Celtic one, or from Romano-British culture, or that the
early monks brought it with them, along with their faith, to Ireland from the
south of France, either as part of local Graeco-Roman or Graeco-Gallic culture or
from further east. The reason why I bring Greek Massilia into this is the
mathematics involved in cerdd dant harmony do call Ancient Greece to mind.
There again, the Irish monks very early on had enough maths and engineering
skills to build impressive tidal mills, but again that may well have been knowledge
brought from the Mediterranean.
Aug 7, 2018
… On a different tack, I’ve been thinking again lately about one of the great
questions that Gerald’s writing on string music throws up: why Scotland? Why
was it that Scotland had surpassed Ireland in the opinion of many at that time, in
the excellence of its string music? For Scotland to have done that, had the music
standard declined in Ireland, or had it advanced in Scotland? Both seem to run
contrary to such as is known about the sister art of strict-metre poetry: the
records give the impression – but perhaps it’s a distorted one – that Scotland was
very much in the shadow of Ireland. It’s not easy to put your finger on why
Scotland may have outstripped Ireland in string music.
Thinking now about any barometers of the strength of native culture in the time
of Gerald that reflect his account of the geography of string music, I come back to
the Culdees. Their recorded distribution in the 12th century does rather reflect his
account of the relative strengths of string music. Most significantly, the number of
recorded Culdee houses in Scotland is about double the number in Ireland (about
nineteen as against about ten). Wales has two (Ynys Enlli & Beddgelert) and
England just one, at York.
The Culdee movement – a sort of ‘back to the roots’ reform - began near Dublin
in around 787 and spread to Scotland so that by around 800 Dunkeld was
established as the Culdee centre in Scotland, taken over by about 850 by St
Andrews, on the East coast. Looking more closely at the 12th century distribution
of Culdees within Scotland has brought something of a revelation to me. I had
always imagined the relevant part of Scotland to what Gerald was referring to
would be the Highlands and Islands but the Culdees were all in Eastern Scotland,
particularly along the East coast. None whatsoever in the Highlands and Western
Isles! This easterly bias shows that the highly conservative Culdee tradition was
embraced in Pictland and Northumbria as a revival of the eremitic aspect of the
Church as it had been earlier in those areas; that is, in the Columban Church
insofar as that was an entity distinct from the early Irish Church and the early
27
British Church.
This reorientation of our view of the heartland of traditional culture in Scotland to

the East may help to explain the otherwise surprising distribution of clarsairs
recorded 1400-1650 in the map published by Keith Sanger at
http://www.wirestrungharp.com/harps/harpers/mapping-the-clarsach.pdf. The
map is blank for the entire Northwest, and it shows a particularly concentrated
distribution in the former ‘Culdee’ area in the East.
I’m not suggesting that the key to Gerald’s point about the excellence of string
music in Scotland is that the Culdees fostered string music, although I think they
may well have done so, but that their growth in Scotland is reflective of Gerald’s
point. It shows a strand of traditional native culture that was strong in Eastern
Scotland in Gerald’s time, entrenched and resistant to the influx of Norman-
French culture and the Roman Church. In Ireland, Scotland and Wales the Culdee
houses tended to get replaced by Augustinian canons, and at Gerald’s time that
process was more advanced in Ireland than it was in Scotland, having begun after
the Synod of Rathbreasail in 1111. The forces that lie behind that disparity should
explain why Gerald had the information he was given, that by the 1180s Ireland
was thought to be lagging behind Scotland in string music: Ireland was being
subjected to an influx of Norman culture and the Roman Church earlier and more
forcefully than was Scotland. And if string music was not in decline but
advancing, the factors favourable to advancement would have been stronger in
Eastern Scotland.
I reckon it’s relevant to all this that the double tonic is at least as firmly rooted in
the Lowlands and the Borders as it is in Western Scotland.
The current fashion is to link medieval Irish musical culture with that of the Gaelic
Highlands and Western Isles, but the points I’ve made here stress links with
Eastern Scotland, at the actual heart of the emerging Scottish nation during the
time that the Norse were still dominant in the North and the West.
Aug 13, 2018
… The earliest depictions of frame harps are all in Pictland, particularly in the
‘Culdee’ area, but the southern part of the ‘Culdee’ area, south of the Firth of
Forth, was not Pictish but Anglian. The Kingdom of Northumbria at its greatest
extent reached up to the Forth. South of the Forth were the Culdee centres of
Abercom, Aberlady, Tyningham, Coldingham, Melrose and York. York as an
archbishopric had primacy over the whole of the North including Scotland until
1154.
What is so interesting about Northumbria from the point of view of cerdd dant is
that there is a piece in the tune lists named for Oswald, the 7th-century king of
Northumbria. He was the foe of Gwynedd, so it is surprising to find him honoured
in this piece. There are only two places in Wales with dedications to him: a church
and a well at Croesoswallt (Oswestry), where it is thought likely that he met his
end in battle with the Welsh and the Mercians, and a well and field name between
Whitford and Treffynnon (Holywell). The piece is Caniad Yswallt or Caniad y
Brenin Yswalld, and the ‘brenin’ indicates his status as a king not as a saint. The
veneration here was political not religious, and since that seems incongruous in a
Welsh context I wonder if it was thought of as a relic of Northumbrian culture.
There are numerous early dedications to Oswald in Lancashire and Cumbria, over
which Northumbria had extended, so perhaps it was a relic not of Anglian culture
but of Cumbric culture: Rheged or Strathclyde. The piece was on the measures
28
mac y mynfaen and mac y delgi, neither of which were very common in the tune
lists.
Three other relevant points bear on the North of England, which I brought up in a
post here on Febuary 16, 2016. There is much evidence of the late survival of
Celtic customs there. The minstrels’ guild of Beverley in Yorkshire covered a
territory between the Tyne and the Tweed, according to its statute dating back to
Athelstan who in 927 had achieved overlordship of this area. And there’s a record
of a Welsh harper at Durham Abbey in 1360 - far from Wales and deep in
Northumbria.
Gerald speculated that the distinctive two-part vocal polyphony of the North of
Britain, beyond the Humber and round about York, had a Norse origin, but all
these points suggest that that may have been related to an older tradition, and
also to an instrumental one.
May 13, 2019
… What other evidence is there that elements of cerdd dant date from an early
period? There are some titles of pieces that relate to historical individuals from
before the Norman Conquest, and more dubious references to famed early
figures: Arthur, Cadwaladr and Oswald. Rather stronger are small pieces of
linguistic evidence. There are the traces of Old Norse terms amongst the
measures, particularly ‘hattr’: ‘metre’, and two Old English words amongst tune
titles: ‘cyning’: ‘king’, and ‘Eadwulf’, a common Anglo-Saxon personal name that
passed out of use following the Norman Conquest, in the title of the piece Caniad
Edfwlch [also Edwlph and Edwlff] Offeiriad: Eadwulf Priest. This is the evidence
which interests me most. As a mere priest Eadwulf is no highflyer such as
Cadwaladr, no obvious candidate for antiquizing. … There’s a record of an Eadwulf
priest serving at Clofesho in Mercia fl. 803, of one at Worcester fl. 892-904, of
another at Leckford, Hants. fl. 947. No doubt there had been others in that sort of
period amongst the Mercian settlements in the areas of Wales which later became
recovered by the Welsh, where OE place names such as Preston and Soughton
became absorbed into Welsh culture (as Prestatyn and Sychdyn etc.).
THE MYTHOLOGICAL AND ARTISTIC BACKGROUND
Mar 21, 2018
The development of cyweirdant and tyniad is readily explicable in a technical

sense: on the lyre or the harp if you chase just intonation then wherever the
harmony is heptatonic you will inevitably create a tyniad residue which clings
beside the justness of the cyweirdant chords, and so you have to accept the need
to create a virtue out of necessity, which they did by organising the double tonic
into measures. But how does that sit with Celtic culture in general? Here are
some thoughts on that.
The Celtic Otherworld very much involved distortions, inversions and reversals of
everyday reality, perhaps prompted by the visual distortions, inversions and
reversals produced by gazing at bodies of water and at mirrors. Celtic myth and
custom very much emphasize the switch between the two ‘worlds’ and the portals
through which beings might slip from the one to the other or back again, at
liminal times or places, and those transitions can be compared with the switches
back-and-forth between I and 0, cyweirdant and tyniad, as we move through a
measure.
29
Celtic ‘art’ often appears, similarly, to concern itself with the margins, the limits,
of realism, where naturalism has been taken in the direction of abstraction to the
extreme point where the disorientating effect of transition is at its greatest. The
art is characteristically ambiguous, difficult to fathom, but perhaps that was
always the prime intention. Certainly the tales must always have had that effect,
and perhaps the music had too. A drawing away from normality and towards a
magical, distorted alternative reality.
As regards the simultaneous representation of pairings, La Tène art often

contains designs that are divided by an implied vertical or horizontal borderline,
such that one half echoes the other half through reversal or inversion, either
exactly or having been transformed. But, otherwise, pairings that might
symbolize the dual conception of realities or of harmonies aren’t particularly
common: there are dragon pairs, twin mother-/sister-godesses, Janiform heads
and divine couples, but not in great profusion. The symbolism of the number
three appears as having been more prominent. In the later knotwork there is no
strong preference for two-strand twist.
There was of course a strong association between music and the Otherworld, for
which see Karen Ralls-MacLeod, Music and the Celtic Otherworld (Edinburgh,
2000). She makes the interesting observation that in tales stringed instruments
were often present in the Celtic Otherworld but were not so in the Celtic-Christian
Heaven where bells and singing were dominant. Angels with harps in Heaven
were a later introduction.
If there are chunks of relevant cultural background that I haven’t covered here,
do please say.
Mar 22, 2018
… And you’re right to draw attention to the role of music in prompting the
transitions [between this world and the Otherworld in Celtic tales]. I think a key
fact about the tales is that the protagonist crosses over with his identity and
personality intact – it’s not as if he/she undergoes a transformation, it is merely a
transition into a different environment which has different rules. That is how it is
in our dreams of course. And the frequent unexpectedness and unpredictability of
the transition event also has the flavour of falling into sleeping consciousness and
of waking up. It might be helpful for us, then, to view the double tonic of cerdd
dant as mimicking that falling and waking. But, if that is indeed how we
experience it at some level (I find that I do) it is in extremely concentrated
quantities, as transitions between cyweirdant and tyniad flood past at the rate
they do. Childhood play is very much a rehearsal for the realities of later life, and
perhaps this music is concentrated rehearsal for, and a concentrated replaying of,
the experience of switching between waking and dreaming consciousness. …
Mar 22, 2018
So can we get any further with these lines of thought?
I’m wondering why it is that a fascination with marginality, in the realm of

perceived reality, was characteristic of Celtic culture. I can see that in cerdd dant
the transitions between cyweirdant and tyniad, and especially the hovering on the
threshold between the two that happens in the music when one is partially
invaded by the other to form ‘hybrid’ chords as Paul Whittaker terms them, join
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similar features in myth and art and strengthens the argument that fascination
with marginality is not entirely a projection of modern culture through the
concept of the Celtic Twilight onto ancient culture. I can see that that extra
insight that cerdd dant, and double-tonic piobaireachd too, gives here is
important in understanding Celtic culture. But I wonder if it helps at all in
answering why, as it appears to us, they in particular had such an interest in
marginality and transition?
I don’t really understand that, why it was a particular feature of Celtic culture,
certainly not peculiar to it but particular within it.
You can see that the reclusive monasticism of the early Christian Church
(motivated admittedly at the expressed level more perhaps by the urge to
withdraw rather than to dwell at the margin) led the anchorites to live at the
geographical margins, almost between land and sea. In the Iron Age it was not
the practice in these islands to live right beside the sea but from what we can
gather of pre-Christian Celtic culture the marginality of that practice would have
had some psychological appeal, and I’m sure that would have been a factor in
why monastic Christianity was so successful in becoming established here.
Maybe it largely comes down simply to the geography, that ‘fringe’ Celtic culture
was situated on the fringe, not just of the known world but with everywhere so
much interface between land and water. That’s more of a question than a
statement, because I’m wondering what else might account for this taste for
marginality in this particular part of the world.
Any thoughts?
Mar 23, 2018
No, the word ‘Celtic’ is not frowned upon in academic circles – Celtic Studies
continues on the academic curriculum. At its core the word ‘Celtic’ adheres most
closely to the Celtic languages, and then to the cultures that accompany and have
accompanied them. I think perhaps you’re thinking of the fact that the concept of
a Celtic race with a habit of migrating hither and thither has become, with good
reason, extremely unpopular today, but that’s a different thing isn’t it?
Back to language, ancient cerdd dafod is in Cymraeg, the Welsh language, so I

make no apology for describing its ancient musical sister as Celtic. But here,
further than that, I’ve been pointing out stylistic and conceptual features which
cerdd dant has in common with Iron Age La Tène culture and Insular Celtic-
Christian culture. It’s important for me to do so because Celtic Studies, whilst
embracing Music in its remit in a formal way, has never really had the resources
to develop it as it deserves, and because I’m demonstrating that the Celticity of
cerdd dant goes beyond and deeper than a simple marriage with the Welsh
language. An English ballad melody can be taken and given Welsh lyrics, but
cerdd dant is in terms of form unique to Wales and we have yet to have any
evidence that suggests it ever developed outside of the British Isles as part of
one of the great diffusions of musical influence from the Continent; whereas the
style and form of ballads can be traced back to late medieval Provence and back
further to roots beyond there. So that’s an important distinction, and the word
‘Celtic’ is a convenient, short way of highlighting it. The degree of divergence of
cerdd dant from the mainstream of European musical culture is extreme,
dramatic.
Also, don’t forget the power of cultural entrenchment in the face of hostile alien
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pressures. I'm thinking here in particular of just how much the crucible in which
piobaireachd developed was an entrenched, conservative one in terms of a taste
for the indigenous and archaic: how the West Highlands in the two or three
centuries leading up to the 'Forty-Five’ rebellion continued to produce artwork
that reveals entrenchment: in sculpture and on whalebone ivory caskets, the
Queen Mary harp, annular brooches, dirks, targes and powder horns (all usefully
itemised briefly in Laing & Laing, Art of the Celts (London, 1992), pp. 197-9)). In
Wales the Celtic visual styles had been displaced earlier (by the Romanesque
visual styles) but from cerdd dafod we know no such revolution happened in the
performing arts – there was an attitude of stubborn, proud entrenchment, along
with a veneration for the hengerdd.
Does not cerdd dant strike you as entirely different from the pan-European music
of the troubadours etc., where, for one example, the harmony implied by the
melodies is simply a drone, with no switching between harmonies and no margin
between them? There’s no sign at all there of the Celtic features I’ve been talking
about – no distortions, inversions and reversals. Plenty of atmosphere but no
mystery. …
Mar 23, 2018
Yes, they all share the same qualities of dense, intricate and highly organised
patterning. There’s nothing exceptional about that – Islamic tilework has the
same for example, but what is striking about cerdd dafod is that the acoustic
content repeats but having been transformed. So in cynghanedd gytsain the
consonants of the first part reappear later in the line but this time framing a
different vowel. This is the principle of near-sameness in operation, rather in the
way that the Otherworld is like this one but not the same as it. As you know, in
the variety of gytsain that is groes o gyswllt the repeat begins before the first
statement has ended, so there is a tiny patch of overlap between the two halves
of the gytsain, where the crossing-over between the two halves has ambiguity –
the brain struggles with the issue of: is this the first half or the second? when
actually it is both simultaneously. That has the flavour of the unexpectedness of
crossing over into or out of the Otherworld.
The principle of near-sameness pervades cerdd dant at every level. A motif may
often repeat but shifted to the other half of the double tonic, and nearly all the
variations in pieces are built on the principle of repeating the last variation but
with subtle changes to it, to build up the enormous pieces we find in the ap Huw
manuscript.
One could say that language in general applies the principle of near-sameness to
word stems to alter or specify their grammatical meaning but I think that all the
later Celtic languages take near-sameness further than other languages do,
because they have initial mutation. Then we can wonder: did the Celtic arts and
languages concentrate on near-sameness because of a concern with two realities
or did the concept of the Otherworld spring out of a predilection for near-
sameness in art and language. It’s rather a chicken-or-egg question, I’m thinking.
Either way, I’m bringing out near-sameness as a distinguishing factor which

unites much of what we know about Celtic culture and religion, and cerdd dant is
a very strong example indeed of that principle.
Mar 26, 2018
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Yes, near-sameness is a principle that was particularly enduring in Celtic culture,

along with ambiguity and reversibility.
A pariticularly enduring and prominent example of these principles is the visual

motif of the dragon pair. It first appears in the fifth century BC and became
more widespread than any other motif, generally taking the form of two
somewhat different, highly-stylized S-shapes with the heads facing each other. In
the Late Iron Age they are found mainly on sword scabbards and may symbolise
cavalry, whilst similar griffin pairs may symbolise infantry (dragons have four
legs, griffins two). Pairings of fantastic creatures connected together by interlaced
limbs, tails and ears were common in Christian Celtic art, and the sword
association was carried forward in the account in the Mabinogi of Arthur’s sword
Caledvwlch (Excalibur) which bore the image of two golden snakes.
One half survives (the other has been lost) of what would have been a serpent or
dragon pair very much in La Tène style flanking the depiction of a harper upon
the shrine of St. Moedoc. The Trinity College harp contains on its forepillar four
roundels each containing a pair of assorted beasts locked together. The Queen
Mary harp on the front of its forepillar sports a pair of reptilian heads, one facing
up, the other facing down, and also a pair of roundels on each side of the
forepillar each containing a different fabulous beast. The harmonic curve of the
Fitzgerald or Dalway harp fragments from 1621 is faced at the top of its front end
with a pair of fabulous beasts side by side: “with heads, wings, two legs, and
long, snake-like tails, also in high relief; that upon the left side has a cock’s head,
and may have been intended for a cockatrice, that upon the right side is
dragonesque, perhaps a wyvern” (Armstrong, p. 66).
Whenever it was that the pairing of cyweirdant and tyniad evolved, it will have
done so in a cultural context that had similar pairings in the visual realm of the
imagination. The dragon-pair motif had symbolic significance, for example the red
dragon and the white dragon associated in the Mabinogi with Dinas Emrys
signifying the Welsh and English forces, so are there any thoughts here on if the
cyweirdant-tyniad pair might have had any symbolism attached to it?
The dragon pair may well have been prompted by a physical phenomenon - the
ripples that emerge in pattern-welded sword blade manufacture - just as
cyweirdant-tyniad is prompted by the physics of intonation, so the latter does not
have to have carried symbolism but I imagine it might have attracted it. Anyway,
the harp ornamentations suggest the possibility of there having been an
association between dragon pairs and harp music and that’s a thought to play
with.
Mar 27, 2018
And surely the key to all this about the cultural background to cyweirdant and
tyniad lies in Caesar’s description of the Gauls as worshipping amongst the gods
primarily Mercury. The cyweirdant-tyniad pairing sits very comfortably indeed in
the context of Mercury, inventor of the lyre, associated with the threshold
between one thing and another and with the transactions between them, and
symbolised by the caduceus with its twin serpents.
There are apparently over four hundred inscriptions that include Mercury in
Roman Gaul and Britain. The theme of Mercury as inventor of the lyre is carried
forward in the cerdd dant manuscript Gwysaney 28, f. 65 in connection with the
invention of the crwth.
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The classical Mercury is thought to have been the nearest Roman equivalent to
the Celtic god Lugus, who features in Irish myth as the god Lugh (Welsh Lleu or
Llew), the lyre player.
Whenever it was that the pairing of cyweirdant and tyniad evolved, it will have
done so in a cultural context that was comfortable with such a pairing
representing or expressing the principle of Mercury, either as myth or personified
as a god. Putting it in another way, if the harmony had not been geminate (i.e.
bipartite) it would not have been an expression of the core principle of Mercury.
Apr 3, 2018
Yes, good points … [about the Queen Mary harp]. The foliate decoration above
the string band does look like the foliage of a tree with the string band itself
representing the trunk. The front of the forepillar has a similar flavour, where the
design above the central band of interlace is quite foliate in contrast to that below
which is rather like a root system. The Queen Mary harp is such a treasure trove
of symbols. What a superb piece of craftmanship it is. I’m thinking now about the
saltire panels it shares with the Trinity, the Keills sculpture and the slab at
Glendalough and how Mercury had dominion over crossroads.
I’m satisfied with bringing in Mercury to this discussion of duality in Celtic myth
and art, that it provides an understanding of the cultural background to the
system of dual harmony on stringed instruments. That Mercury had once been
particularly worshipped in Celtic culture helps explain the importance there of
stringed instruments, of harmony in the sense of one note against another and
particularly of the system of dual harmony that is cyweirdant and tyniad. That
Mercury was less important in the Classical pantheon might explain why it is that
the double tonic was never developed or adopted in the Latin, Greek and Arabic
spheres in place of their notionally drone-based music.
I think I’ve noticed sometimes in some listeners’ initial reactions to the music a
disappointment that it isn’t drone-based, almost as if the addition of double-tonic
cerdd dant to what was already known to be the double-tonic sphere - the reels,
jigs and hornpipes, piobaireachd and the double-tonic songs - was becoming too
much. I’d be very interested to hear if anyone remembers expecting the harmony
to be based on the principle of an actual or notional drone rather than on the
double-tonic principle of duality.
Apr 4, 2018
… Musing further on the role of the dominant as the commonality between

cyweirdant and tyniad, it is what brings cyweirdant and tyniad into relationship,
the pivot point around which they both revolve. That image and the caduceus
with its pair of spiralling serpents both illustrate the same set of principles.
Mercury, as messenger of the gods, speedily shuttles to-and-fro using his winged
shoes and helmet, bringing news from here to there and vice versa, carrying his
caduceus with its pair of serpents, and so he brings the knowledge of the
relationship between one entity and another and brings about an exchange and a
familiarity between them. A second century AD Roman explanation of the
caduceus is that: "When Mercury, holding it in his hand, was journeying to
Arcadia and saw two snakes with bodies intertwined, apparently fighting, he put
down the staff between them. They separated then, and so he said that the staff
had been appointed to bring peace. Some, in making caducei, put two snakes
intertwined on the rod, because this seemed to Mercury a bringer of peace."
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The parallel between all this and the serpent pairs, dragon pairs and the like of
Celtic art is clear, and so are the parallels between both of those and double-tonic
harmony. The music shuttles back and forth dynamically between cyweirdant and
tyniad, which are closely entwined and similar and yet not identical, and as their
dialogue unfolds the attention is drawn to the subtle distinctions between them
and to how they complement one another.
One more quick thing: the theme of the caduceus seems to make an appearance
in Irish legend as the otherworldly silver musical branch of Irish legend, bearing
in mind that Mercury is associated with quicksilver.
THE EXTENT OF THE WELSH TRADITION
Feb 11, 2016
Yes indeed - borders were porous. As regards foreign musicians, some versions of
the Welsh Laws make provision for the musicians - the cerddorion - of another
district - gwlad - having a circuit among the king’s villains, while waiting for their
gifts from the king, if he give any. As regards Welsh musicians abroad, I’ve
already referred to them here on pilgrimage on the Continent (July 20, 2015) and
there’s a record in the account rolls of the abbey of Durham of a payment in 1360
of 3s. 4d. to a Welsh harper (Joseph Strutt: The Sports and Pastimes of the
People of England (London, 1801), p. 152). Durham is a long way from the Welsh
Marches, and this argues for the cerdd dant musicians finding it profitable to
extend their circuits deep into England. The patronage of the English royal court
would have been particularly attractive, and payments to Welsh harpists and
crowders are recorded in the Court Rolls, particularly around the turn of the 14 th
century (see Constance Bullock-Davies: ‘Welsh Minstrels at the Courts of Edward
I and Edward II’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion
(1974), pp. 104-22).
We can be confident that these musicians were of the cerdd dant variety since the
cerdd dafod ones would have hit the language barrier of course, except where
they may have travelled abroad as part of their lord’s retinue in foreign wars, in
France and Scotland, perhaps Ireland, and on diplomatic missions.
As a background to all this, we have to remember the great interest outside

Wales in the Matter of Britain - the Arthurian cycle and the like - and the caché
that accrued to Welsh musicians as a result. What is an interesting question is to
what extent the performing style of the Matter of England and of the Breton lais
by English harpers and crowders might have parallelled or mimicked the Welsh
style. Characters from the Matter of England enter into the poem performed by
the ‘Islington’ harper I was recently talking about, and I wonder how that would
have compared with Welsh performance you see.
Feb 16, 2016
The original word used in the Laws is ‘vilaeineit’ - from the Latin, and indeed that
should be translated today as ‘villeins’. Looking into it more closely, the passage
would refer to the bondmen - the taeogion - of the local manor - the maerdref -
of the royal court having musicians from another country billetted on them during
their stay to attend and perform at the court, and not to the standard cwrs clera
or cylch - the performing circuit or progress amongst the wealthy free men: what
we today would call going on tour.
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It was not just musicians that went on circuit of course. Circuiting was the
general means by which services were delivered to the people: everything was
peripatetic: justice, security, administration, entertainment. The royal court itself
would go on progress twice a year, and it was a big item: the highest records
refer to 520 men, 200 horses and 200 dogs. In addition, court officers went on
their own cylch at their special times of the year: the King’s bodyguard, the pages
and their servants, the falconers, the huntsmen, the King’s stallion and its
grooms and the King’s warhorse and its grooms. Two local officers would travel
round the commote: the local, lesser courts official and the local reeve, and also
the cais or serjeants: a form of police. Very interestingly, some of these customs,
even under the name of 'kilch', survived in the Welsh Marches and across
Northern England until about the fourteenth century, detailed in William Rees:
‘Survivals of Ancient Celtic Customs in Medieval England’ in H. N. Savory: Angles
and Britons (Cardiff, 1963), pp. 148-168. These similarities between English and
Welsh practices are particularly marked in the case of the medieval bishops of
Durham, and that brings to mind the record I recently brought up of that
payment to a Welsh harper at Durham Abbey in 1360. The bishops of Durham
were very supportive of harpers.
Wales was organised into its three taleithiau - three bardic provinces - and
according to the Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan a musician should circuit three
times a year, including a circuit of each province every three years. Perhaps
England had also once been divided into bardic provinces and the minstrels’
courts at Chester, Tutbury and Beverley were survivals of their administration.
The statute of the Beverley guild refers to ancient custom since the time of King
Athelstan in relation to the territory between Tyne and Tweed. Newcastle-under-
Lyme may have been the centre of a fourth territory, as annual tolls were payable
there by minstrels as they were at Chester.
Given all these similarities in administrative organisation between Wales, the

Marches and Northern England, I can easily conceive of some harpers and
crowders amongst the English minstrels of those areas playing music of the cerdd
dant type, or accompanying their voice in the same manner as did the cerdd
dafod performers, and not music in the French manner of the trouvers, jongleurs
and chanteurs.
Aug 23, 2018
‘Yr Alban’ is used in some copies of the Peniarth MS 20 version of the Brut y
Tywysogion in connection with the alleged Cardigan eisteddfod c. 1176, which in
a grandiose declaration describe the eisteddfod as having been announced a year
and a day beforehand “drwy holl gymry a lloegyr ar alban ac ywerdon ar ynyssed
ereill”. The other islands referred to last will have been the Norse islands. Other
versions have Prydyn and Prydein in place of yr Alban, Prydyn being a name for
the land north of the Forth (Pictland) whilst Prydein was originally used for Britain
south of the Forth. Prydein here will be a mistake for Prydyn.
Three terms have overlap in Scotland then: yr Alban, Ysgotland and Prydyn.
Aug 13, 2018
The title of one piece in the cerdd dant tune lists, Caniad Wiliam Ysgotlond,
indicates William the Lion, Earl of Northumbria from 1152 and King of Scotland
from 1165 to 1214. Was this a product of Scotland? There seem to have been no
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dynastic links between William and Wales, and no very significant political
connections, no Welsh troops serving under him. On the contrary, Llywelyn the
Great joined John of England in 1209 in a campaign against William, and the
favour was repaid by Scots joining John’s campaigns in Wales in 1211 and 1212.
Although I’ve just turned up that in 1212 there may have been some diplomatic
liaison between Llywelyn and William, to bring pressure to bear on John to abort
a planned invasion of Gwynedd which was indeed abandoned. Gwynedd would
have customarily sent and received emissaries to and from other courts such as
in Scotland and France, so it is conceivable that this piece may have been
composed to be taken to Scotland as a diplomatic offering to William, or for it to
have been taken to Wales by Scottish musicians representing William on courtesy
visits. Some pieces have ‘anrheg’ in their title, ‘gift’, as if they were offerings
given by their commissioners or composers.
I wonder if the dedicatees of pieces used them regularly in formal ceremony, as a

complement to their heraldry, rather like the national anthems of today. In the
tune lists there are dedications to various Welsh kings and princes, as well as to
King Oswald of Northumbria, an unspecified ‘cyning’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘king’ –
and there’s even a reference to profiadau and ceinciau of William the Conqueror.
The grandeur of cerdd dant seems appropriate for such purposes. It’s such a long
way from Greensleeves!
Aug 14, 2019
I think I’ve got a little further now with Welsh-Scottish relations in the time of
William of Scotland, 1165-1214, re Caniad Wiliam Ysgotland. This is through the
Norsemen of Dublin, Man and the Scottish Isles, with whom the Gwynedd dynasty
were still quite intertwined in William’s time. Specifically, in 1190 Rhodri ab Owain
Gwynedd was driven out of Anglesey and took refuge with the Norsemen,
probably on the Isle of Man, and became betrothed to a daughter of Rognvaldr,
King of Man and the Isles, who was for most of his reign in alliance with William
of Scotland. Three years later Rhodri retook and briefly held Anglesey with a
Manx force supplied by Rognvaldr. Rhodri died in 1195 after which an
arrangement was made for his widow to marry Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. During this
period Rhodri’s brother Rhirid lived amongst the Norsemen of Dublin, where their
brother Maelgwn took refuge in 1173. And Rognvaldr is credited with instigating
the translation into Welsh of texts concerning Charlemagne and Roland, so there
were significant cultural links between Gwynedd and Man at a time when the
Islesmen were in alliance with William.
The Welsh claim that in around 1176 the Deheubarth eisteddfod at Cardigan was
advertised throughout Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland and Man and the Isles
(‘yr ynysoedd ereill’) appears to reflect a cosmopolitan outlook, or at least an
aspiration to one, where a musical tribute to a Scottish king would not be out of
place. I suspect the Isle of Man had something to do with the caniad.
There was later diplomatic Welsh contact with Scotland and the Isles: in 1258
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd made an alliance with the Scottish Comyn faction; in 1315
and following a Scottish fleet was active in the Irish Sea and there was contact
with the Scots regarding opposition to the English. And finally there was a minor
Scottish raid on Beaumaris in 1381, either by privateers or by the ships of the
Lords of the Isles. That reminds us that whilst we today think in terms of four
nations, Gwynedd (Anglesey in particular) was neighbour to that fifth cultural
entity the Kingdom of Dublin, Mann and the Isles.
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Aug 16, 2019
Amongst the titles of pieces with Irish associations I’ve just been looking at
Caniad Iarll Cormac Wyddel. Who was Cormac? Any help on this would be much
appreciated. There have been so many Cormacs. None of them seem to link up
directly with Wales. The Cormac mac Cárthaigh who supplied four or five
thousand Irish troops for the battle of Bannockburn, 1314, was acting as an ally
of Robert and Edward Bruce, whereas the Welsh troops there were levies in
Edward II’s army, in opposition to the Scots and the Irish. Nevertheless, Robert’s
wife was a granddaughter of Llywelyn Fawr and it appears that after Bannockburn
native Welsh leaders were in touch with the Scots and with Edward Bruce in
Ireland where there was a proposal to mount an attack on the English through
Wales. So this piece might be a legacy of such ‘Celtic alliance’ scheming.
The region of Munster fielded seven leaders named Cormac altogether, Meath
(Mide) three, Muskerry two, Moylurg (Magh Luirg) two and Umaill one. Of all of
those I’m particularly interested in Cormac mac Art Ó Melaghlain, King of Mide c.
1205-1239. He was in his time the strongest opponent of the English in Ireland,
especially in the period 1211 to 1235, the time of the greatest hostilities between
Gwynedd under Llywelyn Fawr and the English. That Mide and Gwynedd had
common cause is underscored by the fact that Maurice Fitzgerald, the second
Lord of Offaly and Justiciar of Ireland, was the immediate foe of both: in 1235 he
took Cormac prisoner; in 1244, as had been a plan in 1231, he campaigned in
Anglesey in concert with Henry III’s attack on Gwynedd from Chester. He ravaged
the island and destroyed the harvest upon which Gwynedd was largely reliant.
This was the pincer movement that Gwynedd had long feared, ever since Dublin
had been seized by the Normans in 1170. But in the early 13th century the house
of Gwynedd still owned and occupied its ancestral landholdings in Dublin and
beyond at Cloghran and they and their traditional allies the Ostmen of Dublin
must at least have watched the remarkable sustained resistance of Cormac Ó
Melaghlain to the west of Dublin with the greatest of interest. Cloghran, curiously,
is still an international hub in its current incarnation as Dublin Airport.
Whichever Cormac it was that is referred to in the cerdd dant piece, it must arise
from some diplomatic communication between the Irish and the Welsh for
Cormac to have been accorded this mark of respect, if indeed it was a Welsh
composition and not one imported from Ireland. Owain Glyndwr’s government
had substantial international liaisons but none of the Cormacs I’m aware of relate
to Owain’s period nor to Owain Lawgoch’s.
In the absence of any early tune lists from Ireland or Scotland it’s good to know
from these Welsh lists that instrumental tributes to Irish and Scottish leaders did
exist.
Aug 16, 2019
Good idea … So, over to the online data bases of poetry. No Cormacs in the
Welsh one. Quite a few in the Irish one, of which three are to the Earl of
Desmond mac Carthaigh fl. 1326-1359, the ally of the Bruces, composed by
Gearoid Iarla mac Gearailt. None to Cormac mac Art o Melaghlain of Midhe fl.
1213-1239, only ones referring to his later descendant Cormac Bhallaigh mac Art
of Midhe fl. 1344-62, including praise of his fighting against the English. But the
later the date, the more poems have survived of course.
Edward Bruce in Ireland and Gruffydd Llwyd in Wales were in contact after
Bannockburn, trying to coordinate a pan-Celtic offensive against the English, with
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Bruce offering to invade Wales from Ireland with, I imagine, the support of the
Earl of Desmond Cormac.
But although there is only the occasional record of liaison between the native
Welsh and the Gaelic Irish, the Islesmen and the Scots, there's enough to
suppose that liaison would have been generally continuous. For example a treaty
of 1258 between the native Welsh leaders and those of much of Scotland included
a trade agreement to encourage merchants to travel between the two,
guaranteeing protection to them. Bordering the Irish Sea, all borders were
porous, and that encouraged continuous cultural exchange.
Oct 18, 2005
Would this type of music have been played in Brittany then? I expect so. There is
no other available candidate for early Breton court music and, from what we can
gather, British and Welsh harpists were known and respected there. What is less
clear is whether harmonious music like this was widespread across France. But if
the Normans were as impressed with the Breton harpists as they were with the
Breton story-tellers and poets then they would have taken harpists with them as
they spread across the Mediterranean. Also, in Southern Europe in general,
people would have been acquainted with chordal accompaniment from the music
of the Irish monasteries there, and from Welsh, Breton and Irish pilgrims to
Santiago de Compostela and Rome.
MONASTICISM AND STRING-PLAYING
Jul 11, 2017
… String-playing was very much the occupation of both the pastoral clergy and
the secluded monks, as we know from Gerald and other sources. It is thought
that St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury 960-978, would have learned his
string-playing at Glastonbury, whilst he was being taught the liberal arts by the
Irish monks there, and in a similar way Gille-Pádraig, Bishop of Dublin 1074-
1084, may have learned his whilst being trained at Worcester.
Jul 11, 2017
It is the associations of cerdd dant with the asceticism of Early Insular Christianity
that account for the ascetic qualities of the music. An understanding of the
meditative aspects of music is vital to the appreciation of cerdd dant. This was
music that was not designed only or always to entertain and impress others, but
was also designed as a simple celebration of piety, for one’s own private benefit.
Playing stringed instruments in private, in solitude, had been important amongst
clerics, as the Gille-Pádraig poem makes plain: “On it [the 6-stringed 'cithara'] I
make music for the people; more often I play it just for myself”. The saints
('sancti') referred to by Gerald who, along with the bishops and abbots, were
accustomed to carry citharae around with them and to be piously entertained
with their music, would have been the hermit monks, the anchorites, hence the
reference to the harp as “the one darling of sages” (in the Irish poem ‘A
chláirsioch Chnuic Í Chosgair’). So the peregrini (the early hermits), and perhaps
their later emulators the Culdees, along with the older monks including abbots
and bishops that would retire into solitude, would have been largely occupied in
string-playing in their seclusion. A link with reclusive monasticism comes from the
account of the Life of St. Caradog (Caradog Fynach, d. 1124), a monk who had
39
formerly been in service as a cithara-player to the court of Rhys ap Tewdwr, King

of Deheubarth (1077-93), to whom a cwlwm and a caniad are dedicated in the
repertory lists. Caradog subsequently retreated to an island, as was the custom
amongst the Culdees. The Caniad Caradog in the repertory lists might have been
a composition of his.
The relevance of this ascetic background to the cerdd dant repertory is confirmed
by the many other titles in the repertory lists that refer to saints. Whereas all the
indications are that the piece Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd was used for
accompaniment, the ‘saint’ pieces in the repertory lists were instrumental solo
pieces, like Caniad San Silin in the manuscript, which indicates that there was a
sacred element to purely instrumental playing.
There is some indication that these pieces bearing the names of saints were not
the product of the clergy. It seems that by the fifteenth century it had become
the practice of secular, professional musicians to dedicate the occasional
composition to their local patron saint (see the notices of the mabsant in the
poems quoted by Peter Crossley-Holland, The Composers in the Robert ap Huw
Manuscript, 1998, pp. 58-9). Indeed one of the very last contributions to the
repertory of the lists was Caniad Gwenfrewi, which is attributed by Panton 56:55
to Rhys Bencerdd, who flourished in the mid-fifteenth century. Rhys was from
Prestatyn, near to Holywell where Gwenfrewi's healing well was one of the major
pilgimage sites in the British Isles, so we may presume that the caniad played a
rôle in this setting. But such pieces would have been composed in the traditional
idiom proper to worship and prayer irrespective of whether they were the product
of clerical or secular composers.
Jul 12, 2017
Yes, there is a connection [between St. Kevin of Glendalough and cerdd dant].
Gerald writes:
... accidit ut episcopi at abbates, at sancti in Hibernia viri, citharas circumferre, at
in eis modulando pie delectari consueverint. Quapropter at sancti Keivini cithara
ab indigenis in reverentia non modica, at pro reliquiis virtuosis at magnis, usque
in hodiernum habetur.
... the bishops and abbots, and holy men in Ireland, were accustomed to bear
citharae around with them, and to be piously entertained with their music. On
which account both the cithara of St. Kevin and other powerful and important
remains [of this saint] are held in no small reverence by the people of the land to
this day. (trans. Christopher Page).
Kevin by tradition was the founder of the monastery of Glendalough, and that is
where the Welsh cerdd dant records place a congress of Welsh and Irish
musicians, at which the set of 24 canonical measures was agreed, apparently
rather along the lines of an international standard. There were a greater number
of non-canonical measures, in Wales at least, so perhaps the intention was to
reduce the number used in future composition. Kevin’s name is mentioned in the
cerdd dant documents (as Cwyfan) and there’s a dedication to him at Llangwyfan
on the coast of Anglesey which looks across to the Wicklow mountains behind
Glendalough and which is only a mile or so from the site of the main court of the
kings of Gwynedd at Aberffraw, that which gave its name to the northwestern
bardic province. There’s also another dedication to Kevin elsewhere in Wales, so
he may well have been active here, as was the case with many peregrini from the
other Celtic regions. [Kevin’s teacher is alleged to have been the Welsh monk St.
Petroc.]
40
The congress at Glendalough was reputedly held under the auspices of the king,
Muirchertach. Did it actually happen? In 1110 Muirchertach convened the Synod
of Rathbreasail, which was to the Church very much what a council at
Glendalough would have been to music: it was proposed there to reorganize and
consolodate the innumerable dioceses of native Ireland into just that number: 24.
The Norse kingdom of Dublin, which was usually independent of Muirchertach,
already constituted a diocese subject to the authority of Canterbury and was
excluded from this scheme. The proposal was never put into effect, but I gather
that it is an important example (along with the gift of the royal city of Cashel) of
Muirchertach's concern to unify native Ireland and to woo the Church in Ireland
away from the pressures put upon it to come under the authority of Canterbury.
We can speculate that some such battle for the allegiance of the institutions of
music might also have been taking place at that time, and if so that it would have
been expedient for Muirchertach to convene a musical congress along the same
lines as the two synods held under his auspices. This is to say that if a musical
congress did take place in his time at Glendalough, such an event would be quite
intelligible in the general circumstances.
On the other hand, if the Glyn Achlach account was a fabrication then it would
seem that the fabricators were probably drawing on an account of Rath Breasail
as a model, which then raises the addressable question of who would have had
access to such an account.
Possible parallels between the two events may involve the concept of the number
of measures being reduced to a standard of 24, and indeed perhaps many of the
other measures were already in existence before the canon was drafted. Again,
the canon seems to have had very little impact on actual composition (outside of
the clymau cytgerdd, that is) to judge from the tabulations of actual frequency of
usage I’ve compiled.
Strange to say, I know the Abbot of Glendalough at the time [Gilla Comgaill Ua
Tuathail] to have been amongst my remote ancestors.
Jul 12, 2017
Here’s a list of the pieces with clerical associations:
‘Mesur Cenhedlon’ (St. Cenedlon), 'Cwlwm y Sant', 'Cwlwm Atyr Sant/Cwlwm at

yr Hen Sant', 'Cwlwm Anrheg yr Iesu' (gift of Jesus), 'Cwlwm Salm Wgan' (the
psalm of Gwgan), 'Cwlwm Anrheg Ddewi' (St. David), 'Carn Digiad Was Mair' (?
shaft of the standard of the servant of Mary), 'Trimwchl Was Mair' (... servant of
Mary), ‘Cwlwm yr Hen Badarn’ (St. Padarn), 'Caniad San Silin' (St. Giles), 'Caniad
Caron' (St. Caron), 'Caniad Curic' (St. Curig), 'Caniad Gwenfrewi' (St. Winifred),
'Caniad Yswallt' (St. Oswald), 'Caniad y Sant', 'Caniad Byrnach' (St. Brynach),
'Caniad Iago' (St. James), 'Caniad Gwenog' (St. Gwynog), 'Caniad Edfwlff
Offeiriad' (Eadwulf the Priest), 'Caniad Beuno' (St. Beuno of Clynnog), 'Caniad
Brothen' (St. Brothen). Beuno and Brothen also occur elsewhere in a musical
context, in the fifteenth-century litany of Llanbeblig. Many titles contain the word
'cor', which may have indicated 'choir' or, in earlier usage, monastic 'college'
[clas].
Jul 12, 2017
The fact of the matter is, as I expect people here realise, that the music obliges
the player and the listener alike to find satisfaction in the very smallest of things,
41
as Gerald describes. Otherwise one is confronted [in a long piece] with an

ambience which is sustained for so long that it may or may not be agreeable. The
point is the alertness and the receptivity, both in conjunction with one another
from moment-to-moment, needed to follow the music are those qualities which
give rise to meditativeness.
I think it’s obvious that the pace of development in a cerdd dant piece is often so
slow not only because medieval life was generally slow but because the secluded
monk’s life was particularly slow. And attentive.
SECULAR SCHOOLS
Sep 7, 2017
Thinking on O’Davoran’s Irish Glossary that we’ve just been discussing, and all
the powerful bardic laments for the loss of the classical poetry and music, and the
ruination of the schools and abbeys: this O’Davoran was from his family’s law
school at Cathair Mhic Neachtain in Co. Clare. When you visit such a place you
are brought closer to the reality of the ruination, but you also enter into the
architectural Iron Age. Through the architectural continuity of such sites you get a
feel for the incredible antiquity of the schools’ traditions and of their materials.
The Irish schools – of string musicians, poets, physicians and jurists - were in
these cashels and raths in some areas right up until the early 17th century. And
there are many minor, non-military ringworks – raths – in Wales too, including
around here in Gwynedd, and I expect these had been for housing schools, but
schools which became defunct long before they did in parts of Ireland. The Iron
Age background to bardism becomes particularly apparent when we reflect on
how remarkable it is that such things as the text of O’Davoran’s Glossary have
been salvaged and transmitted out of places that look so ancient, as if they
belong to the Iron Age. I find it amazing.
MUSICAL ARTHURIANA
Jul 12, 2015
There are actually three Arthurian glosses altogether, in manuscripts concerned

with medieval court music. Each gloss associates Arthur's name with an
instrumental composition of long standing. The earliest manuscript with such a
gloss is Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 17116-B ("Gwysaney 28", c.
1560), p.62: "pibe morvydd o waith arthvr": ("Caniad Pibau Morfydd of Arthur's
workmanship"). The status of this piece, Caniad Pibau Morfydd, was particularly
high and it was associated with the time of King Cadwaladr, 7th century.
The other two glosses concern Gosteg yr Halen - 'yr halen' meaning 'the salt'.
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 62 (post 1582), p. 144
states: "Gostec yr Halen a genit wrth wasaneuthu cinio a swper yn llys Arthur": (
Gosteg yr Halen was played with the serving of dinner and supper at Arthur's
court). A variant of this is found in London, British Library MS 14905 ('The Robert
ap Huw Manuscript', c. 1613), p.19: "terfyn gosteg yr halen yr hvn a fyddid yn
ganu o flaen marchogion arthvr pan roid y salter ar halen ar y bwrdd": ("Here
ends Gosteg yr Halen, which used to be played before the knights of Arthur when
the salt-cellar was placed upon the table"). This piece was evidently in use as
part of the ceremony involved in banqueting, and, although the use of the original
music has long been abandoned, the placement of the salt remains important
today in formal banqueting in Europe.
42
The earliest reference to Arthur as telynior is in the 14th century Triads, where he
is referred to as one of three ‘amherodraidd delynorion’ - imperial telynorion.
Given that the gostegion are very long pieces of music, it must have been that a
piece was begun as the salt was placed on the table and that it continued
throughout what followed: the announcing and the entry of each of the guests in
reverse order of preference, the greeting of each of them by the lord and by any
ladies present, the washing of hands and the seating. The blessing and the
serving would follow.
Anglo-Norman and Tudor society used trumpet preludes to signal the

commencement of the proceedings. The gostegion, then, may on occasion have
been preceded by a trumpet prelude.
To fully appreciate listening to a gosteg today, we need to imagine the elaborate,

formal, conservative rituals it accompanied, and, of course, the celebratory
atmosphere and the anxiety that must both have been inherent in assembling for
a banquet amongst the powerful and their courtiers.
Jul 13, 2015
A major step forward in this [identifying the age of these pieces’ associations]
would be to be able to classify the Welsh musical Arthuriana as pre- or post-
Geoffrey of Monmouth (1138). The point here is that the small amount of pre-
Geoffrey material is essentially Welsh, the post-Geoffrey material is essentially
not, but it was taken up in Wales in a reflex action because of its massive
popularity. Judging on the size of pre- and post- material in general, the chances
of this musical Arthuriana being post-1138 must be about 99%, with peaks
perhaps around the late 12th century and the early years of the 16th century.
But, as it happens, the Triad I mentioned about the imperial telynorion, including
Arthur, names another Arthurian character: Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr, who does
feature in pre-Geoffrey sources in existence in the 10th and the 11th centuries.
Because of that, the chances might be something like 50/50 that the connection
in the Triad between Arthur and the telyn is a tradition that predates 1138 - that
is to say, a deeply embedded native tradition rather than a romantic notion
inspired by literature from outside Wales.
Very significantly, the third named imperial telynior in the Triad appears to be an
historical personage: Crellan, who turns up in the Historia Gruffudd ap Cynan
(originally written in the 12th c.) as Gellan telynior pencerdd, killed in the retreat
from the Battle of Aberlleiniog in 1094. This brings us on to a substantial cluster
that I’ve identified of sources relating to Gruffudd’s time.
The Statute of Gruffudd ap Cynan has an historical section which states that the
eisteddfod of Gruffudd's time at Caerwys was summoned under "Gruffudd ap
Kynan a gwynn ap Eginir i ddistain ac Eraill o vonheddigion a brehyrion". In
support is a 15th c. (probably) pedigree source which mentions that there was a
Gwyn, the distain, ap Eginir ap Collwyn ap Tangno, which doesn't specify to
whom he was distain (steward, seneschal, effectively prime minister). The
Statute is the only place where Gruffudd ap Cynan's distain is identified, so there
is an argument for the Statute having had an historical foundation in the time of
Gruffudd, rather than being culled from other sources or cooked up very much
later.
Gellan the pencerdd with Gruffudd at Aberlleiniog was probably Gellan ap
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Gollwyn, i.e. the uncle of Gwyn ap Eginir ap Collwyn the distain. This association
between cerdd dant and distain families (the office of distain was generally
hereditary) continued with the Mostyns as the major patrons of the eisteddfodau
in the 16th century. I’ll just trace that through. It is probable that the Gwyn ap
Ednowain who was distain to Llywelyn Fawr in 1209 was a descendant (great-
grandson) of Gwyn ab Eginir. There has been some confusion between the two
Gwyns (see http://www.ancientwalesstudies.org/id120.html for more on that). In
1215 Gwyn ap Ednowain, having perhaps died without a male heir, was
succeeded by Ednyfed Fychan, a non-relative. Ednyfed was the first of the Mostyn
ancestors (Trecastell branch) to become distain of Gwynedd. The Tudors were
also descended from him. Gwyn ap Ednowain's descendants can be traced in
Beddgelert, and include the poet Rhys Goch Eryri. Summing it up, there was an
earlier Gwynedd distain dynasty, and a later one which amalgamated (twice)
through marriage with the Powys Fadog distain dynasty and became the Mostyns.
All three had associations with cerdd dant or cerdd dafod. The Historia takes the
link with cerdd dant back to Gruffudd’s time, it having originally been written
shortly after his death in 1137.
To continue with the cluster, there are more pieces to be added to those which I
wrote about in a recent post as relating to Gruffudd ap Cynan’s family: Caniad
Hun Wenllian and Caniad Suwsana. There was also Caniad Marwnad Gruffudd ap
Cynan, his death memorial, in the cerdd dant repertory, implying a date for its
composition of 1137. It could be argued that it was composed much later,
prompted by the strength of the cerdd dant traditions about his importance,
along with pieces concerning other figures from that time associated with
Gruffudd in the cerdd dant traditional history, such as Cwlwm Henri Gefnrhudd.
But I don’t think the same can be said of Caniad Llywarch Hwlbwrch, since he
never enters the cerdd dant history and was a fairly obscure figure (chamberlain
and treasurer to Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys d. 1063,
mentioned in the Historia). The impression that I have from studying the
repertory as a whole over many years is that the pieces were probably composed
in the time of the historical figures they relate to. But ‘historical figures’ doesn’t
include Arthur. But, yes … , I imagine that Caniad Pibau Morfudd and Gosteg yr
Halen are very old, and that that is what the Arthurian tags here are really
designed to communicate.
How old? Well, in cerdd dafod, as you'll know, the oldest material is thought to be
6th century in origin and there's plenty of it before the 12th century. Being
preserved in writing has helped the early cerdd dafod of course, but we shouldn’t
overlook that the preservation of the hengerdd in oral tradition was something
that was actively encouraged because it was thought to be tremendously
valuable. The same must have applied to cerdd dant - after all, it is the kudos
conferred by antiquity that these Arthurian glosses reveal. In a culture where the
conservation of antiquity in the performing arts was so tremendously valuable,
we would need to look for positive evidence of the abandonment or displacement
of aspects of early cerdd dant before supposing that the tradition had ever turned
its back on old material. The abandonment of the lyre may well have been a
watershed of course.
Jul 20, 2015
Another interesting facet of the associating of Arthur with the telyn is the
relationship between kingship and cerdd dant. Evidently in the 16th century it
was considered appropriate that a king, such as Arthur was the ideal model for,
would play instrumental cerdd dant, such as Gosteg yr Halen and Pibau Morfudd.
The Laws of Hywel Dda and the Triads refer to the legal status and worth of the
44
telyn of a king, so given that background the glosses referring to Arthur as a

telyn player are unsurprising. The Arthurian glosses imply that the playing of
instrumental cerdd dant would have been the purpose the telyn of a king was put
to (instrumental cerdd dant is a different animal from accompaniment cerdd
dant), and in that case I imagine the Laws and the Triads use ‘telyn’ to refer,
when its use was instrument specific, to the frame harp rather than the lyre. This
is because I consider the solo lyre, with just nine or so strings, to have been a
very different instrument from the timpan and the frame harp, both with their
wide compass, and in consequence its music must have been significantly
different from cerdd dant. Cerdd dant as we know it, exploiting a wide compass,
could have taken shape only on the timpan and the harp. My suggestions as to
what the solo lyre was used for and how it was played are in my article ‘A
Technique for Ancient Solo Lyre’ at
https://petergreenhill.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/a-technique-for-ancient-solo-
lyre.pdf
The constellation Lyra is called ‘Telyn Arthur’ in Welsh, indicating the meaning
lyre not harp for telyn in this instance, so it is not always that the association
between Arthur and telyn implies a harp and not a lyre.
Aside from Arthur, high status associations with purely instrumental cerdd dant
are also to be found in the Breton lais about Orfeo and Tristan, although Breton
lais were themselves modelled on accompanied poetic performing.
All these romantic idealizations indicate how highly prized cerdd dant was in the
Middle Ages, internationally. Along with the Arthurian legends of the lais, it
hugely caught the imagination of all of Norman Europe. The Normans were very
much entwined with the Bretons and, to a lesser degree, the Welsh. Gerald of
Wales was descended from all three. Geoffrey of Monmouth, also in Wales, was
probably from a Breton family, and it seems that the Bretons of Monmouth would
have been a major channel of Arthuriana into Europe as a whole. There was some
Arthuriana in Southern Italy dating from well before 1137 though, so it was
something of a steady stream over a long period. It’s worth mentioning here that
there had been a British population in Northern Spain dating from the Dark Ages,
and we know of British or Welsh pilgrims playing the crwth at Santiago de
Compostela in the 12th century. Presumably the same would happen at Rome
and Jerusalem. We can imagine plenty of exposure to cerdd dant then, at
cathedrals and at the courts of Normans spread across the Continent.
Jul 22, 2015
… One more Arthurian-type association with the telyn is in the South Walian
version of the Laws, probably finally compiled around 1150-1250. The court
bardd teulu, who accompanied himself on the telyn, was expected to perform for
the queen in her chamber a cerdd on the subject of Camlann - Arthur’s last
battle. That will have been an example of the performing that the Breton lais
purport to have imitated … .
THE LOSS OF THE TRADITION
Dec 11, 2017
The key figures in the tightening suppression of Welsh Catholicism under

Elizabeth in reaction to the Counter-Reformation were Robert Dudley, earl of
Leicester, who became Baron Denbigh in 1563, and his ally … Henry Herbert, earl
45
of Pembroke, who became Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales
in 1586. Most of the other major landowners of Wales, the patrons of the
musicians and poets, had much to fear and hide in terms of their attachment to
the ‘old religion’: Catholic sympathies and recusancy within their families and
amongst their tenants, and with some Jesuit priests circulating. The watershed
moment was the discovery in 1586 of the Babington Plot and of the Welsh
involvement in it. Thomas Salusbury, the heir to Lleweni, and Edward Jones of
Plas Cadwgan in Denbighshire were found guilty of treason and were hanged,
drawn and quartered. Also involved was Thomas Morgan of Llantarnam, who was
imprisoned in Paris.
The fear became more acute immediately following the Babington plot when
Elizabeth was made aware that the laws against recusancy and assemblies of
Catholics were not being enforced by magistrates in North Wales, who were then
accused of negligence. This was particularly difficult for the Mostyn family, the
great patrons of the eisteddfod, as the priest William Davies, the grandson of
Dafydd Nantglyn the winner of the silver harp award in 1523, was active on their
lands. Davies went into hiding and the magistrate Thomas Mostyn seems to have
allowed him to escape capture in 1587. But in 1592 he was captured at Holyhead,
convicted at Beaumaris but not executed. Beaumaris was the responsibility of
Richard Bulkeley, and Davies was transferred to Ludlow, to the Council of the
Marches. Eventually, in 1593 he was returned to Beaumaris and hanged, drawn
and quartered there despite strong local support for him. Bulkeley had been
losing power to Leicester, who had replaced him as Keeper of the Rolls in
Anglesey.
It was Henry Herbert who did not accede to the petition in 1594 for another
eisteddfod to be held. Tellingly absent from amongst the eleven petitioners were
three of the greatest landowners of North Wales: Richard Bulkeley, Thomas
Mostyn and John Salusbury the brother of the executed Thomas. All three were
central heirs to the eisteddfod tradition: Bulkeley had been the leading
commissioner of the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1567/8, which had been hosted by
Mostyn’s father William, and William’s grandfather Richard had hosted the
Caerwys eisteddfod of 1523, where Salusbury’s great-grandfather Roger had also
presided. In South Wales that same year, perhaps in coordination with the North
Wales petition, George Owen, Lord of Cemais, was requested by the poet Siôn
Mawddwy to petition the Council at Ludlow for an eisteddfod but it seems Owen
took no action. He was cousin [first cousin once removed] to Henry Herbert.
The 1594 petition could be viewed partly as a testing of the water, by those brave
enough to do it, to see if the bardic tradition was off the menu along with
Catholicism. Even if that had not been part of the intention it will have been the
conclusion following the failure of the petition. Any association with pre-
Reformation ways would have become something one would want to avoid as
much as possible.
There’s some evidence of a more relaxed atmosphere under James I, of

eisteddfods being held on Anglesey, but the organisation of the bardic provinces
elsewhere appears to have completely collapsed under the pressures of
Elizabeth’s later reign. It’s an irony that, with her Welsh ancestry, she eventually
became the main agent of the destruction of Wales’s high culture.
Dec 13, 2017
There was a great collapse of the bardic order, in the wake of the events I
described in my last post. It was not that the numbers of professional performers
46
held steady and that they simply altered the style of their material. The touring
instrumentalists and performing poets acting as datgeiniaid became rarities,
because to tour without a licence was unlawful. Without an assembly of judges,
such as at an eisteddfod, authorised to award degrees and issue licences,
licenced performers were bound to quickly die out. The law was enforced, as early
17th century records show. So I think it would be a mistake to attribute any of
the disappearance down to some sort of a change in musical taste.
I expect the same collapse must have happened in Ireland, but starting a little
earlier than it did in Wales and completing earlier with the fall of Ulster in 1603.
The documentation in regard to that is probably more problematic though. I
haven't studied it.
What a loss!
Dec 15, 2017
… it was a sudden blow that the bardic system suffered, but it's right that the
dying out of its professional practitioners was gradual. Some touring did continue,
or later resumed, in spite of the lack of licences, at least on the cerdd dafod side
of things, as there's one record of a payment in 1654 to what may well have been
the very last two cerdd dafod poets to go on tour, in the company of a harpist. He
would have performed in the traditional style the freshly-composed poem that
each poet had brought to honour their host, as was the ancient tradition, and so
he was probably a trainee poet rather than a cerdd dant specialist. See Klausner:
REDW p. 151 in respect of NLW MS: Chirk Castle F12572: "paid John Morgan the
harper v s. paid harry howell the bard for his cowydd x s. and to Griffith Phillip for
his cowydd x s.". Gruffydd Phylip (died 1666) at least was certainly on tour here
as he lived far from Chirk.
And we can imagine that the children of the last cerdd dant professionals might
have learnt some pieces of cerdd dant even if they could not anticipate making a
living from it. But the difficulty with conceiving of a long sustaining of amateur
cerdd dant following the loss of its institutions is that the pieces are so very large
and complex that the music requires a big investment of time to learn, and so it
is not surprising that by the first half of the 18th century no-one could
understand its terms, and what was in the manuscript had become entirely alien
because no-one living had ever heard anything approaching that type of music.
And so began the struggle, starting with the Morris brothers, to recover what had
been so central, and not so very long before. It is truly a strange story.
Sep 23, 2019
… The entire bardic system was a fascinating system. It was originally entirely
independent of the system of legal governance but was gradually brought under
state control and eventually destroyed as the practitioners became prosecutable
in criminal court if not in possession of warrants which had become unobtainable.
The profession was closed down, but not before a lot of people on the inside had
put a lot of energy into writing things down to preserve them for the future. We
are all very much obliged to them!
Sep 24, 2019
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“It is amazing to me at how little attention is paid to the RaH ms. by early music
aficionados in general. I suspect it is because it rather ‘upends’ the status quo,
especially for harp players who began their approach with a modified, but
definitely modern approach.”
Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the picture …. And the status quo through the modern
era has been very much predicated on the basis that harp music in particular is a
survival of the bardic tradition of the Middle Ages, and that therefore nothing
much was ever lost. But a cuckoo’s egg was planted in the nest, a substitute for
the real cerdd dant, beginning in Wales with John Parry’s Antient British Music in
1742. That’s a long time ago. There’s been plenty of time for the cuckoo to hatch
and fly, for the new status quo to become firmly established in the popular
imagination.
THE HOME OF ROBERT AP HUW
Feb 28, 2017
At last I’ve made some progress on where exactly Robert ap Huw lived, through
our local history group here which has just had a presentation by Gerwyn James
on the subject of local mills and in which Robert was referred to. Osian Ellis in his
address: ‘Welsh music: history and fancy’, Transactions of the Honourable Society
of Cymmrodorion, 1972-3 (1974), 73-94, referring to Rosemarie Kerr’s M.A.
thesis ‘Cywyddau Siôn Brwynog’, Bangor, 1960, explained:
“Robert ap Huw's will shows that he lived at Pen-y-Dentyr in Llandegfan,

Anglesey; his elder brother, John, lived in the family home of Bodwigan. (There
are some englynion by John ap Huw in B.M. MS. 14,998). The Anglesey Hearth
Tax Accounts of the 1670s show that John lived some years later than Robert,
and Robert's wife, probably a native of Llandegfan, survived her husband by six
or seven years. According to the Hearth Tax Accounts there were two hearths at
Pen-y-Dentyr, which suggests that the family was reasonably well-off, and the
will confirms this.”
For years I’ve been wondering about the location of Pen-y-Dentyr, not finding it
on old maps nor even through asking the postwoman. What I’ve just learnt is
that ‘dentyr’ is from ‘deintur’ or English ‘tenter’, as in ‘tenter-hooks’. A tenter was
one of the large frames on which cloth was stretched after fulling, stood in a field
next to the fulling mill. Fulling or beating the cloth was water-powered and indeed
there was an early fulling mill – Welsh ‘pandy’ – in Llandegfan parish, first
recorded in a manuscript of 1605 but now in ruins having burnt down. I know the
site. The Ordnance Survey grid reference of the corn mill Melin Cadnant 100
yards to the north of the actual Pandy Cadnant is SH56007410. It is set low in
the spectacular, deep gorge of the Afon Cadnant, not very far from the
churchyard where Robert was buried. The Pandy was also residential, but since
Pen-y-Dentyr was a farm and Robert we think was farming not fulling and his
residence was not given as Pandy Cadnant, I think Pen-y-Dentyr was probably
not the Pandy itself but must have been very close by. In which case either it has
vanished or it was the only current farmhouse nearby which is the fine old house
now named Ty Gwyn and which used to be the home of a friend of mine, above
the gorge on the West side. There’s one more reference to Pen-y-Dentyr which
I’ve been given the details of and I’ll look into it sometime.
We don’t know where it was that Robert copied his manuscripts but they were
probably kept at Pen-y-Dentyr for quite a while. The gorge or cwm itself is a very
beautiful, densely-wooded place, an SSSI, with an old stone clapper bridge across
48
the river near the two mills, in an otherwise flat and largely treeless landscape.
Mar 1, 2017
Gerwyn has now added that there was also a 5-acre holding named Pendentyr on
the tithe map of the next parish, Llandysilio. This Pendentyr is on high ground
about half a mile from the river and not near any other watercourse, and it may
have served another pandy near to the river mouth and lower down the river
from the 1605 Pandy Cadnant. So in this case of ‘Pendentyr’ it looks as if the
drying was done in a high field, to catch the wind and speed up the drying
process? (‘pen’ is head or end). In which case Robert’s home Pen-y-Dentyr may
also have been high up and at a bit of a distance. There are more notices in
estate papers of the Llandegfan Pen-y-Dentyr that relates to Robert which
Gerwyn has kindly just given me and I’ll follow those up eventually. They may not
include it located on any map though. It is frustrating that the name does not
appear on the Llandegfan tithe map.
Apr 7, 2017
I’m now confident that I’ve identified the precise location of Robert ap Huw’s
house, Pen-y-Dentyr, from three sources: the Enclosure Map of Llandysilio of
1815, the Tithe Map of that parish of 1840 and the current owner. The Enclosure
Map gives the location, shape and orientation of ‘Pendentir’, the Tithe Map is on a
larger scale and allows the locating of the precise footprint of the building, and
the other day the owner kindly showed me round and explained that in the early
19th century the current building was indeed the old farmhouse of that locality
and that parts of it are thought to date from the 17th century. It’s a building that
I already know from the outside and I have friends who have stayed in it – it is
currently two holiday cottages, known as the Old Dairy and the Old Brewhouse, at
Plas Cadnant, which has gardens open to the public and must be one of the most
beautiful gardens in Britain. Here are links to photos and details of the building:
http://www.plascadnantgardens.co.uk/11/en-GB/The-Old-Dairy-Cottage
http://www.plascadnantgardens.co.uk/10/en-GB/The-Brewhouse
The name Pendentir has been eclipsed: in the early 19th century the farm was
part of a very large estate but the owner decided that Pendentir was the perfect
place to build his new plas – grand house – so he built it beside the farmhouse,
leaving room for a courtyard between the two, and the property became named
Plas Cadnant, after the river nearby. Just a remnant of the farm’s land at a
distance [that referred to in my post of 1 March] retained the name Pendentir for
a little while.
The parish boundary with Llandegfan runs along the opposite wall of the adjacent
walled garden, and a small lobe of the estate nearby enters Llandegfan parish.
The property is midway between Llandysilio Church and Llandegfan Church,
where Robert was buried.
The topography of Plas Cadnant is really beautiful, and the garden amazing. One
of my favourite places, and it's lovely it turns out to be what I've been looking for
in relation to the music all this time. It's well worth a visit!
Apr 9, 2017
49
Yes, there should be a plaque and in time I'll see if I can get Cadw to put one up.
The other, more important, hunt is for Pencarreg, for that was the name of where
Ifan ab y Gof the composer lived. It's a common placename. There's a village so-
named in the South of the country. The Rev. Dr. Dafydd Wyn Wiliam, a great
authority on the history of Ynys Môn (Anglesey), has noted two on the island.
One is, as it happens, only about a mile west of Pendentir, and the other is on the
North coast. That is the one that I hope may one day turn out to be the correct
one, because it feels right and it is in the region Talybolion from where came the
greatest (to my mind) cerdd dafod composer: Gruffudd ap Maredudd, very
possibly a contemporary of Ifan ab y Gof. Sadly, it is next to the Wylfa nuclear
power station.
If anyone here can dig up any more on the hunt for Pencarreg I'd be delighted.
Sep 22, 2019
… About Robert ap Huw’s name: “ap Huw” is the patronymic: son of Huw, but it is
from a tradition that is from before patronymics were treated as surnames, so
although it tends to be used today as a surname for him that’s not in sympathy
with his tradition. It’s best, then, to use “Robert ap Huw”, or just “Robert” for
short. I try to do that but it’s a bit awkward when other people are saying “the ap
Huw manuscript” so commonly. “Ap” rhymes with English “map”; “Huw” is
pronounced as the English name spelt “Hugh” but with a little more force on the
“h”.
INSTRUMENTS
THE MEANINGS OF ‘TELYN’
Dec 20, 2005
Actually, Giraldus devoted more space to string-playing in his book on Wales than
he did in his book on Ireland, but essentially he used the same passage in both,
to describe the music. There's no hint in his writings that can suggest there were
any differences between the two in their brass- or bronze-strung instruments,
just that the Welsh didn't use the timpan and the Irish didn't use the 'chorus'.
This doesn't mean that national characteristics for harps couldn't have evolved,
just that they couldn't have included non-metallic materials for the stringing.
You can often hear it said that the Welsh word for harp: 'telyn' is a borrowing of
the Old Irish word 'teillin' (or 'teillén') for the buzzing of bees. It was a theory
suggested by O'Curry and, although there are other possibilities, there are things
to be said in its favour. In particular, it may seem incredible that such an antique
word could have been imported into Wales and survived, but we also have
'maccu' (or 'moccu': 'pertaining to' or 'affiliated with') - one of the most anciently
attested words in the entire language - turning up, to all appearances, in four of
the cerdd dant measure names that were traditionally believed to have been
imported from Ireland at the end of the 11th century.
'Telyn' was also once used for the lyre, just as the words that have now come to
mean harp in the neighbouring languages: ‘cruit', ‘harp' and ‘cithara' were once
used to describe all manner of stringed instruments but particularly lyres. Some
lyres in Wales might have buzzed because lyres lacking a bridge do just that.
There again, lyre bridges do seem to have been commonplace in Northwest
Europe. Brays on harps for self-accompaniment in Wales seem to have been an
50
innovation of the 14th century, so I don't imagine that brays could have had
anything to do with the origin of the word ‘telyn'. The word goes back at least as
early as the 12th century.
Another suggestion that has been made - nothing to do with buzzing at all - is
that the connection between ‘teillén' and the lyre could have arisen simply
because lyres can be dish-shaped, since 'dish' is the primary meaning of the
word. I gather that it only came to mean a swarm of bees as well because people
used to beat a metal dish in order to calm bees down. The mind boggles when it
starts to think about what that might imply about the sound of the lyre!
THE NATURE OF VARIOUS TYPES OF HARP IN MEDIEVAL WALES
Dec 21, 2005
I think we need to slow down a bit here. I mean valid [to play this music on
metal-strung harp] from the standpoint of the tradition, not from an ethical
standpoint. Sorry - it's just that I don't like to think there might be wire harpists
who have been dissuaded from playing this music because they think that wasn't
traditional. But hopefully there aren't. I actually haven't got an opinion about who
should and who shouldn't be playing what today - I haven't thought about it. I try
not to form opinions on things like that if I can possibly help it, so is it ok if you
leave me out of this one?!!
I'll pick up the points about the article [‘The Forgotten, Silver-voiced Harp of
Wales’] later. Thanks.
Dec 23, 2005
I think it will be good if I bring in more info on these points … , because the
article [‘The Forgotten, Silver-voiced Harp of Wales’] is very concise. Sorry about
that, but I tried to keep it as brief as possible, partly in the hope that people
wouldn't feel a need to paraphrase it at all, with all the problems that can bring.
It isn't conjecture that wire-strung instruments were used by instrumentalists.

For instance, that is what Gerald described. If the music he described had been
vocal accompaniment then he would have mentioned it. These were independent
instrumentalists playing purely instrumental music, and this is what we find in
most of the ap Huw manuscript. There are many clear indicators that the bulk
(but very possibly not all) of the pieces are instrumental. For example, we know
they were played by solo instrumentalists who were not singers or declaimers.
Those writers who have thought the pieces were accompaniments - and they
have not been in the majority - have done so on an interpretation of the word
‘caniad' (as the main pieces were entitled) as 'a song', but the rubrics in the
manuscript use the verb ‘canu' in the sense of 'to play', not 'to sing'. And just in
respect of these caniad pieces alone, there are about a dozen other blocks of
evidence that indicate they were not accompaniments but 'playings'.
You bring up the subject of brays. The first thing here is to be very clear about
the documentary evidence. There was a particular subclass of datgeiniad (reciter)
called the ‘datgeiniad arwest gan dant', and within this group were datgeiniaid
who accompanied their recitation on harps, at least some of the time. All the
evidence is that this was on leathern harps fitted with brays. There may well have
been at first a brief time when these particular harps characteristically had gut
strings, but virtually all the evidence is that the strings were horsehair. We could
51
call this 'the datgeiniad harp' because by the 16th century recitation with this
type of harp had actually become emblematic of Welshness (to judge from a
poem by a very cosmopolitan Englishman - Andrew Boorde). There are two
depictions of harps with brays from that time - one in the hands of King David,
who accompanied his psalms. Neither of these have frames which are at all
skeletal, but at that time there may well have been also the latest European
renaissance-style wooden harps with brays coming in. If so I imagine these would
have been used for renaissance music more than for recitation. As late as the
beginning of the 19th century there was one player of a wooden harp which,
because he played a good deal for dancing, had brays, where the brays would be
turned on to "give a good effect in a dancing tune".
And obviously, in their time, brays must have had all sorts of merits for the
reciters too, to do with their particular specialism. But I don't think there's a lot of
point in speculating about what the merits of brays could have been for the
telynorion - the professional cerdd dant harpists - unless we know that they used
them. In my article I've tried to make it clear that it's not a good idea to just
presume that since many reciters used wooden harps with horsehair strings and
brays, everyone else must have done. I can't be sure, but it might be that people
have been doing exactly that without realising it, you see. I say that because I
don't think that anyone (except Osian Ellis who suggested the pins acted as
sharping levers rather than as buzzing mechanisms) has made out a case that
brays were used by the cerdd dant telynorion as well, and also because you often
get plain statements to the effect that there was one single type of harp
characteristic of Wales at any one time. This is worrying, because the records
show a very great deal of diversity in instruments. To some extent that will be
because Wales, especially from 1485 to 1586, stood at a crossroads of musical
cultures, but it will also be a reflection of the many different categories of musical
performers that had existed here throughout the Middle Ages.
On your last point, the poem you refer to ("Cywydd moliant i'r delyn rawn a
dychan i'r delyn ledr", also known from its first line as "Rho Duw hael, rhadau
helynt") is the one attributed variously to Iolo Goch and Dafydd ap Gwilym which
I discuss in my article. The poem was written in defence of the accompaniment
horsehair-strung lyre which at the time was under threat of being ousted by the
harp (specifically the gut-strung leathern harp with brays). His criticisms centre
on how harps differ from lyres (most obviously in their shape) and so cover just
about every characteristic of harps of the day, including the wire-strung harp. He
was very familiar with the wire-strung harp - the passage you refer to complains
about the length of time (over a month, he says) it takes to raise the soundboard
of a newly-built one. He was an insider [to the world of the metal-strung harp].
But his two-line criticism of the wire-strung harp is just in passing; there are forty
lines of invective against his main target: the gut-strung leathern harp with
brays. Now please don't imagine that this imbalance is because the wire-strung
harp was less important. We know from a slightly earlier poem (Iorwerth Beli's "I
Escob Bangor") that poets could be jealous of the patronage given to
instrumentalists at the expense of the poets and their reciters, so it is not at all
surprising that this poet takes a swipe at the wire-strung harp. But his main
concern was the lyre, which had always provided the traditional accompaniment
for the poets' works, and it wasn't the wire-strung harp that their reciters were
turning to - it was the gut-strung harp with brays.
It can't be right to take this poem out of its context and then to draw conclusions
about the taste of the Welsh people as a whole and about their taste over the
centuries too. But if you were to insist on doing that, then you'd be forced to
52
conclude that gut strings and bray pins were twenty times more unpopular than
metal strings!
Apr 29, 2016
Whilst I was going through the old threads on this list I looked at the long one
[May 17-June 6, 2012] on raising newly-built metal-strung harps, and I’d like to
add my own two pennies to it. The importance of this comes out of Iolo Goch’s
detailed poem on stringed instruments, where he is complaining about the delay
caused by it taking an apprentice more than a month to ‘ystofi’ one which is
‘miliast efydd’ and the issue of whether or not this refers to the delay in raising a
newly-built brass-strung harp, and indeed whether or not such a substantial delay
is necessary (relative to a newly-built harp with organic strings). For on those
issues hinges the question of whether or not Iolo’s brass instrument (‘efydd’ is
brass or bronze) had metal strings and was a different instrument from the gut-
strung harp much of his criticism elsewhere in the poem is directed at. The point
was made in the thread that although today we commonly do need patience as
we encounter a protracted delay in breaking-in wire-strung harps as we tease
them up until they reliably hold optimum pitch, this isn’t always the case. The
central question then becomes: would the delay have been characteristic enough
for us to be sure that Iolo’s ‘efydd’ instrument was indeed a brass-strung one and
not one with organic strings which bore brass ornaments or had a brass-coloured
leather soundtable? Put another way: does the other early evidence on wire-
strung harps bear out Iolo’s complaint about the delay of more than a month?
As regards the Trinity, the Queen Mary and the Lamont harps, I think one would
be very hard put indeed to make out any case at all that they would not have
taken a really substantial delay before they would have been fit for professional
use. That physical evidence is borne out by the letter from John Denham in
Dublin to Sir Michael Hickes dated 7th February 1612 to accompany a recently-
built Irish harp, in which Denham explains the delay: “The masters of the art give
hopes of the well-proving thereof, and if the ceremony of the raising thereof had
not been observed, it had been presented unto before Michaelmas”, i.e. 131 days
earlier – over four months earlier. See Sean Donnelly, ‘The Irish Harp in England
1590-1690’, Ceol, i and ii (1984), pp. 56-7. Since the kind of instrument in Iolo’s
poem would take only ‘more than a month’ it evidently tended to bear
considerably less strings than the 40 or so we might expect from the 1612 era,
and that accords with the 25 strings of the ‘ap Huw’ harp that the ms. implies.
The delegation of the task of raising that Iolo describes is echoed by a record
from 1619: “I lent my new harp to William Barry the blind harper to raise”, (cited
in Donnelly, p. 57). Note also here that it requires experience as well as patience.
I’m sure we all have the horror of cascade failure in mind if we rush it or cut it
too fine or don’t balance the string tensions right as we go.
Dec 23, 2005
… On fraying and not fraying gut strings, my guess is that it will be to do with
whatever sort of fingering technique it is that you use. You'll know that in the
article I'm just concerned with the cerdd dant technique. Anyway, that's only a
guess, because one of my harpist friends who's being playing on gut every day
since the 60s and who doesn't use cerdd dant technique also finds using the nails
expensive. It could be to do with things like the lower and thicker the string, and
particularly the slacker the string, the less it gets damaged, so it's hard to
compare one person's experience with another's here, when there are different
53
repertoires and different instruments of course. But in the article I do say there
are ways of using the nails on gut you know.
On brays, please don't get me wrong. I haven't said anything about them being
quiet. Of course they tend to be loud. But there's nothing odd about them having
been used to accompany the voice - that has been traditional in Ethiopia, where
the very ancient baganna - a lyre - has buzzing mechanisms (each string rests in
a little U-shaped piece of leather where it passes over the bridge). The
accompaniment is played softly, so that the words can be heard. It's a very
beautiful combination of sounds.
On horsehair strings and fraying, yes, they are tough under the nails. It surprised
me at first, but then when you think about it the structure of hair is related to
those of nail and horn I seem to remember.
Dec 23, 2005
My guess is that the fraying [on gut strings using the nails] is slow for you
possibly to do with one or more of these: technique, pitch level and tension, and
probably not the sourcing. But unless someone is prepared to replicate what I
had to do and give the same a good test, my experience (several years of it) is
what we have to go on. If there was some evidence that indicated these
particular harpists might have used gut, then we would all be facing a puzzle and
it would be useful to try to solve that with practical experiments. But as it stands
we haven't got a puzzle, so I don't see there's much more I can say about it. I
know the practicalities of using nails on gut are of immediate interest to harpists
today, but my concern is with the cerdd dant tradition you see, so you'll have to
excuse me as I keep out of the discussions on modern playing.
I really don't imagine that this particular fingering and damping technique would
have been used in the musical environment on the Continent you're referring to.
But the quote you supply ["Teach him to harp with his nails sharp."] comes from
a very different period, a very different place and a very different culture. It's
from 13th century England: King Horn - a Middle English romance poem, which
is, for its time, decidedly Anglo-Saxon in character rather than Norman. I'd be
very surprised indeed if this didn't involve metal strings, but as we can't tell I
wouldn't want to get caught up in trying to figure out what the strings were. If we
had playable harp music from 13th century England it might be different.
Dec 24, 2005
There's clearly a group of you who have come to hold a conviction that the pieces
in the manuscript were designed for wooden harps with gut strings, bray pins and
soundholes. My suggestion is that those of you who have a concern with historical
authenticity could now confer amongst yourselves as to why you believe that, try
to identify the likely construction type(s)and the design styling(s) involved, and
publish an article as soon as possible, so the proposition is properly on the table.
As soon as that's done, a profitable debate could be begun if it was felt that that
was necessary, and at the practical level those harpists who are interested in
restorative art rather than modern art in this field would be able to assess the
evidence and make their own individual decisions on what to do …
Dec 29, 2005
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Tension below the optimum does reduce the susceptibility of gut strings to wear,
and with bray pins it can be a good idea to have low tension to enhance the
buzzing.
Without reasons to believe either the accompaniment harps or the instrumental

harps had gut strings, I don't think there's a lot of point in going into any more
detail on optimum tension for gut, about the importance of sound quality and
such. Nylon the same.
I doubt that you and these other players on gut are using the same technique,
nor playing precisely the same music that the article refers to. And you may not
be playing with strings at the optimum tension or you may be playing with thicker
gauges. I could have some sympathy with your doubts about my experience … if
it had been at all borderline, but honestly - it was murder!
You mustn't confuse ancient and modern, where you say bray harps have
soundholes. Some harps with brays did have soundholes, some did not - even on
the Continent. In particular, one of the depictions of harps without soundholes
near here in Wales has brays. Both this one and another are in the hands of a
King David figure (which indicates an accompaniment function for these harps).
Then there's the association between lyres and accompaniment and that lyres in
NW Europe in general seem to have lacked soundholes. Now you ask why
accompaniment harps had no soundholes. We have no record, but I expect it's to
do with the volume and the projection of sound. There are two things here.
Soundholes help slightly to throw the sound into the distance anyway I believe,
but the major thing is that having a soundboard closed at the front and quite
open at the back - as these harps must have been to allow for stringing - causes
quite a lot of the sound to be buried in the clothes of the harpist. That's
convenient for a self-accompanist because it means he has to take less care to
play softly on a harp that has brays, and in turn that will extend the time that a
string is in contact with the bray and therefore the buzzing is brought out more.
You understand that recitation of poetry with its musical ornamentation already
built into the words is very vulnerable to being overshadowed and swamped by
instrumentation I hope. It would have been nothing like the singing of a ballad
you see. We are looking at a highly specialised form of accompaniment which,
like the instrumental music, is entirely outside our experience. That is why the
main accompaniment instrument - the wooden lyre with horsehair strings but
without soundholes - had to be so very different from - say - a lute or a guitar. It
was a highly specialised instrument for a highly specialised purpose. Same with
the accompaniment harp. If they had wanted soundholes, they would have had
soundholes.
I know historical accuracy isn't everyone's cup of tea … , but I've got to say I'm
not sure it's wise to encourage us all, when we choose to play certain material on
a particular instrument, not to feel obliged to justify that to anyone, or even to
ourselves. I imagine the early music movement faces enough difficulties without
musicians suggesting to them they shouldn't bother about the accuracy, but
please don't expect me to be drawn into dialogues about who should or shouldn't
play what today because as I've already said, I have no opinions on that. What I
am concerned with is which musicians and which instruments the pieces in the
manuscript were designed for. That's an important thing to try to discover, and if
some harpists today will like to play it on what they enjoy playing it on, or even
what comes to hand, that doesn't make it any less important. I'm a bit puzzled,
by the way, when you say you think I have a goal to show that the music can be
played on wire strings irrespective of what instrument it was written for, when my
55
article is concerned with what the relevant instruments actually were. I hope
that's clear to you now.
Dec 29, 2005
There's very little time at my disposal at the moment I'm afraid, but I'll try to
respond to one more of [this series of] postings because it's rather pressing.
… Remember that what we were talking about replicating was not playing with
the nails on gut in general but the experience that led me to write: “There are
ways of using nails on gut, but this particular nail technique frays them to
destruction very quickly indeed”. I certainly haven’t encouraged any gut players
to use this technique, so I doubt that even any ‘ap Huw’ players have done so.
That’s why I say my experience is what we have to go on here. You understand,
I’m sure, that all nail players don’t use the same technique as one another, and
nor do all those who play arrangements of the ms.
… Unplayable on brays?? I’m sorry but that’s not what I argue anywhere. On the
contrary, personally I think some of the music was played on leathern harps with
horsehair strings and brays. If some of the pieces were reciters’ accompaniments,
then the evidence is such that they must have been played on brays.
May 9, 2006
… Picking up the thread on the ap Huw from January, there was a mix-up there
which is easily sorted. I've talked to some harpists in the States now about their
playing of translations of the ap Huw tablature on gut. On the forum there had
been a presumption earlier in this thread that we were all playing the same
music, hence their surprise that we have different experiences of gut fraying
when we play it. But it turns out we're talking about very different music.
During all the years of work I put into improving the accuracy of translations of
the tablature back into music, things weren't at a standstill, so the final result
was a very different music indeed from what used to be thought of as the sorts of
things. You can easily hear the differences by listening to the CD of my
translations: ‘Music from the Robert ap Huw Manuscript Vol. 1' issued by Paul
Dooley: http://pauldooley.com/Press_release.html This is the music that I talk
about in my article ‘The forgotten, silver-voiced harp of Wales’ on the same
website.
But one respect in which this music isn't different from most of what came before
is the octave level used. Yet in the States in recent years, harpists have begun to
read and play quite a lot of pieces at a pitch an octave lower (the origin of this
might be Claire Polin's book published in the US in 1982, which provided a kind of
transliteration onto the stave of the whole text at the lower octave level). And if
you play lower, you play on thicker strings which (if they're gut) are very much
less prone to fraying of course. That's just one simple example of why it's no
good at all presuming that if you play translations of the ms. on gut, you'll be
replicating my experience with gut. You won't be.
But even if gut strings had turned out to be able to stand up to the music being
played accurately on them, what would that prove? Nylon works, but so what?
I'm afraid that what is needed - before we need to spend even this much time on
discussing the feasibility of using gut - is some good reason for supposing that
gut might have been used in the first place. I know that may seem odd to those
56
who have read Grattan Flood, but when he reported that the Welsh Laws include
the fining of minstrels who exchanged horsehair-strung harps for gut-strung
harps he was mistaken. There's no mention of gut there. Grattan Flood created a
legacy of confusion with this myth about gut which education and the media
adopted and modern scholarship has been having to combat.
Do please all try to get to hear my translations of the tablature on Paul's CD,
even if your prime interests aren't medieval music or historical reproduction,
because it's sophisticated and powerfully effective music that must have taken
many centuries to develop and it has by no means been rendered redundant by
all the music that's come after.
May 12, 2006
… I see you've just posted your digest 7445 on your very useful electrum
experiments on the HHS list. You refer to no-one in history mentioning the gold
strings in writing. Actually, I've made the discovery that Ann and Charlie
Heymann's hypothesis was indeed true - they did use gold strings, in Wales at
least. The mentions of this are amongst the neglected Welsh poems that I
introduce in my article [‘The Forgotten, Silver-voiced Harp of Wales’] on the type
of harp used in cerdd dant.
May 14, 2006
The most informative notice of gold strings amongst Welsh poems that I've found
to date is within ‘Moliant Hywel ap Gruffudd o'r Ystog' (LlGC Maldwyn cerdd
15904). It has been published: Gwaith Owain ap Llywelyn ab y Moel, ed. Eurys
Rolant (Cardiff, 1984), pp. 17-8, no. 9.
May 9, 2013
In retrospect, I think I was being over-cautious in 2005 in my article [‘The

Forgotten, Silver-voiced Harp of Wales’] about what the meaning is of the telyn
rawn passage in the Laws. It must have been the second explanation I offered,
that the payments to the pencerdd telyn were premiums on indenture, when new
apprentices were about to start their instruction ("who wish to become recognized
musicians and suitors") with a pencerdd telyn. So they would not have been using
a telyn rawn whilst they were under instruction, only beforehand. The point here
is that in the apprentice system, which this was, the only lump sum which is paid
to the master is the premium at indenture at the start of the apprenticeship. I
think that's the only viable explanation because there's nothing else in the Laws
that could be the indenture premium. It means that the pencerdd telyn would not
take on complete novices - they had to have had some musical experience on the
telyn rawn first.
That makes sense because that experience could be got in a range of potential
recruiting grounds, wherever there were vocalists who accompanied
themselves. There were datgeiniaid dyledog, noble vocalists, who accompanied
themselves, so there were accompaniment instruments amongst the more well-
off families. Remember that Gerald said that in every house (that would be every
posh house) there were two citharae and young girls waiting to play for you. Here
the father can afford to pay the premium.
57
Then there were instruments for self-accompaniment amongst the jobbing

datgeiniaid who were not using the pastwn - the staff. As time went by, the class
divisions and restrictions were being relaxed because of the shortage of suitable
candidates, as the Statute explains, and entry was no longer restricted to the
children of noble families. These datgeiniaid in the servant class were much
encouraged to learn the rudiments of cerdd dant harp or crwth music. If they had
saved up for the premium, they could move up into a more lucrative and
respected career by applying for an apprenticeship in cerdd dant. There were no
apprenticeships in datgeiniaeth you see.
Then there were accompaniment instruments amongst the apprenticed poets. If

they took a shine to the instrumental side of things … they could transfer their
apprenticeship to an instrumental pencerdd.
I do hope everyone's clear that there is no doubt whatsoever, and there never
has been, that leathern harps with horsehair strings and brays were used
by datgeiniaid of all types. I'm clear that that tells us nothing about the type
of harp used by the licensed harpers who played caniad pieces like the ones we
have in the Robert ap Huw manuscript. The Laws give us the information
that their strings weren't horsehair. And I've traced the historiography of the
myth that the Laws say they were gut all the way back to Grattan Flood and the
buck stops there - he simply made it up. Naughty man! Irish nationalist
propagandist that was, he wouldn't have wanted to countenance metal strings in
Wales, no sir!
Jan 28, 2019
Now it seems the evidence I’ve been producing that the professional cerdd dant
harpists used neither gut nor horsehair but metal strings hasn’t yet been picked
up on by all commentators on the subject. So I think it’s worth me repeating that
the ardently romantic Irish nationalist W. H. Grattan Flood in 1905 was the one
originally responsible for the widespread myth, the falsehood, that the Welsh
Laws make it apparent that they used gut strings. He picked up correctly that
they didn’t use horsehair but then he added that they used gut strings:
“From the Welsh laws it appears that the ordinary or lower-grade harpers of
Wales in the twelfth century were wont to play on harps strung with horse-hair,
and that the chief harper was entitled to a fine of twenty-four pence from each
minstrel who exchanged his hair-strung harp (telyn) for a gut-strung one.” (W. H.
Grattan Flood, The Story of the Harp (London, 1905), p. 34).
There’s no mention of gut in the passage in the Laws he’s referring to. The
passage exists in multiple manuscripts and in several redactions as here:
1) Pob penkerd telyn a dyly y gan y kerdoryon ieueinc a uo vrth kerd telyn a
mynnu ymadau a thelyn raun a bot yn eirchat. y penkerd a dyly pedeir ar ugeint.
2) Pob penkerd telyn a dyly y gan y kerdoryon a vynno ymadau a thelyn raun a
bot yn gerdaur keweithas ac yn eirchat; pedeir ar hugeint.
3) Pob penkerd telyn a dyly er kerdoryon yeueyng a uynno emadau a telyn raun
a mynnu en kerdaur keweythas a bot en eyrchat. .xxiiii. ev gobyr penkerd.
4) Pop penkerd telyn a dele y kan e kerdoryon telyn guedy ed emadauoent a

telyn raun a mennu bod yn kerdaur keuey[th]as ay uod en eyrcyat pedeyr ar
ugeynt y ober.
58
To explain the context: actual enrollment into the profession of cerdd dant
involved an athro taking the young candidate to be inspected by a gathering of
noblemen who would pronounce on whether his appearance was satisfactory and
whether they considered it likely that a gwr wrth gerdd graddol could be made of
him. If so, then the athro would apprentice the youth in return for a payment
(rhodd) from the kindred (cenedl) of the youth or from an individual nobleman
acting for the kindred. This is the ancestor of the premium payment due to the
master or principal on indenture into the apprenticeship system of modern times.
The size of the donation is not specified in the Statute but in this passage in the
Welsh Laws the sum of 24d. is stipulated as due to every pencerdd of the telyn
from the young musician (cerddor) who is at cerdd delyn and who, after
abandoning the telyn rawn, aspires to become an enrolled musician (cerddor
cyweithas) and supplicant (eirchiad) – i.e. who aspires to become a professional
musician entitled to solicit rewards from patrons.
Flood’s report of gut being identified as the string material of the professional
cerdd dant harpists here was false, in spite of the passage having been already
printed and translated correctly in Aneurin Owen’s 1841 ‘Ancient Laws and
Institutes of Wales’, Vol. II, pp. 18-19. Flood was evidently anxious to create the
impression of a really fundamental distinction between harping in Ireland and
Wales – to establish between them a ‘hard border in the Irish Sea’ as is said
today! As to gut, there were some cerdd dafod harpists who used gut strings to
accompany their voices, notably Dafydd ap Gwilym, whilst the remainder used
horsehair, but there’s no evidence that the cerdd dant harpists ever used gut or
horsehair, and horsehair is positively excluded by the Laws here. Any notion that
the repertory of the cerdd dant harpists in the ap Huw manuscript was played on
gut or horsehair is without foundation. Yet the legacy of Flood and all those
writers who like him have ignored or misunderstood the distinction between the
cerdd dant and cerdd dafod professions in their use of harps has led to two
curious, unfortunate situations – the formation of two ghettos really - a Welsh-
oriented milieu of historical harpists who feel prohibited from taking advantage of
the medieval wire harp and an Irish- and Scottish-oriented milieu of medieval
wire harpists who miss out on the only fully-detailed source of music for their
instrument.
If anyone has any queries or needs more clarity on this I’d be very pleased to get
a dialogue going here on this crucial point.
May 7, 2016
To supply the context for the Dolmetsches, it was Sir Henry Walford Davies who
got Arnold Dolmetsch going on the manuscript. Walford Davies’s interest
stemmed from the early 1920s when he was Professor of Music at Aberystwyth.
He was one of the founders of the Dolmetsch Foundation. Other professors in the
University of Wales who got involved later were D. E. Parry Williams and William
Mathias. Parry Williams’ writing on it was eventually published at Bangor in 1999
as part of the book titled Early Welsh Music. It is essentially a short literature
review, focusing particularly on Arnold Dolmetsch and Peter Crossley-Holland’s
first writing on it from 1942 but on no material subsequent to 1942 (as is the
case with W. S. Gwynn Williams’ 1962 references). John Lloyd Williams was
another Welsh academic involved in the time of Walford Davies and the
Dolmetsches, and of course Henry Lewis, Professor of Welsh at Swansea, who
edited the first published facsimile of the manuscript in 1936. The Early Welsh
Music Society in Llangefni published the Dolmetsch recordings and Arnold’s 1937
essay, and its papers are now in the archives at Bangor.
59
Some clarity on the Dolmetsches’ position on string materials is to be found in

this passage from their 1935 presentation to the Cymmrodorion Society: “We
know from Ancient Welsh texts that the Welsh, like the Irish, Scotch, and other
Celts, had harps strung with wire and others strung with gut strings. Each have
their special sphere of action. We use both kinds.” (p. 123).
It would be good to know just what they thought those special spheres were. It
might just be that even back then they had already worked out that since Iolo
Goch was a poet the gut-strung harps he was so threatened by were used by
poets (as we know was the case at that time with Dafydd ap Gwilym) and the
wire-strung ones by instrumentalists.
There is no record of what type of harp was used by the reacairí – the Irish
counterparts to the Welsh poet-performers - but the Welsh customs suggest we
should expect that the strings would have been of gut or horsehair. Note that
Galilei in 1581 qualified his statement on brass strings for harps in Ireland: (in
translation): “The harps … have generally the strings of brass …”. The only
description we have of a reacaire accompanying himself on the harp – the 1518
one by Laurent Vital – doesn’t notice the string material. But, given that Vital was
French and very much had his eye open in Ireland for the exotic, you’d think that
if the strings had been metal and not gut as in France he’d have picked up on
that.
Jun 29, 2016
With the blow suffered by internationalism the other day [the ‘Brexit’ referendum
result], I find myself wanting to point out forgotten bridges that have existed in
history. Here I think is one.
Following through on my post on May 7 about the harps of the Irish reacairí,
where I was saying that we should expect that their strings would have been gut
or horsehair, that’s supported by the number of finds of bone or ivory harp pins
widespread across Ireland - see the draft article by Keith Sanger at
http://www.wirestrungharp.com/material/harp_pegs.html . Bone or ivory pins
aren’t suitable for metal-stringed harps: they indicate gut or horsehair stringing.
Most of the pins are perforated (that is, with a transverse hole) and that implies
gut; whereas slotted pins, and perhaps also plain pins without perforations or
slots, imply horsehair. Keith takes these pins as indicative of the existence of a
class of non-native ‘Norman’ harps, but they tend to be associated with crannogs,
i.e. with native sites.
Gut or horsehair rather than metal strings is also supported by the slenderness of
the design of the harp in the crest of Ireland in the Rous Roll of Richard III, 1483,
and of the harps on the Irish coinage issued in the reigns of Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I.
I suggest that native Irish harping culture in the Middle Ages was more diverse
and richer than its current portrayal.
Nov 23, 2015
… At the 1523 eisteddfod the people in charge were oriented primarily toward the
poetry. Richard ap Hywel ab Ieuan Fychan was the main commissioner, and
Richard's grandson Wiliam ap Thomas ap Richard Mostyn that of the 1567
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eisteddfod. Richard, Thomas and Wiliam were all known for their patronage of the
poets, as had their ancestors. Ieuan Fychan ab Ieuan, Richard’s grandfather, had
himself been a poet - some poems have survived. In 1523 the commissioners
were aided by the personal council of two named respected poets - Gruffydd ab
Ieuan ap Llywelyn Fychan and Tudur Aled, a chaired poet and the leading poet of
his generation. No cerdd dant musicians are named in that capacity, so
representation of the two arts here appears to have been out of balance.
This imbalance may well have some bearing on the design of the silver harp
badge made for the 1523 eisteddfod and awarded to the cerdd dant victor. This
has often been taken as indicating the type of harp which the music of the cerdd
dant tradition and of the ap Huw manuscript was played on. But it’s a design
suitable for horsehair or gut strings, horsehair being what the poets used at the
time, and it doesn’t represent a metal-strung harp, which is what I set out the
case for as the appropriate harp in my 2005 article on the design of the cerdd
dant harp at http://pauldooley.com/aphuw_pages/silvervoice2.html
My view is that the badge appears to be a cerdd dafod artefact, not a cerdd dant
one, possibly as a consequence of the poets having more influence with the
Mostyn family, who would have commissioned the badge, than the cerdd dant
musicians.
An alternative is that its European-style Gothic design, in sharp contrast to the

older design used by the Welsh poets of the time for their horsehair-strung harps,
is simply a result of the Chester-registered silversmith, who certainly had a hand
in its design, following his own - possibly English - lights.
Now Tudur Aled certainly knew of metal strings. He’s the author of one of the
Welsh notices of metal strings I refer to in my 2005 article. The reference is T.
Gwynn Jones (ed.), Gwaith Tudur Aled (Cardiff, 1926), vol. 1, poem XXXI, line
49, where Tudur, addressing his apparently valued but vulnerable patron, says:
Tant aur wyt o naturiau,

Treulio'n hawdd trwy lawenhau;
(You are a gold string in nature,

easily worn away by rejoicing).
As I explain in my article, p. 3, gold strings in the bass can be helpful on low-

headed harps like the surviving early Irish and Scottish harps, where there’s
some foreshortening of the lowest strings relative to higher ones:
“Ann Heymann, followed by other harpists, has already been led by the physics of
early metal-strung harps to experiment with using mainly gold alloy strings in the
bass. They have found that the greater density of gold, by enabling the lower
strings to be thinner and more flexible, produces a better sound than brass or
bronze does there.”
Nov 25, 2015
It’s important not to confuse the various types of harp, nor also the various types
of harpist. I think you’ve just conflated two different types of harp. Putting it
briefly, the harps depicted at Gresford and Dyserth are very different from the
type that the Mostyn badge is modelled on. I also wonder if you’re conflating the
two types of harpist. There’s been so much conflation in the literature on these
two fundamentals of medieval music making that I think it’s best if I write a
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series of detailed posts, amplifying my 2005 article where I identified the

conflations. I’ll start with the Mostyn badge and its relatives, and later set them
into context.
The silver miniature of a harp, the actual ariandlws itself, made for the award at
the 1523 Caerwys eisteddfod to the victorious telynior (Dafydd Nanklyn), survives
at Mostyn Hall. Although it is only six inches tall, it is well detailed and is a
representation of a ‘gothic’ harp. Bray pins are cleverly suggested by hooks
emerging from the soundboard for anchoring the ‘strings’ to. The hooks here
necessarily point downwards rather than upwards as do actual bray pins. It is
‘strung’ on the right side of the ‘neck’. It is hallmarked Chester and was
commissioned by the Mostyn family. It is thought to have been designed to be
worn as a badge, perhaps on the hat, pinned through an eye protruding from the
side of the ‘soundbox’. Here’s a photo of the badge.
Closely related to that is the form of harp represented in the splendid wood
carving from Dynevor now at Cotehele in Cornwall, dating prior to about 1524.
This is very much an example of a standard European ‘gothic’ harp of the type
developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and associated particularly
with Burgundy, with a slender, skeletal frame. Such harps had non-leather
soundtables and gut strings but did have bray pins. Indeed the entire design can
be viewed as an adaptation to bray pins: the angle of the strings to the
soundtable is more acute than on earlier designs, which assists the seating of the
pins into the soundtable, and the slimming down of the soundbox brings out
some aspects of the timbre of the braying action. It is shown being played
against the right shoulder.
Less related to the Mostyn badge is the stained glass representation, of David, at
Llanrhaeadr Dyffryn Clwyd Church dated 1533. It is executed in detail and yet
lacks bray pins. It also lacks a finial above the shank joining the neck to the
soundbox, and the forepillar is almost straight. It is a design familiar from
England and the Continent, and one which will probably be later in origin than the
Gresford and Dyserth design. It is strung on the left side of the neck. A similar
but more exaggerated design is shown in the little and rough outline sketch c.
1605-10 by John Jones of Gellilyfdy, where the top end of the soundbox comes to
a sharp point, as do the shank-to-neck joint and the top end of the forepillar.
Both have frames which are far less skeletal than the Cotehele carving and
considerably less so than the Mostyn badge.
The other representations of harps are fundamentally different in style from the
Mostyn badge, and I’ll come on to those next.
Nov 25, 2015
I’ll now move on to discussing the more vernacular types of accompaniment harp.
As I point out in my article, Iolo Goch’s poem reveals that in the fourteenth
century the leather harp with gut strings and bray pins began to threaten the
traditional horsehair-strung lyre as the instrument used by poet-performers to
accompany their vocal delivery of poems. Yet it was the leather harp with
horsehair strings that emerges as the standard instrument of self-accompaniment
in the fifteenth century, and that remained a fairly stable set of components
through the sixteenth century. From the many descriptions of such harps in
poems of the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century and from some later
prose descriptions a composite picture can be built up. Putting it briefly here, the
components involved - wood for the frame and the soundbox, leather for covering
the soundbox, horsehair for the strings and bone for the tuning pins, along with
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wooden bray pins and silver tuning keys - tend to cluster together in poems
describing harps. Thus a poem by Wiliam Llŷn requesting a harp for Siôn Trefor
which notices its bray pins is titled in some manuscripts as referring to a ‘telyn
rawn’: horsehair harp, and in another as referring to a ‘telyn ledr’: leather harp.
The earliest poem to mention horsehair strings is perhaps the poem requesting a
harp by the poet Gwerful Mechain (fl. 1462-c. 1500). That is followed by many
similar poems, a dozen or so, of the second half of the sixteenth century, and the
number of these makes it apparent that this particular combination of
components had become standard by that time, horsehair seemingly having
overtaken gut as the main string material at some time prior.
Two of the three harps illustrated in stained glass windows in Welsh churches
display bray pins, and these may be our best guides to the overall designs of this
combination of components. That at Gresford Church is dated 1506 and that at
Dyserth Church nearby, 1533. Both are depicted played standing, the former by a
harpist at the feast of King Herod and the latter by David, but they probably
reflect contemporary designs. They are quite similar to one another and fairly
small: as measured against the players’ bodies the soundboxes would be around
two-and-a-half feet long. They are relatively low-headed, although the Dyserth
one, the slightly larger of the two, has a sharp upcurving at the front end of the
neck, although it is not that it has a finial as a separate piece. The necks of both
appear to be mortised into the forepillar and the forepillars are mortised into the
soundbox. Both have a pronounced curvature of the forepillar and are strung on
the right side of the neck. The necks appear to be one piece, mortised directly
into the top part of the soundbox without an intervening shank and without a
‘swan’s neck’ shaping. Both are sturdy instruments, with strong forepillars, but if
indeed the neck is mortised into the forepillar and not vice versa that is a weak
design. Gresford has small soundholes on the side of the soundbox, Dyserth does
not. The scale of neither illustration has allowed for a realistic depiction of the
number of strings and tuning pins, but the size of the harps suggests they may
have had less than thirty strings.
To contrast the leather harps used by the poet-performers in Wales with the
gothic harps I discussed in my last post, note that the differences are not just
about styling, origin and association, but about fundamental design. By a leather
harp is meant that the soundbox was hollowed out of one piece of timber and
covered over with stretched leather; that is, cured animal skin. The gothic harps
had built-up soundboxes with solid wooden soundtables. Taken together with the
switch from gut to horsehair strings, it appears from this that from the fourteenth
century on there were successive waves of new harp designs coming into Wales
from England. Probably the first major innovation in construction was the
introduction of a wooden soundboard, although there is no positive evidence at all
of any switching amongst cerdd dafod performers from leather to wooden
soundtables. It may well be, then, that instruments with wooden soundboards
were used only for the same types of music they were used for in England and
elsewhere.
That is why it’s important to be clear about the distinctions I’ve clarified here
between the standard harp of the poet-performers, the cerdd dafod telynorion,
and the gothic harps. To conflate the two types would be to ignore the possibility
of music being played on horsehair- or gut-strung harps in Wales other than the
self-accompaniment to cerdd dafod. I’m thinking there of dance tunes, ballad
tunes or instrumental pieces in the lute or virginals styles.
Before I move on to the relationship of these harps to instrumental cerdd dant,

have I given enough detail on these distinctions of harp styling and construction
for you … to feel clear that these are not all, as you put it, Mostyn-style harps?
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Nov 26, 2015
The leathern harp, as you’ve wondered, would indeed have needed to have a
wooden rib running below the string line of the membrane, with tapering holes
into which could be inserted the bray pins which are referred to in several
accounts, beginning with Iolo Goch’s poem.
It is a highly distinctive instrument. The leathern soundtable is in contrast to the

wooden soundboards of many early instruments: in Northern Europe: lyres and
metal-strung harps and psalteries; further south: the Greek and Roman kithara
and bowl lyres in Egypt, Sudan and Nubia. A leather as opposed to a wooden
soundtable indicates a concern for light weight and a preference for a sound in
which the component of attack is important, at the expense both of sustain in
general and of stability in respect of pitch, timbre and intensity. A wooden
soundboard, in being more rigid, vibrates for longer and produces better high
frequencies, giving a smoother, more consistent sound. Leather throws the
energy out as sound faster and communicates the method of attack more clearly,
in particular the articulation of the nails sliding off the strings in the closed-
fingering action of cerdd dant described in my dissertation ‘Technique’, pp. 103-
112. However, the mare and ox skin of the Welsh accounts implies that the
contrast with wood was not as important here as it is in other cultures, where
finer leathers such as lamb, goat or calf skin are used for soundtables. Leather
has the further advantage over wood that manufacture is more convenient: it is
easier to fit a skin soundtable than to fashion one out of timber.
The fact that skin soundtables, vulnerable to changes in humidity, have been and
still are more common in drier, hotter and more stable climates than that of the
British Isles, and particularly in Wales, rather confirms Iolo Goch’s view that the
design was an import and not anciently indigenous to Wales. I can well imagine
the concept of skin as a soundtable material for stringed instruments in general
originally finding its way to England from Moorish Spain, perhaps in the wake of
the conquest of Barbastro in 1065. But perhaps gut harps in England had been
leathern from their inception.
The last reference to the leathern harp anywhere is by Edward Jones in his The
Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (London, 1784), p. 103, in an
account of a harp that was constructed in this manner: “I am informed by Mr
William Williams, that, when a boy, he had an old leathern Harp, which he used
to play upon. The body of it was hollowed, or scooped, out of a piece of wood,
and covered over with an ox’s skin, which was sewed extremely tight at the back;
and the pegs, which the strings were screwed with, were made of bone, or of
ivory.” As there were several harpists at that time with that name, it’s still an
open question as to who William Williams was.
Jones also gives an account of an interesting old harp that was also hollowed-out
from the front (the other methods of harp soundbox construction being hollowing
out from the back, hollowing out of back and front panels, and stave) and so
appears to be the structural successor to the leathern harp: “I saw an old Harp,
that formerly belonged to William ab Owen, of Pencraig, in Caernarvonshire,
which is said to have been made upwards of two hundred years ago, about the
reign of Elizabeth. It had one row of strings, consisting of thirty-three. It was four
feet nine inches high, and made of Pren Masarn, or Sicamore wood, as all the
Harps and Viols are still made of, except the sound-board, which is made of
deal.”
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Nov 27, 2015
Correction: on thinking about that second old harp that Jones described: “made
of Pren Masarn, or Sicamore wood, as all the Harps and Viols are still made of,
except the sound-board, which is made of deal”, I now realize from the use of the
present tense that the deal soundboard relates to the harps of Jones’s time, not
to the Elizabethan one. That one must have been either stave-backed or, more
likely, hollowed out from the back. James Talbot’s notes on instruments from c.
1690-5 describe Welsh examples of both, with bray pins, attributing the stave-
backed design to England.
That leaves the leathern harp with its hollowing-out from the front as a unique
soundbox design for the frame harp. Leathern arched harps and angular harps,
where they have wooden soundboxes, are also hollowed out from the front, and
the front is then covered with leather, secured by thongs at the sides or the back.
At this point it’s worth reflecting on the essential difference in soundbox design
between leathern harps with strings of organic material and medieval harps with
metal strings. The frame of a metal-strung harp needs to be far more sturdily
built to withstand much greater tension from the strings. Hence a wooden
soundboard is essential. The soundbox is hollowed out from one piece of timber,
from the back, and the back is then covered with a separate wooden backboard.
In short, the fundamental method of construction is reversed. It’s unclear, I
think, as to whether the use of the hollowed-out from the back design was
adopted for organic strings from the metal strings design or vice versa.
Nov 26, 2015
Moving on now to how all this relates to the ap Huw manuscript, the key is the
compositional forms. The cainc form was the one used to accompany the vocal
delivery of cerdd dafod, as I’ve shown in an earlier post (Oct 18, 2015), by the
self-accompanying vocalists, i.e. the noble amateurs (datgeiniaid dyledog), the
retained professional vocalists (teuluwyr), the independent professional vocalists
(datgeiniaid) and the apprenticed poets and the fully-qualified poets (posfeirdd
and prifeirdd: both types of gwŷr wrth gerdd dafod). This was the range of
personnel that used the accompaniment harp, and we have just the two
examples of the cainc form in the manuscript. It follows that these were played
on leathern harps.
As to the collaborative accompaniment provided by the dedicated instrumental

harpists (gwŷr wrth gerdd dant, purorion) which was considered preferable to
self-accompaniment by the vocalists, it is unclear what form or forms they used.
Gruffydd Robert in his grammar explains the ideal scenario: ‘Os byddai un yn
chwennychu digrifwch, e gai buror ai delyn i ganu mwyn bynciau, a datceiniad
peroslau i ganu gida thant’. (‘If one were to desire pleasant entertainment, one
would get a puror with his telyn to play gentle pynciau, and a sweet-toned
datgeiniad to vocalize with strings’). A pwnc is a metrical unit (see my
dissertation on ‘Metre’, 1998, pp. 6-11, 16-18) of uncertain and perhaps variable
length which was a component of all types of compositional form, so this
reference does not enable us to pin down which form or forms were used for the
purpose. For all we know, to provide variety the accompanists might have
improvised rather than played set pieces like the vocalists did, using the
measures as the means to coordinate the two parts. I’ve identified what I’m sure
the rhythmic aspects of the vocal part were in my article on ‘Bardic Rhythm’ in
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2011 but alas the tonal aspects of it continue to be uncertain (see my dissertation
on ‘Verse’, 1995, pp. 103-113).
Nov 27, 2015
Hi … - see my last post from yesterday on that - how the leathern harp was used
for accompaniment, also the metal-strung harp.
The accompaniment lyre is in itself a very big subject. Let's stick to harps here.
Nov 28, 2015
Here’s a bit of tragicomedy. The most detailed information on the Welsh harper-
vocalists in performance comes, sadly, from a parody of them, which hasn’t
before been picked up by scholars of Welsh music. It centres on, of all places,
Islington (poor Islington, even today, is still the butt of jokes!).
Islington first makes an entrance into the subject in a tale relating to 1277,
allegedly translated from a Mostyn ms. of Sir Thomas Mostyn (the son of the
Caerwys commissioner), in one published version:
“The Snowdon barons had accompanied Llewelyn to London, and joined

their homage with that of their prince. These with their numerous trains
were quartered at Islington and well entertained. Unhappily they could not
drink the wine and the ale of London, the English bread they slighted, and
the environs afforded not milk enough for their party. Their pride too was
disgusted at the continual staring of the Londoners, who followed them in
crowds to gaze at their uncommon garb. No! chorussed the indignant
Britons - we never again will visit Islington except as conquerors! And
from that instant resolved to take up arms.”
In 1575, a few years after the last Caerwys eisteddfod and seemingly inspired by
it, a ‘ridiculous’ entertainment drawing on the Islington tale was meticulously
composed and rehearsed for Elizabeth’s court at Kenilworth Castle. It involved a
fake performance by a theatrically-costumed musician acting the part of an
ancient ‘squire minstrel’ from Islington, performing first a scripted mock heraldic
speech revolving around the importance of dairy produce and then an alliterative
English poem self-accompanied on the harp. See (it’s online): John Merrydew:
Kenilworth Festivities: Comprising Laneham's Description of the Pageantry …
(Warwick & Leamington, 1825), pp. 49-59. Note that the poem concerns Arthur
and a king of North Wales, that the village of Islington is lampooned by gross
elevation of its status - an echo of the exceptional borough status of Caerwys -
and that Kenilworth is in the same region as Ludlow, the seat of the Council of
the Marches under whose auspices the Caerwys eisteddfod was held.
It’s gratifying that the entertainment wasn’t in the end presented at Kenilworth -
there wasn’t time, but there’s a wealth of detail in the description of the
performance and I think it may well be that much of it was well-informed: the
musician may well have been a trained representative at the tail-end of the
English counterpart to the Welsh tradition, particularly as the poem was
alliterative. Noteworthy is the harp prelude, that the vocalist was standing and
that the harp was ‘dependent’ i.e. suspended.
The theme of dairy produce had cropped up already in Andrew Boorde’s 1548
caricature of the Welsh harper-vocalist (“I do loue cawse boby, good rosted
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chese”). Somewhat earlier, Gaelic bardic performance in Scotland had also

prompted the notion of humorous entertainment to the poet William Dunbar. But
how poignant this Kenilworth account is, this almost photographic description,
that the great tradition of the heroic figure of the solo singer or declaimer
accompanying himself on the harp and before that on the lyre, stretching back to
the Bronze Age, deified in Brythonic culture as Maponos, had become viewed as
such a joke.
Nov 28, 2015
What you're missing here [concerning what was played on the accompaniment
harp] is what I've said about the cainc form. That is what they played. We know
about these from the two that are in the manuscript, from the catalogues of
others, from the ones that led to longer compositions I wrote about the other
week, and from the odd mention of them in poems.
They were used by the datgeiniaid to accompany their delivery of cywyddau,

we're told, and I expect of englynion also. I doubt they were used for the awdl.
They were played on, generally, leathern harps with horsehair strings and bray
pins. As to whether they were used by the metal-strung harpists when they
accompanied the vocalists is uncertain. In a way to do so doesn't make any
sense. I think it's obvious that the ceinciau in the manuscript are so extremely
short in order for it to be possible for the vocalists to cope with playing them,
repeatedly, whilst they were mainly preoccupied with coping with the
complexities of the timings and rhythms of the phonemes in the vocal part.
Delivering cynghanedd was not like singing a song lyric - every line has a
different rhythm, as you know so well. Meanwhile, an accompanist doesn't have
that load, that restraint, so there's no need for him to be confined to the simple
repetition of a cainc. Equally, there's no need for him to use the organised,
structured, incremental development of the pieces in his set repertoire either,
since the audience's attention is keenly focused on the content and rhythms of
the vocal part. So I imagine he improvised.
Nov 28, 2015
Well, that’s not quite right [questions posed about ceinciau and clymau cytgerdd],
but first off let’s leave the accompaniment lyre because it’s too involved a subject
to go into here. Yes indeed, ceinciau on the leathern harp, as I say. On the metal
harp I’m setting out a case for improvisations, structured on the measures to
coordinate with the vocalist. That doesn’t mean the clymau cytgerdd since they
aren’t improvisational (apart perhaps from those rare florid cadences), merely
skeletal, plus I’m suggesting they were part of a set of compositional aids, out of
which set pieces could be constructed.
The real prize to be strained for here in the accompaniment field is the music of
the accompaniment lyre. The leathern accompaniment harp was used in Wales for
only about three hundred years - say from 1350 to 1650 - and for only perhaps a
further two or three hundred years before that in England. Whereas the
accompaniment lyre stretches right back into prehistory, right across Northern
Europe. For example, in relation to just Wales, a particularly early probable lyre
wrest plank, third century B.C., has been excavated at the Dinorben hillfort above
the Conwy valley. And if ever the accompaniment lyre was preceded by the
arched harp (in Europe it may not have been), that would probably have been
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used in the same way. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the accompaniment lyre and
have written up the results, to be published. I won’t be going into it here.
Nov 20, 2015
It is Iolo Morganwg and his adherents that I worry about here [concerning the
origin of the material in the 1858 letter on Irish influence I reported on Nov 16,
2015]. I think I see his hand in this. His main agenda was to establish a fake
primacy for his invented early Glamorgan poets, not only over the whole of Wales
and Britain but Ireland also. In order to make that claim more acceptable he was
prepared to offer a quid pro quo trade-off and thereby present himself as a fair
dealer, such that whilst Wales had the credit for the origin of poetry Ireland had
the credit for the instrumental music. This is the argument he presents by citing
from what he describes as ‘the Llandegai copy of the statute of Gruffudd ap
Cynan’:
“The poets, otherwise termed bards, and men of vocal song, and of
information, were from the country of Wales aborigine, and it was from
them that the Hiberians derived their vocal song, and its scientific
principles of song. The men of instrumental or of string music came from
Ireland in the time of Gruffudd ap Cynan, and of King Stephen [1135-54],
and the regulations that were made respecting these were subjected to
those of the bards, or men of vocal song, and for this reason; no degrees
in music can be conferred but in the meetings or sittings of the men of
vocal song, for it is not incumbent on the men of string music to read the
Welsh language and to write it correctly; for which reason they do not
possess the essential and requisite qualifications for preserving the
memorials and knowledge of the laws and regulations to which they ought
to be subjected.”
In other words, it was very much in his interests to promote and therefore
perhaps to exaggerate the impact of Irish music in the time of Gruffudd ap
Cynan. We need to be alert to that agenda.
Dec 1, 2015
Yes, I agree that the harmony [of Caingc y Pibydd Bach as recorded by Ifor Ceri]
can be divided into those two stacks of thirds, except at bar 12 where the
prominent notes G and C would make a 0 on your second resolution not a I. But I
don’t see this piece as double tonic. First, it doesn’t have imitation of phrases
shifted down a tone. Second, I don’t see it as triadic in the first place - the jumps
emphasize the interval of the fourth, not thirds. That’s why, despite its 6/8 time
signature, it sounds nothing like a jig to me. I hear it as simply F tonality for the
opening and closing sections and C tonality for the middle six (bars 9-14).
The sustained run of quavers through most of the middle six [bars] isn’t a
characteristic at all of cerdd dant. But then neither is 6/8 you know.
Most important here in deciding whether this piece could be a survival of late
medieval self-accompaniment has to be: is this practicable whilst delivering cerdd
dafod? I don’t fancy my chances of getting something this long so hard-wired into
the memory that I could concentrate on the demands of the cerdd dafod at the
same time, even if it wasn’t running on a different rhythm.
And it shouldn’t have been too difficult. I’m sure it’d be expected that if you were
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going to learn how to deliver strict-metre poetry whilst accompanying yourself on

strings you’d be taught in your childhood. There’s an account of a remarkable
five-year-old boy who could already do it using the harp.
Can I just check that people have been following what I’ve been saying about the
differences between self-accompanying vocalists and specialised instrumentalists?
Whenever we see an image or read of a harpist or crowder standing, like the
‘Islington’ harpist, that’s a vocalist. But when we read merely of a ‘harpist’ we
can’t tell which of the two types he was, unless he was in the company of a
pencerdd poet in which case he will have been a vocalist since the pencerdd did
not perform but had the dignity of remaining seated at the table, which practice
would have prompted the award to poets of a ‘chair’. The accompaniment harp
would have had straps or a harness to support it and would have been relatively
light. For playing on horseback a stool to support the harp would have been
needed as well. Add in the large numbers of horsehair strings and bray pins and
altogether the accompaniment harp was a complex business - something of a
Heath Robinson contraption. I can well understand why the Welsh resisted it for a
long time.
Feb 16, 2019
To come back to the soothing pieces and them needing to be played on metal
strings, they really would not have been suited by the horsehair bray harps of the
cerdd dafod harpers. I can’t imagine a piece with the length, the spaciousness,
the delicacy of phrasing and the chordal subtlety of, say, Caniad Llywelyn
Delynior ever working on anything except metal strings, and I say that from my
experience of playing them on gut even without brays. With brays the problem in
a soothing context is not just the timbre but the staccato effect in the treble
created by the abrupt ‘drop-off’ point in volume when a string ceases to contact
the pin and buzz. After that point the volume tails off in the same manner as an
organic string without a bray pin but the note is now so quiet as to not really
make itself heard above the bass strings that are still buzzing and have not yet
reached their drop-off point (that comes much later than the drop-off of the
treble strings).
We can read that the sound of brays on a medieval harp is like the sound of the
sitar but the sitar (ideally) has no drop-off point. As the amplitude of the string’s
vibration reduces the buzzing continues because the surface against which the
string vibrates is carefully fashioned to sustain the contact. It’s the job of
specialist jawari craftsmen to create and to regularly maintain the gentle
parabolic curves of that delicate and complex surface so it runs almost parallel to
each of the strings no matter which fret they’re stopped on, to eliminate the
drop-off problem. A similar approach was taken for some gothic harps on the
European mainland by running a slightly curved edge of the bray pin almost
parallel to the string but in the Welsh evidence on brays they were not tangential
to the string but L-shaped with a corner acting as the contact point with the
string, and that results in a sudden drop-off of the buzzing.
Still, the cerdd dafod harpers with their bray harps would not, I think, have need
of a soothing, suantraí sound because their poems are almost all praise poems,
and eulogy requires either a joyful geantraí expression or a sorrowful goltraí one,
depending on the context. The religious poems are generally eulogistic as well,
composed to be performed before the altar. Many of them are in awdl metres and
there’s no evidence that the awdl was ever accompanied. The dychanau, the
satirical poems which are often humorous, would have used a geantraí vehicle of
expression I’m sure, and they would be particularly suited by the raucous sound
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of L-shaped brays. As would the repertory of the teuluwr, whose origin was as the
musical representative of the warband.
The organology of harps is a particular interest of many who read here of course,
so any comments or corrections would be welcome. I’m not aware that the
relationship between different types of harp and different modes of expression
has ever been brought up anywhere before.
Feb 17, 2019
Yes, the leather harp with bray pins was new to Wales in Iolo Goch’s time. The
traditional self-accompaniment instrument was the strummed lyre, for which see
‘The Accompaniment Lyre’ and ‘Playing Cerdd Dant Chords on the Lyre’ in my
‘discussions’ doc here. Most of that is not from this group but from the Anglo
Saxon lyres group btw.
It’s possible to fit lyres with buzzing devices but there’s no evidence that that was
ever done in Europe, only in East Africa and, by implication, perhaps in the
Ancient Middle East also. Buzzing devices along with hide soundtables seem very
out of place in Northern Europe so I have the impression that the harps from
England that Iolo Goch was so threatened by would have been inspired by
buzzing mechanisms and hide soundtables on exotic instruments encountered by
the Crusaders (who reached as far as Egypt) or perhaps by pilgrims to Jerusalem,
Rome or Santiago de Compostela. Certainly the brays and leather soundtables
had been alien to Wales in the time of Iorwerth Beli and Iolo Goch (mid-14th
century) and I see them as part of a broad, gradual drift of musical culture to the
north and west via France and England which started perhaps as early as 1065
and had yet to reach the Hebrides in the mid-16th century.
But as you know all this relates to the self-accompaniment of the vocalists who
performed cerdd dafod, not to be confused with the music of the dedicated
instrumentalists: the specialist cerdd dant harpers and crythors. And the ‘sleep’
pieces in the manuscript, especially Caniad Llywelyn Delynior, are so suave, so
laid-back, so kool …
Nov 6, 2017
… Harps for self-accompaniment needed to be played standing, and there the

problem is that if you have just a strap or sling around the neck or shoulder
straps or slings then the strings will not be vertical. They need to be vaguely
vertical if you’re going to use cerdd dant technique. On Gothic harps you can see
that the problem is partly addressed by the strings being much more at an acute
angle to the soundbox than they are on other early harps, including the Irish
ones. What would help would be a spacer of some sort between the bottom of the
back of the soundbox and the midriff, not that I’ve seen indication of that
represented anywhere.
On some representations of harps played sitting you can see an apron in which
the harp nestles, and that accommodates those harps too small to be on the floor
and too large to be on the lap or on the chair or bench. …
Nov 20, 2018
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Some of you will be aware of the late 15th – early 16th century signet ring that
was found last year in South Wales near Castleton – see http://paw-
things.com/the-druidstone-ring/ - bearing the device of a harp and also letters to
each side of the harp. The letters were earlier thought to represent ‘P’ and ‘W’ but
I’ve just been told that the National Museum of Wales now reads them as,
probably, ‘PUR’ – the Welsh word for ‘pure’. ‘Pur’ is much more significant to
harping in Wales than might first be apparent. It is a word with very strong
associations with the harp. As you may all know, there were two bardic
professions, each with equal status. The formal term 'gŵr wrth gerdd dant' was,
in terms of performance, a musician who played on strings but was not expected
to also himself vocalize; that is, he was purely a dedicated instrumentalist. The
contrasting term 'gŵr wrth gerdd dafod' was, in terms of performance, a musician
who did vocalize and commonly also had the capacity to accompany himself on
strings. Now, the pure instrumentalist was also known by the term 'puror' and the
music that he produced was termed 'puroriaeth', so the root word 'pur' is quite
fundamental to the distinction between a specialist harper (or crythor) and a
vocalist.
The distinction between the two bardic professions is often presented nowadays
as having been between those who played on strings and those who composed
poetry but that is incorrect. As I say, it was usual for the gŵr wrth gerdd dafod to
have the ability to accompany himself on the harp or the crwth, which is what he
would do when the verse form required accompaniment if there was no pure
instrumentalist present. The ideal performance context was described by Gruffydd
Robert thus: ‘Os byddai un yn chwennychu digrifwch, e gai buror ai delyn i ganu
mwyn bynciau, a datceiniad peroslau i ganu gida thant'. (If one were to desire
pleasant entertainment, one would get a puror with his telyn to play gentle
pynciau, and a sweet-toned datgeiniad to vocalise with strings). The truth is that
both professions had dual roles: as performers and as composers, so it is
incorrect to treat the pure instrumentalists as merely performers and the
vocalists as merely composers (that is, of poetry), as you often find today.
In view of the word 'pur' being so central to harping, I think it is extremely likely
that the Museum is correct. I imagine the ring belonged to a harper, or was
possibly an unrecorded part of the regalia, the 'furniture', of a South Walian
eisteddfod tradition, in other words a prize rather like the ariandlws - the Mostyn
silver harp badge. In 1594 a poem by Siôn Mawddwy mentions the existence of a
second silver harp badge in Pembrokeshire which was traditionally kept at Cemais
and sometimes at Llandudog Abbey, and is reputed to have been awarded by the
Martin family, lords marcher, at eisteddfodau at Newport in Pembrokeshire. So
South Wales is not an entirely unexpected region to find an artefact such as this
ring, although the timing of the decline in professional cerdd dafod (and no doubt
cerdd dant) is earlier than in North Wales and that would suggest the ring dates
from the earlier part of the date range suggested by the Museum.
Nov 21, 2018
Yes, it's an exciting find. I think that could indeed be a Tudor rose on the face so
when it was thought the letters were the initials 'P W' I suggested they might be
for 'Princeps Walliae': Prince of Wales. There were royal connections in the area.
That looter Thomas Cromwell was gifted Rompney (Rumney) Manor in 1532 and
his son Gregory was leasing part of it in 1545: https://www.british-
history.ac.uk/cardiff-records/vol2/pp8-41#h2-0027. And William Herbert in
Cardiff had been a guardian of young Edward VI, Prince of Wales 1537-1547.
Things from the royal court could become dispersed: just down the road from
here a burse or purse cover for the Great Seal of Elizabeth had been kept for
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centuries:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_det
ails.aspx?objectId=68722&partId=1&images=true
… Henry Jones of Plas Llangoed was a legal man in London who worked for and
was a friend of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. This shows just how easily
things could become dispersed, apparently legitimately in the case of the burse.
But with the reading of the letters as 'PUR' a court connection seems much less
likely.
Anything more that can be dug up on the context of the ring would be great,
particularly anything more on eisteddfod traditions in South Wales.
THE TIMPAN AND THE CRWTH
Sep 4, 2017
… It’s interesting that the word used in crwth technique for a stop was ystopiad,
apparently a borrowing from English. That’s a reminder that the crwth was
common in England, under the names crowd and rote. And for those here with an
Irish orientation it’s interesting that the the Patent Rolls for 1436 of Henry VI
refer to ‘…Irish … clarsaghours, tympanours, crowthores…’. And there are a
couple of Irish references to the bow being used on the ‘tiompán’, which I expect
refers to the crwth rather than to the plucked instrument commonly known as the
timpan. Plus the stone carving c. 1200 at St. Finian’s Church, Co. Kerry, of a
bowed instrument, although it is badly worn and unclear if it has a fingerboard or
not. Then there’s an ambiguity over the word ‘crutta’ in the Irish Annals written in
Latin by Friar Thady Dowling (d. 1628) where, in respect of 1137, his entry claims
that Griffith ab Conan brought lyras, tympanas, cruttas, cytharas, cytharizantes
(lyres, timpans, cruits or crwths?, harps and harp players) with him to Wales
from Ireland. In order for the ‘crutta’ here to be something other than a lyre,
timpan or harp it would need to be bowed I think.
Aug 23, 2019
Bethan Miles’s 1983 M.A. thesis ‘Swyddogaeth a Chelfyddyd y Crythor’,

Aberystwyth includes details of all the tune lists and measure lists, along with
biographical information drawn mainly from poems on the crwth players. It is a
thoroughly scholarly, excellent compilation and analysis of the primary
documents, one which deserves our admiration. As yet still unpublished I think.
And I’d like to point out that at Caerwys 1567/8 there were more crythorion than
telynorion, harpers. The crwth, then, was in no way the junior partner of the
harp. Somehow all the glamour today is attached to the medieval harp but that
happens at the expense of the crwth, the crowd, and that’s a great shame.
An old saying for harmless rivalry between friends was “ymryson crwth a thelyn”:
competition between crwth and harp.
Aug 23, 2019
And I've just read on Wikipedia, citing The Oxford Companion to Musical
Instruments, that "In Wales, the crwth long took second place to the harp in the
musical hierarchy". That is simply incorrect. The Statute shows that the two
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professions had parity with each other, and with the cerdd dafod profession, and
there's no reason to suppose it had ever been different since the crwth was
adopted. There are a million ways in which the modern era projects its own
values and tastes onto the pre-modern era and this is one of them I'm afraid.
Part of the reason I'm sure is the desire to claim continuity of tradition so that the
glamour of antiquity can be claimed as a selling-point for modern things.
Medieval harps, their techniques and their music had almost nothing in common
with the triple harp culture of modern Wales, nor did the crwth with modern violin
culture. And that's exactly what is so valuable about medieval cerdd dant: in
being different it constitutes an addition, an enrichment to current culture, a
broadening of cultural identity.
May 9, 2014
With the timpan (Welsh spelling) or tiompán (Irish) I know there was once a
vogue for interpreting it as hammered but from what I remember of all the
evidence in Ann Buckley's expert writings on it it was plucked. It had once had
just three strings so they must have been stopped against a fingerboard (or
bottle-necked). We know how fantastic the long-necked lute is for melody, but
three strings isn't ideal for cerdd dant harmony, nor is plucking stopped strings,
so the harp had the edge there. But I think the timpan held its own in Ireland,
and the crwth certainly did in Wales, and I expect that brings us to just how
wonderful it is to be able to bend notes. So I don't like to think of the harp as the
perfect instrument for the music, but as one of the instruments. With the
manuscript, we are essentially engaging with stringed music in general. There are
other references to the timpan in Wales, and there's one to the crwth in Ireland,
but I don't know why they were not more significant in those places. Perhaps it
was that if you had one instrument you can bend the notes on that was sufficient,
so the timpan and crwth might have been in quite direct competition with one
another. Maybe the bowed crwth caused the timpan to die out in Wales but in
Ireland there was more attachment to the old ways so the crwth didn't make
much headway. I don't know. There's so much we don't know.
I've written about the timpan in my technique dissertation pp. 145-146.
May 9, 2014
Yes … there would be a need to transpose, or to adapt the chords, of some of the
manuscript pieces to get them all into a single pitch level for the crwth. That
would be particularly problematic for those pieces that have a change of pitch
level within them of course. So you would wind up with less variety between
pieces, and sometimes less variety within a piece. Still, you could preserve
changes of melodic mode easily enough by fingering.
It seems O'Curry, way back then, wasn't aware of the Welsh triad list that has the
timpan and the crwth as separate instruments, nor the Irish one of 1435 that lists
both tympanours and crowthores, nor the references to the timpan as three-
stringed and as plucked and as metal-strung. All that is enough to establish there
were two instruments here, not one. There are two fairly late references to the
'timpan' being bowed, but I expect that that bowed instrument was what we
would call the crwth. Similarly, the early reference to the 'cruit' as three-stringed
I expect indicates the instrument that was normally termed the timpan.
Ann Buckley's 1978 article: ‘What was the tiompán?’ is a comprehensive

collection of notices of it.
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What I think is most important about the timpan and the crwth is that we don't
lose sight of the fact that the professional instrumentalists had three instruments
at their disposal, not just one. In so far as exploring playing the pieces on the
timpan and the crwth helps with that, that's all to the good. We could throw into
the mix an earlier precursor lyre of about nine strings (a different animal from the
six-stringed accompaniment lyre) as a possible candidate for solo music too. But I
think it's unrealistic to expect that we could ever do justice to what was played on
the timpan and the crwth, so I do hope that if cerdd dant of a sort is ever
presented on them, the point is made clear that the tradition is inevitably being
under-represented. The timpanors and crythors must have made music that was
the equal of that made by the harpers, since they were also highly esteemed, but
theirs would have had some of their own special features and strengths which are
not apparent in the manuscript.
What do others think about the timpan? I never heard an actual argument being
put forward that it was hammered, just people making statements that it was.
Tampering with the timpan?
May 10, 2014
I think that reconstruction is roughly the most probable form of a crwth trithant.
If its body was waisted, that implies a curved bridge and the bow being able to
access just one or two strings at a time, in which case it would have been played
like a rebec - melody with drone. That would explain the fact that players of it
weren't allowed to participate in the eisteddfod - that, as a folk music instrument,
it lacked the capacity to produce the I-0 alternating harmony of the classical
tradition.
If it had a flat bridge and all three strings were sounded together, then alternate
stopping would have been possible, or it could be that it was used in the manner
of how the medieval fiddle is thought to have been played, with each finger held
flat and stopping two strings to produce organum with drone. But it looks like a
rebec-technique instrument to me, with the waisting and the small apertures as
shown in the St Martial Troper.
The players that turned up at the eisteddfod were entitled to a penny for their
pains, the Statute says, patronisingly. Still, that would be more than the bus fare.
Anyone here a fan of early hornpipes? That's what I believe they played.
Fantastic stuff!
Jun 24, 2019
I think there’s an outside chance that the ‘crwth trithant’ was the Welsh term for
the rebec. If so I expect it would have had the same tuning and technique as the
Cretan lyra used to have, the central string providing a constant drone. More
likely I think is that the 3-stringed crwth had held out against the rebec inWales
up to and through the 16th century, else we might expect the term ‘rebec’ to have
been introduced.
The Cretan lyra, played with the nails, produces an excellent, harsh, loud tone
which is well suited to dance music in the open, but for all forms of music that
tone expresses the resilient spirit of rural and traditional Greek culture. I love it.
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Sept 13, 2015
The form of the timpan has been a longstanding problem. Although it’s a
possibility, I don’t think it would have taken the form of the fidla and the langspil.
They use the built-up box method of construction, which tends to be later in
introduction and more easterly in distribution than the hollowed-out method for
soundboxes. I believe the timpan was the plucked precursor of the crwth, i.e. a
lyre with a fingerboard. With only three strings and yet capable of producing high-
status music, the form of the timpan cannot have been that of a simple plucked
lyre, producing just three notes in total. It must have had a neck or fingerboard
against which to stop those three strings. It would seem odd indeed if it had had
the form of the lute family, alien as the lute had been to Northern and
Northwestern Europe where the form of the lyre was so dominant. The form of
the crwth is of course that of a lyre with a neck and fingerboard added, and it
should be expected that on the introduction of the bow it was applied to a pre-
existing, indigenous instrument: that is, a plucked or strummed lyre with a
fingerboard running inbetween and parallel to the arms. Such an instrument
exists in the iconographic record: a single, remarkably apt, clear, detailed
representation in a miniature in the ninth-century Bible of Charles the Bald from
France (in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), of an instrument. It has just three
strings. See
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lute_Charles_the_Bald_Bible.jpg
The roundedness of the top and the bottom of the instrument is echoed in some
early representations of the crwth, for example the Seal of Roger Wade the
Crowder (1316). The arms are skeletal relative to the crwth, but this is certainly
an example of its plucked, immediate forebear.
Significantly, it is a large instrument and the fingerboard is long in relation to the

soundbox, much more so than on the Wade crwth. Indeed, with just three
strings, to be really useful it needs a long fingerboard so the stopping hand can
come well above first position. It is thought the citole might have been developed
from this instrument:- see Paul Butler: The Citole Project, as suggested by a
long-necked ninth-century example (Utrecht Psalter, Psalm 43) where the arms
of the plucked lyre-with-fingerboard appear to have been dropped in a further
shift away from the lyre and towards the lute, leaving vestigial horns on the
soundbox and the head.
By a process of reverse engineering the citole could be used as a model for

suggestions on the finer details of the timpan and how it may have been set up
and handled. Certainly a long fingerboard would have been important.
Sept 14, 2015
Yes, that's right … , apart from the string material. That's a complex issue.
Returning to the central defining feature of the timpan - three as the number of
strings - of obvious relevance is the use, in one of the many applications of the
term ‘cruit’, to describe a three-stringed instrument, in the twelfth-century tale
Agallamh na Seanórach in the Book of Lismore. The strings are described
individually: “Téad diarann, teud dumha an, An ceadna darccod iomlán: A string
of iron, a string of noble bronze, And a string of entire silver.” Evidently, by the
twelfth century - and O’Curry believed the tale could be much earlier in origin -
the principle of using metals of different densities for different pitches had been
adopted. The same principle is to be found in the eighth or ninth century tale, the
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Táin Bó Fraích:
“Crota of gold (ór), and silver (airged), and findruine, with figures of
serpents, and birds, and greyhounds upon them. These figures were made
of gold and of silver, Accordingly as the strings vibrated [these figures]
ran around the men.” (translation by Eugene O'Curry: Manners and
Customs of the Ancient Irish, vol. 3 (London, 1873) p. 222)
The animal symbolism here seems at first impenetrably arcane, until one reflects
that serpents are fast in movement, yet birds are faster, and greyhounds are
faster still. Thus are the relative speeds of vibration being indicated: gold strings
(like serpents) for low pitch, silver (like birds) for medium pitch and findruine
(like greyhounds) for high pitch (relative to string length). Findruine is an
unidentified alloy that had a value between gold and bronze and generally less
than silver. The term may be a corruption of findbruinne: white bronze (see
Buckley, p. 58); the whitening would suggest a higher content of either tin or
silver to whatever copper alloy (copper, zinc and/or tin) was standard for umha -
loosely translated today as bronze. It is unclear if the Táin Bó Fraích ‘crota’
series: gold - silver - findruine refers to a three-stringed instrument as does the
less dense series of the Agallamh na Seanórach: silver - bronze - iron, or whether
it refers to a cruit of around nine strings, but it is unlikely to refer to a harp of
more strings because of its early date.
The series: silver - bronze - iron may be the most reliable information on the
stringing of the timpan that we have. Other references to the instrument as being
of silver or of bronze may refer merely to the ornamentation it could bear.
However, there is a reference to its strings being of red gold (ór derg - an alloy of
copper and gold), another to the strings of a small timpan being of findruinne,
and another to a bronze thread (snáth uma) in connection with both the cruit and
the timpan (see Buckley, p. 58). Also, Philip O'Sullivan [Beare] in the early 17th
century claimed the timpan used strings of brass or silver.
Feb 28, 2019
There’s no doubt that findruine is a metal – it occurs in literature in conjunction

with other metals such as ór (yellow gold), dergor (red gold) and airged (silver).
Its whiteness suggests a relatively high content of either tin or silver.
Ann Buckley writes:
“Findruine is thought to have been an amalgam of either copper or gold with

silver; in value it ranked below gold and above bronze. Stokes has suggested that
it was a corruption of findbruine, meaning ‘white bronze’. Thurneysen took it to
be derived from finn and ór, thus ‘white gold’, gold from which the silver with
which it is often found has been separated.” (Ann Buckley, ‘What was the
Tiompán?’, Jahrbuch für musikalische Volks- und Volkerkunde, 9, ed. Josef
Kuckertz (Cologne, 1978), p. 58.)
The eDIL dictionary suggests electrum; a by-product from the smelting of gold
and silver, but that is probably what was termed ‘findeor’, ‘white gold’ and
Thurneysen’s suggestion of that as the origin of the word ‘findbruine’ seems
unlikely. It was less valuable than gold and silver and most likely, then, less
dense, hence the series described in the timpan's strings.
Feb 18, 2019
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Ah, silver and brass [strings] for your harp. I think that makes sense, and it
works well?
With the timpan having just three strings I’m sure this ‘cruit’ would be one. I
appreciate that some descriptions of the timpan mention only a single alloy for its
strings: red gold (ór derg), findruine and silver, but I’m inclined to take the three
strings each of a different alloy on Scathach’s instrument at face value.
Remember that three different metals are also mentioned in the Táin Bó Fraích:
“Crota of gold (ór), and silver (airged), and findruine, with figures of serpents,
and birds, and greyhounds upon them. These figures were made of gold and of
silver, Accordingly as the strings vibrated [these figures] ran around the men.”
(translation by Eugene O'Curry: Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, vol. 3
(London, 1873), p. 222)
Perhaps this was a collection of three different sizes of instruments, each strung
with a single alloy, but perhaps they were all of one size and each strung with
three different alloys. Whichever was the case the principle of using metals of
different densities for different pitch ranges is surely in use here. The contrasts in
the string vibration frequencies of the three different pitch ranges are shown by
the contrasts in the speed of movement between the serpents, birds and
greyhounds as I’ve mentioned before.
If I had a timpan, with its three strings all of one length, I reckon I’d rather use a
different alloy for each rather than rely on gauge alone to achieve a wide overall
compass, even if the strings weren’t tuned wider than a fifth apart. The sitar for
example switches between bronze and steel for its two main melody strings (sa
and ma) only a fourth apart.
It’d be good if you could have a go on your string spreadsheet to see how the
land lies on this …
Mar 26, 2019
There would be problems with using Mercury in the manufacture of music wire:
amalgams have low tensile strength and a Mercury coating would tend to wear off
with use. As I’ve said before, I believe it likely that findruine was a copper alloy
that had a higher content of silver or tin than whatever was standard for umha
(loosely translated today as bronze), to account for the white or whitish quality.
Silver or both silver and tin added to a copper-zinc or copper-tin alloy would also
account for the presence of findruine in records where silver is absent, for the
value of findruine being below that of silver and above that of umha and for its
density being less than that of silver. A gold amalgam, indeed almost any
amalgam, would be denser than silver, so that wouldn’t work for music wire
strung in the series: gold, silver, findruine.
Mar 27, 2019
Mercury is present in weathered smelt at the Parys Mountain copper mine on

Anglesey. See https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/7/11/229/htm I have no idea if
that is in recoverable quantities. The mine was worked in the Bronze Age and in
the Roman period, as were the huge mines on the Great Orme nearby. In the
Bronze Age, if not later, smelting did take place at the Great Orme to produce
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bronze, with the tin imported from Cornwall. But I’m not aware of any industrial
activity at either site in the medieval period.
Feb 28, 2019
Interesting [suggestions on string parameters]. Can I suggest varying the

diameters? I think the main problem that prompts multi-alloys is inharmonicity,
so see if there’s a set of optimum gauges for, say, silver, brass and iron that
yields less inharmonicity than three brass strings of any gauges does? Also, I
suggest you try increasing the length by at least 50% for the timpan.
Sept 14, 2015
I’m not sure … . Functionally, the Stuttgart guitar-like instrument is close to the
Charles the Bald instrument that I believe to be a timpan, but morphologically it’s
a long way from a lyre, isn’t it? If it was not descended from the lyre, the
alternative would be that it was descended from the arched harp, which is
probably the case with North African ‘guitars’. What interests me most here,
coming as I do from the perspective of cerdd dant with its fullness of harmony, is
that the Stuttgart instrument is just one of a wide variety of medieval Continental
instruments on which it is hard to believe that complex chords were not played.
Harps in general, some psalteries, the psaltery-harp and the Bohemian wing all
fall into that category, and if they were not originally designed for chordal music
they certainly invite its introduction or development. There is a mismatch here,
between the capabilities of these instruments and the modern view that
instrumental music in Continental Europe was probably monodic or, at most,
parallel organum against drone. I think it would be a mistake to assume that the
cerdd dant system of harmony had been always native only to the British Isles.
It’s an open question, at present anyway.
Sept 14, 2015
I think that [image from Musée des Manuscripts Avranches, MS 222; fol. 23; 13th
century] is a good representation of a period citole. So the thinking is that the
horns at the top end of the box are vestigial remnants of lyre arms, and that they
betray a lyre ancestry. If so, then we can imagine the citole evolving out of a
plucked lyre with fingerboard and arms, i.e. what I argue was the standard form
of the timpan. Perhaps the citole produced music similar to that of the timpan.
Perhaps what we label as a citole was sometimes referred to as a timpan.
Essentially, it works out that, whatever the terminologies at the time, there were
basically three classes of struck stringed instruments around - what we call lyres,
what we call harps, and also stopped instruments with fingerboards and few
strings. Both of the latter two offer the broad compass that cerdd dant used in
the Robert ap Huw ms. for harp, as does the crwth. The lyre in this sense stands
alone, and so perhaps its music was somewhat different in more respects than
just its limited compass, for which see my article on its solo use. I like to draw
back and to try to get an overview, a broad perspective, on the whole musical
landscape and what it possibly contained, so that the role of the harp is kept in
reasonable perspective.
Sept 15, 2015
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[snip] “… Alternatively, like the crwth, it could be bowed …”
No, I don't think that what I'm identifying as the timpan was bowed. I'm arguing
that when it was adapted to the bow it became what we know as the crwth. In
other words, there was only one bowed instrument: the crwth; not two: the
timpan and the crwth.
The crwth family can then be broken down into its various members according to
the number of strings and the pairing of them.
The timpan is invariably described as having three strings, so by the time there
are armless timpan-like instruments with more than three strings I think it's best
to term those citoles.
What comes into the orbit of cerdd dant here is the timpan, evidently three-
stringed, and the six-stringed crwth but not the three-stringed crwth. There are
also representations of four- and five-stringed crwths, and we don't know
whether or not they were instruments of cerdd dant but I imagine they were,
since they resemble the six-stringer but not the three-stringer.
Sept 15, 2015
I don't see why the timpan would have had frets, you know. The Charles the Bald
instrument seems to be fretless. The crwth is fretless. As you know, I'm sure that
different intonations were important in cerdd dant, and frets would make that
difficult.
One more point on the timpan - the Welsh and the Irish sources agree that the
sound of the timpan was quiet.
Jun 21, 2019
I’ve been thinking more about the nature of the timpan and if it can be ruled out
that it was bowed. The issue hinges on whether the two mentions of it in Irish
sources as bowed refer truly to the timpan or merely to the bowed crwth, for the
crwth was also present in Ireland, and of course it was common for the terms by
which various stringed instruments were referred to by writers to be used loosely
and to be exchanged. So, is there any historically viable candidate amongst
bowed instruments that could be a bowed timpan, sufficiently different from the
crwth? I think I’ve hit upon one, in this quote from Otto Andersson, ‘Francis
Galpin and the Triangular Harps’, The Galpin Society Journal vol. 19 (Apr., 1966),
p. 59:
“ … the well-known scholar, Henrik Gabriel Porthan. In his work De Poesi Fennica
(1766-78), Porthan says there were altogether three types of the kithara family
in use among the Finns (‘Sunt autem triplicis omino generis citharae Fennis in
usu’): Kandele, Harpu and Jouhikandele. The typological characteristics of the
first and the third instruments present no difficulties for they were in use up to
the present century. On the other hand the second one, the Harpu, remains
problematic. Porthan gives the following description (after having mentioned the
kantele):
‘Another species of cithara or barbiton (luta, lyra) of our people is called Harpu,
the name transferred from the Swedes, about two ells long and about one ell
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wide, open beneath, stringed with three brass strings, and played with a plectrum
[here probably a bow] of horsehair, drawn to and fro over the strings.’ …
The evidence beyond dispute is that the instrument Harpu must be different from
the kantele and the jouhikantele.”
The ‘harpu’ here, being distinct from the jouhikantele and being 2 x 1 oblong and
with some open access beneath the strings, was a bowed lyre without a
fingerboard, that is, what we know today as the talharpa but with brass strings.
That’s unusual for a bowed instrument but the sarangi has metal strings. In
Finland, then, in Porthan’s time there was one plucked instrument – the kantele –
and two bowed instruments – the harpu and the jouhikantele. Now given that the
talharpa type of bowed lyre came into Finland and Estonia from Sweden, that it
once had three brass strings and that it has an open playing window - i.e. no
fingerboard – it is the prime candidate for a bowed timpan of the British Isles.
And the talharpa differs more from the crwth than it does from the jouhikantele,
in lacking a fingerboard and therefore in its stopping technique and in its playing
orientation, so it is entirely feasible that it would have gone by a different name
despite sharing with the crwth in being bowed, as it did with the jouhikantele in
Finland.
Two more pieces of evidence strike me. A late 12th-century Irish account speaks
of the strings of the tiompán being touched by the fronts, sides, tips and nails of
the fingers (Buckley, ‘What Was The Tiompán’, p. 62), which seems to relate
more to the freedom and variety in stopping techniques that the talharpa allows
than to stopping on a fingerboard. And there is the solitary early depiction of a
bowed instrument in Wales and Ireland: the stone carving c. 1200 at St. Finian’s
churchyard, Co. Kerry, for a photo of which see
http://www.megalithicireland.com/Church%20Island,%20Lough%20Currane,%2
0Kerry.html. Despite the lack of realism in the way in which the instrument is
raised it seems to me that the soundbox is below the bow and the playing
window, as it is on the talharpa.
I think it is a distinct possibility that the timpan was the talharpa, that it was
bowed and not plucked. And if indeed that was so it would help explain why it
was that the crwth seems to have been in competition with it in the sense of the
crwth gradually displacing it.
Could be well worth trying out a brass-strung talharpa then, with a variety of
stopping methods: nails, knuckles and soft tissues, and finding out what sounds
come out?
Some in Wales may already have experienced the great treat of seeing Welsh folk
music being played here on the talharpa by Sille Ilves:
https://www.youyube.com/watch?v=wvsEUvOKu78.
THE ACCOMPANIMENT LYRE
Dec 5, 2018
Yes indeed … there is very late evidence of gut-strung lyres in the Highlands. I’m
not sure that anyone has remarked on the apparent incongruity of these well-
known and often quoted references to the plectrum being used on stringed
instruments in the Western Isles. Here are extracts from my unpublished
dissertation on 'Instruments' in connection with the ap Huw manuscript:-
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George Buchanan, in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), a history of Scotland,

included an account of the culture of the Western Isles, with this passage on
stringed music: “Musica maxime delectantur, sed sui generis fidibus quarum aliis
chordae sunt aeneae, aliis e nervis factae, quas vel unguibus praelongis vel
plectris pulsant.”: in one translation: “They take the greatest delight in music, but
for their kind of string instruments, of which the strings of some are made of
copper/bronze, and of others of sinew, which they strike either with long
fingernails or with plectrums.”
In the context of early Gaelic Scotland and Ireland there is much information here
that is not found in other sources. When other early sources mention string
material at all, it is always metallic materials, not gut, and the understanding is
that the harp and the timpan were customarily metal-strung. The use of a
plectrum is also absent in other sources, apart from the need on the timpan for a
quill when a fingernail is broken. Given, then, that we are accustomed to sources
informing us that the nails were used on the metal-strung instruments, it appears
that the plectrum in Buchanan’s account most probably applies to the gut-strung
instruments, that is to say, there are two categories of practice here: 1) metal
strings with nails, and 2) gut strings with plectrum, and not four categories
(metal strings with nails, metal strings with plectrum, gut strings with nails, gut
strings with plectrum).
The form, indeed the identity, of a gut-strung instrument played with a plectrum
is an interesting proposition. The timpan does not suggest itself, for every
description of its stringing refers to metal. Neither does the harp, for there are no
historical records of the European frame harp ever having been played with a
plectrum. The psaltery is known to have been played using a technique with a
quill in each hand, but it was metal-strung, and it is very unlikely to have already
penetrated the Western Isles. The strummed lyre, with gut strings, is the only
remaining plausible candidate, and I suggest that it had survived, restricted to its
original purpose, that is, as the instrument used by the performers of bardic
poetry to accompany themselves. That it could have done so in the Western Isles
without being noticed by other historical sources is surely possible, whilst what
must have been more eye-catching was solo instrumental performing on the
metal-strung harp and timpan and the provision of accompaniment by those
same performers to others performing the poetry in collaborative performance,
which was the most desirable and formal means of presenting praise poetry.
Buchanan ought to be a reliable source. He was a native Gaelic speaker, raised on
the edge but within the Highlands at Killearn and Cardross. His account of Gaelic
culture is original, and detailed enough to be certain he was writing from first-
hand experience and not borrowing from other writers.
Buchanan’s account gave rise to many English translations, amongst which that
by John Monipennie in 1603 is a little more specific in respect of the instruments
(fides): ‘They delight much in musicke, but chiefly in harps and clairschoes of
their own fashion. The strings of their clairschoes are made of brasse-wyar, and
the strings of the harpes of sinews, which strings they strike either with their
nayles growing long, or else with an instrument appointed for that use.”
Here the metal-strung instruments are identified as clarsachs, i.e. metal-strung

harps, and the gut-strung ones as ‘harps’. Monipennie may have had the frame
harp in mind, yet that is still impossible to reconcile with the plectrum.
Monipennie describes Buchanan’s plectrum as ‘an instrument appointed for that
use’ (i.e. for striking the strings). A single plectrum suggests not the quill-in-
each-hand technique of the psaltery but that the other hand blocks or damps the
strings strummed by the plectrum-wielding hand, in the manner used on
instruments of few strings (lyre, arched harp and psaltery). That is not a
81
technique that makes good use of the frame harp’s many strings, and is not
known to ever have been used on one. I suggest that Monipennie, whilst he was
aware of the Gaelic term for the metal-strung harp, was confounded by
Buchanan’s account of gut-strung instruments and used ‘harp’ simply as a
convenient means of getting out of difficulty, not as a conscious appeal to the
original meaning of ‘harp’ [\‘hearpe’]: the lyre.
Suddenly the lyre leaps forward from Sutton Hoo-type contexts. Yet we already
have the Kravik lyre from Norway estimated to be 14th century, and David as
lyre-player continued in images long after the Vespasian Psalter: Grove (Rotte, p.
264) sums it up: "The triangular harp, which first appears in manuscripts and
sculpture around 900, gradually supplanted the round lyre in representations of
David the musician, and from the 13th century the lyre occurs less and less
frequently". Then we have the Irish Stowe Missal dated to 1381.
It seems, then, that we don’t have a significant temporal gap between some form
of lyre and the probable date of the emergence of piobaireachd on the pipe. But I
do think that the 16th-century description by Buchanan is most likely to relate to
the small accompaniment lyre and not to the 9-stringed cruit, so there may yet
be a temporal gap to account for.
Dec 15, 2018
As I say, on the frame harp using a plectrum is unknown as far as I’m aware.
With so many strings greater use can be got out of the harp if the digits of both
hands are free to pluck, and that is what we find in all the evidence of medieval
harping. The arched harp, unlike the frame harp and the angular harp, has very
few strings so it can make sense to use block-and-strum which practice still exists
in tiny pockets in Asia, but there’s no evidence of the arched harp in the British
Isles, or anywhere near, because Europe was part of the great lyre region in
Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. …
Feb 20, 2016
I think that when you look into it very closely, the design of the Kravik lyre can
be used to shed some light on the realities of how some Northern European lyres
were handled and played.
I have several lyres, most notably a six-stringed reconstruction of the one

excavated at Sutton Hoo, made by Michael [King] here, and a seven-stringed
reproduction of the one collected from Kravik Manor, made by Sverre Heimdal.
On these I have experimented a great deal, to find the practical solution to how
these instruments were handled. The key to the answer has been a mysterious 5
mm. hole bored purposefully in the Kravik lyre, through the soundbox just below
the left or upper arm. It turns out, curiously and significantly, that this position is
exactly the balance point of the instrument. If it is suspended from this point the
instrument retains or assumes horizontal equilibrium. The balance point has been
intentionally placed there, by virtue of this lyre, along with many Scandinavian
depictions, having a ‘crown’, which is to say the yoke, instead of being bar-
shaped, i.e. in cross-section circular, is extended into a solid block which makes
the instrument taller or longer than it would be otherwise, and therefore top-
heavier. This moves the balance point up from lower down the soundbox to just
below the left arm. I have put a ring through the hole and attached a leather
strap of adjustable length to the ring and then experimented again with various
ways of supporting the strap. The result has been that it must have been a simple
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neck-strap. I cannot overstate how very much more comfortable and accessible a
neck-strap secured in this way makes playing the instrument. This instrument is
relatively heavy for a lyre, and it is helpful, when standing, that it does not up-
end itself whenever it is released.
The placement of the balance point next to where the left arm joins the soundbox
implies that those European lyres that lack a crown to the yoke will have been
supported by a neck-strap also, but one simply run through that corner of the
hand aperture, the playing-window. That method of support is equally effective as
the hole-and-ring method, apart from the one limitation that the instrument
continues to need to be held, whilst standing and when not being played. The
introduction of the crown and the hole will have been to overcome that
restriction, albeit at the cost of adding extra weight and a little bulk.
The length of the neck strap needs to be adjusted so that the end of the
soundbox, appropriately rounded, is cradled in the crook of the right arm and
against the right midriff, with the forearm coming round the front of the
soundbox to strum quite near to the bridge. The head of the lyre is pointing
slightly down from the horizontal, and forward from the body, so that the strings
are most comfortably accessed by the left hand; that is, with the hand only
gently angled back at the wrist and not angled laterally up or down at all but
continuing the line of the forearm. Thus neither elbow is sharply bent, neither
shoulder joint is carrying stress or bearing load, and both forearms are not raised
but slightly lowered. My experience is that European accompaniment lyres (as
opposed to vertically-held lyres which I believe may have been used with a
different technique for purely instrumental music) were designed exactly for this
posture and method of handling. It is equally effective when standing or sitting. I
recommend it, for the block-and-strum technique.
Feb 21, 2016
Thanks … . I do have a caveat here, in that on my [Kravik] instrument what

you’ve noticed on yours so far is certainly true - it responds much better to being
plucked than to being strummed, no matter what type of plectrum is used. I feel
this is largely down to the soundboard being thicker than perhaps it ought to be,
given that the soundboard of the original isn’t extant. If I’m right that it was a
strummed instrument, then I expect the original soundboard would have been as
thin as those of the Germanic lyres.
Feb 21, 2016
Yes, I’m sure that playing whilst standing is relevant. In Wales and Ireland the
vocalists who performed the poetry did so standing - it helps with projection of
course - and presumably that was also the case when they accompanied
themselves on the lyre and other stringed instruments. That was the case in
16th-century England for the delivery of alliterative poetry with the harp. So as
an instrument of self-accompaniment it must be most probable that the lyre was
designed to be played whilst standing. With the exception of David figures and
other royal figures, seated as a matter of dignity, depictions of lyres played whilst
seated rather suggest purely instrumental music I think.
And yes, perhaps the Trossingen was placed with a neck-strap wrapped around
its front and back in more-or-less its proper position - at the soundbox end of the
playing window.
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What would be very telling would be the detection on any lyre of wear-marks at
the relevant corner of the playing window. Has anyone here got any records of
such?
Nov 6, 2017
… Bowl lyres are light and supported by a wrist strap and by the body. Medium
weight wooden Northern European lyres for self-accompaniment, supported by a
wrist strap and by the body, eventually gave me tennis elbow. I switched to a
neck strap which I’m sure is how they were used. Citharas must be heavier still
and it’s hard to believe they were supported by the wrist strap and nothing else,
at that height. I wouldn’t want to do it. …
THE SOLO LYRE
Jul 17, 2017
Alemu Aga has another technique in addition to the left-handed plucking one he
uses in that clip, using a plectrum in the right hand, which was the way vertical
lyres were played in the Ancient World. That plectrum technique will probably be
the one used in Ireland on the ancient 9-stringed cruit, and I give the complex
detail of it in my article ‘A Technique for Ancient Solo Lyre’ at
https://petergreenhill.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/a-technique-for-ancient-solo-
lyre.pdf. Essentially, it’s a technique peculiar to the vertical lyre and not one
shared with frame harps.
Oct 10, 2017
Apart from the topic of harmony, the other major area of challenge today
concerning Irish musical terms is the names of the pipers and cruitires in The Tale
of Dá Derga’s Hostel, and whether they signify note names as persuasively
suggested by Frans Buisman in 1999. I wonder, has anyone yet been able to
investigate the meanings, the symbolism or the associations of these words or of
their relatives in any other context? Or has anyone got further than Frans did in
clarifying their relationships to one another?
As regards the meaning of the early Irish term ‘ceis’ - which has been under
discussion spanning around 900 years - i.e. the thing which enabled the cruit to
sound, I’d be very surprised if it was not simply the plectrum which is needed to
make the lyre sound. If so then the word would be onomatopoeic: rather like the
English word ‘cosh’ but perhaps with a long vowel.
Oct 12, 2017
It [Frans Buisman’s paper, now uploaded onto the ap Huw forum files section]
was an unpublished paper delivered at the 5th CAWMS Conference at Bangor
University:
Sunday 1 August / Dydd Sul 1 Awst 1999

10.10 Frans Buisman:
The pipers and harpers in Da Derga’s Hostel
The day before at the conference I whispered to Peter Crossley-Holland: would he
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mind being kidnapped? He said he'd be delighted so I whisked him off to my

place for some cerdd dant, along with Frans and my friend Roderick, and that's
when I first got to know Frans.
It should be understood that Frans might well have had reasons to not publish
the paper, such as the lack of time to work it up further, but I know from his
close friend that he would be pleased for it to be carried forward now, as long as
it is understood as what it was: an unpublished conference paper.
Oct 13, 2017
Frans spent a lot of time here because his close Dutch friend had settled here a
long time ago. He used to cycle over. His friend says he would want all his vast
archive to go to the Institut in Amsterdam where he worked, so I'm sure that will
happen.
Nov 5, 2017
Excellent video. I think the various techniques Stefan Hagel demonstrates there
were used in combination with one another on the cithara and on other vertically-
held lyres with wide string spacing: left-hand damping and plucking, with right-
hand plectrum strums and plectrum plucks. I think the 9-stringed cruit was such
an instrument.
What I don’t understand with the cithara is the incredibly high playing position. It
looks as if it would be impossibly uncomfortable to sustain. Stefan seems to be
supporting it just with a wrist-strap (see at 2:18) so that his left arm takes all the
weight, and in all the iconography I’ve never seen indication of a neck strap. I
just don’t understand it.
And here is a wonderful video by Peter Pringle of the cithara explaining its note-
bending mechanisms. This is really exciting, because it was not just the aulos
that could bend notes, and that moves Ancient Greek and Roman instrumental
music rather away from the fixed note concepts of the ancient theorists and more
into the ballpark of the traditional music of the Arabs and of the peoples of the
Balkans and Greece, where slides are so terribly important. The night before last
a magnificent iso-polyphony band from Southern Albania played here – Saz’Iso –
with delicious slides everywhere.
… I’m so pleased to see people really making progress with the cithara now.
Fantastic.
Nov 6, 2017
Yes, it’s odd, the support for the cithara. … I reckon that what is comfortable is a
very important indicator of technique on ancient instruments. But having the
cithara that high suggests to me that the Greeks and Romans were here more
concerned with showmanship, theatre and spectacle.
Jun 12, 2018
There are several depictions of asymmetrical lyres. I discussed them in my article

on the solo lyre p. 16:
85
"It follows that if asymmetrical lyres were ever put to the purpose of such music,
they would have needed to have the longest arm nearest to the player. That
accords with the instrument depicted on the late eighth-century St. Martin’s
Cross, Iona, although it is the reverse of the Irish depictions of asymmetrical
instruments on the Cross of Muireadach at Monasterboice, the Durrow Cross and
the Cross of Patrick and Columba at Kells,36 and also that on the Mal Lumkun
Cross at Kirkmichael on the Isle of Man, 11th century.37
36
Illustrated in Ann Buckley, ‘Musical Instruments in Ireland from the Ninth to the
Fourteenth Centuries: A Review of the Organological Evidence’, in Gerard Gillen &
Harry White (ed.), Irish Musical Studies, I, (Dublin, 1990), 30, 32-33.
37
It is not known whether the nine-stringed cruit would itself ever have been
asymmetrical, or whether these depictions are intended to be exotic instruments
with Biblical associations."
The last point there is an important one - these depictions might well not be of
local instruments but local impressions of what Biblical ones might have been
like.
The 9-stringed cruit might have been asymmetrical; as far as we know the 6-
stringed lyre was not.
Nov 30, 2018
Alas, I don’t have a 9-stringed lyre with wide string spacing. My hope is that
Barnaby Brown – a great specialist in early piobaireachd - will source one, learn
these techniques that I describe in my article and record, so that the piobaireachd
community can evaluate the whole thesis. What you can do now … is try for
yourself what I’ve done: take your 6-stringed lyre with its narrow string spacing
and put aside for the moment what it was designed for. Support it vertically, take
a fairly thick, rather rigid plectrum and drag it quite briskly – but not as fast as
normal strumming - across the strings (or some of them) where they are
relatively widely-spaced below the yoke, blocking some or most strings in various
combinations with the left fingers. If you have a harp you can use that for the
same purpose by the way. After a minute or two when you’ve got the speed right
you’ll find you’re producing complex rattlings or cracklings which resemble the
gracenote runs of piobaireachd. Remember that the runs of piobaireachd are
unique and have a highly distinctive rattling sound because the chanter is conical
– there’s no way of getting a sound that remotely resembles that on any parallel-
bore wind instrument and in any music other than that for the Great Highland
bagpipe which contains runs that play on that rattling sound by alternating high
and low gracenotes. The only way of getting close is as I describe, on a vertical
lyre with nine or ten strings, and it strikes me as not a coincidence that such
instruments were around in antiquity. It gives an explanation of how piobaireachd
seems to have come into existence fully-formed, given that the ap Huw implies it
didn’t borrow wholesale from the harp. It may well prove, then, that piobaireachd
is a door that opens onto the music of the ancient solo lyre, in the British Isles at
least.
Dec 4, 2018
… Yes, I remember well you’re a piobaireachd wallah from when we were talking
about it, and The Desperate Battle etc., 10 years ago. Great.
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Shame there’s no pictorial representation that’s been actually identified as a 9-

stringed cruit. I reckon it would have to be a radically different design from that
of all the excavated lyres – a large, deep soundbox with a base suitable for going
on the lap or on the seat so the instrument is vertical, it doesn’t need to have a
tall playing window but it does need to be fairly wide, gut strings wide-spaced
and running parallel to one another. Probably an asymmetric yoke. Maybe a
relatively low pitch: thicker strings when they’re blocked whilst strummed give
out a bit more scrape factor than thin strings do. As a solo instrument rather than
as an accompaniment to the voice I reckon it needs to be loud and rich. There’s
that interesting Polish image of a lyre with, oddly, a guitar soundbox, implying
that loud and rich lyres have been in existence.
I reckon it all needs quite a spell of mulling over, to digest the practicalities and
viabilities of the concept as a workable proposition. Have you, or anyone else, got
more thoughts to offer right now on what the design might possibly have been?
Dec 4, 2018
I take your point … that the technique of pipe ornaments and that of the
vertically-held plucked and strummed lyre are totally different. But that total
difference is inherent in the different natures of wind and string instruments. The
thesis hinges on the fact that the unique runs of piobaireachd are in their sound
remarkably uncharacteristic of wind instruments, whereas their militaristic,
percussive nature, what I describe as crackling or rattling, puts me at least very
much in mind of the form of block-and-strum on strings that I describe. Roderick
Cannon also thought the thesis very much had promise. Arpeggios on plucked
strings don’t come close, because they lack any equivalents to the tiny ‘gaps’ on
low A and on low G that interrupt the higher gracenotes on the pipe in the runs to
create that extraordinary staccato effect. On the lyre those ‘gaps’ are created by
the strikes across the blocked strings you see, contrasting with those which are
left open, albeit momentarily, to sound, resulting in a rapid alternation, a burst,
of percussive contrasts. And that’s an available feature that one would want to
resort to on a lyre if one was aiming to create long solo pieces out of just nine
notes, as long as piobaireachd pieces are, when you can’t rely, just as you can’t
in piobaireachd, on exploiting a wide note range.
That’s one of the many reasons why I came to dismiss the harp as a precursor
instrument of piobaireachd – it’s unable to emulate the gracenote runs of
piobaireachd.
As to the psaltery, I don’t think it came into the British Isles early enough to have
been a candidate for being a precursor of piobaireachd, and it scarcely made it
beyond England into Wales even, and not at all as far as I’m aware into the
Western Highlands. I think it’s easy enough to explain why: beyond England the
metal-strung harp was much more well-established, so the attraction of the
psaltery, metal-strung as it was in 15th century England, would have had much
less appeal. On the Continent the psaltery provided people with the opportunity
of having a metal-strung instrument, where the metal-strung harp had never
become established. In the British Isles the psaltery was just not an indigenous
instrument in the way in which the lyre was.
Dec 5, 2018
… But if you actually had some basis on which to posit in medieval Scotland some
form of harp which, like the arched harp, had few strings and on which the
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plectrum was used, that would not be reason for me to revise the techniques and
fingerings for the nine-stringed cruit that I recommend. I doubt very much that
the nine-stringed cruit was a harp: I join others in thinking it was a lyre, but the
nature of the frame is neither here-nor-there when it comes to the physical
techniques: they can apply to either instrument.
I should explain that I don’t think of the figures made out of the complex and
selective combinations of plucking, strumming, blocking and damping that I’ve
forged to match the various figures of piobaireachd on the lyre as incidental: they
are highly contrived: I know because it took me a lot of work on the lyre to arrive
at them. They are very much ‘a deliberate added effort to gain greater effect’ as
you describe the piobaireachd figures. They are not incidental.
THE HARP PSALTERY
Nov 20, 2017
Carrying on with psalteries, I’ll pick up an important point I made in Technique p.

116 and also here on Sept 14, 2015. The metal-strung harp with its many strings
is best suited to the full sonorities of the homophony of cerdd dant but that is
also the case with psalteries with many strings, which have generally also been
metal-strung. In terms of technique, just as the strummed Baltic psalteries work
like the strummed Northern European lyres, plucked harp psalteries can work like
plucked harps. These harp psalteries had two rows of strings, one for each hand,
set on either side of a central soundbox, as in this reconstruction. Along the
Atlantic seaboard of France and Spain there are many depictions of harp
psalteries, generally from the 12th century, as shown here. There is also another
in Dorset, England. England seems to have been an area where the two types of
metal-strung instrument overlapped: the harp of the West and the psalteries of
Continental Europe.
Both the frame harp and the harp psaltery might have developed out of the
classical trigonon depicted as equilateral in the Bible of Charles the Bald. The
straightness of the tuning member without a harmonic curve of the harp psaltery
appears to have been an inheritance from the trigonon, and the harp psaltery
retained this antique feature much longer than did the frame harp. The harp
psaltery may have carried a relatively antique repertory then.
I expect that it had metal strings, since this type of psaltery design is especially
robust. If indeed the strings were metal then this instrument would be best suited
to cerdd dant and to its harping technique. The French depictions are particularly
concentrated in the Saintonge region, and Saintonge pottery has commonly been
found at sites in Wales and Ireland, indicating strong links with Saintonge through
the medieval wine trade. I wonder, then, if there had been a tradition of cerdd-
dant style homophony localised along the Atlantic fringe of the Continent. It
would need to have been one of which Gerald was unaware because he located
the type of music in the ‘three nations’ of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and as
being exclusive to them. But I think it’s entirely possible that he might not have
encountered the regional styles of harping in Cornwall, Brittany and the Biscayan
coast. Fernando Conde in Galicia has kindly been sharing with me a great deal of
information on ancient cultural links and affinities between the British Isles and
the Atlantic seaboard further south.
Alas, the rich, thick wall of sound that the cerdd dant homophony is so well-
served by on the metal-strung harp and on the crwth would be less well-served
by the harp psaltery. Early psalteries are relatively quiet, although the double row
88
of strings here would help to pick up just a little of the loss in sympathetic
resonance that results from the strings not being tensioned against the
soundboard as they are on the harp.
So I imagine it’s possible that the metal-strung harp was initially conceived as an
improvement on the harp psaltery rather than as an improvement on the gut- or
horsehair-strung frame harp. But it’s hard to say, in the absence of early
evidence.
Nov 26, 2017
I think that’s not quite what I was thinking … . I’m not sure that the lyre evolved
into the frame harp. The morphology is so different, and as far as we know the
harp has never been strummed. I’m pretty sure it was the psaltery that the lyre
evolved into, by filling in the playing window to enlarge the soundbox and
bringing the left hand round to the front to do the blocking.
The two possible routes I’m thinking to the metal-strung frame harp are the gut-
or horsehair-strung frame harp and the metal-strung harp psaltery. Another way
of posing the question is: which instrument was first fitted with metal strings –
the harp or the psaltery? The answer might boil down to geography, in that if the
initial development of music wire was indeed dependent on the innovation of wire
drawing then it could be asked: did that innovation take place in the British Isles
or elsewhere? But the links between the West of the British Isles and the coast of
the Bay of Biscay have always been very strong (apart from during the Roman
period) so whichever came first – the metal-strung harp or the harp psaltery –
the other must have quickly followed. What I think is surprising here is that the
Atlantic coast spawned two such very similar instruments and not just one of
them, and what I think is most intriguing here is: were there two types of music
involved – homophony and polyphony - or just one - homophony?
Nov 28, 2017
It’s unlikely that the psaltery was known early on in Wales. References to it, as
sawtring and saltring, are few and arise mainly in the 15th century, one of which
is sawtring Sais – the English psaltery. The 13th century broken stone corbel at
Haverfordwest which is very similar in style to those of the French and Spanish
harp psaltery corbels may have depicted a harp psaltery rather than a harp, but
the port of Haverfordwest at the time, very much occupied with the wine trade,
was not native Welsh in culture.
However, what has always caught my eye is an extraordinary mention of

deugeintant – forty strings – in a late 15th century poem: see W. L. Richards,
Gwaith Dafydd Llwyd o Fathafarn (Cardiff, 1964), poem 71, lines 23-26. Forty
strings is unconvincing as a number likely to have been in use at this time on any
single-rank diatonic harp or psaltery, so I believe the instrument here must have
been a double-rank one or the other, most likely the harp psaltery.
Double the number of strings on the ‘ap Huw’ harp would give 50 (2 X 25), not 40
strings. But not every string would need to be duplicated on an ‘ap Huw’ harp
psaltery: in the manuscript the upper hand goes no lower than bl and the lower
no higher than c., so that’s 20 + 21 = 41. That’s very close to 40, so it seems
reasonable to suggest that some examples of harp psalteries had become known
in Wales by the late 15th century.
89
A double-rank concept doesn’t help with page 108, incidentally, because to

retune certain strings in one rank of a two-rank instrument by up to a fourth is as
impractical as to retune a single-rank instrument by the same.
Anyway, unless the forty strings is a poetic exaggeration I think it’s possible that
the psaltery harp might have been a late and occasional addition to the cerdd
dant instrumentarium. Any thoughts?
REED PIPES
Jul 24, 2015
‘Pibau’ in these sorts of contexts is always plural, so they must be reed pipes.
Reeds have a massive back pressure which flutes and whistles don’t, so you can
power more than one of them at a time because the passage of air is relatively
very slow. Even saxophones can be played two at a time (Roland Kirk and Dick
Heckstall-Smith did a fine job of that). The Welsh term for the stockhorn is
pibgorn (singular, plural pibgyrn) and that is a single pipe, but is distinct from
‘pibau’ plural. The Welsh for flute or whistle is chwibanogl, first recorded use c.
1300. But the Triad for wind instruments has organ, mouth-blown pipes and bag-
blown pipes; flute and whistle not included there.
‘Pib’ is most onomatopoeic of reed pipes. It’s one of those basic words common to
the Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages.
Apart from having two or more going at once, and of course their reedy timbre,
reed pipes have the attraction, the peculiarity, that they articulate gracenotes
particularly clearly, especially if the pipe is conical. I wasn’t certain about the
importance of the conicity when I wrote the article [‘A Technique for Ancient Solo
Lyre’], but Roderick Cannon has assured me subsequently that indeed it is
responsible for the crackling that there is in piobaireachd. Very sadly, dear
Roderick has recently, and very unexpectedly, passed away. His contribution to
piobaireachd has been absolutely immense, but cerdd dant and the ap Huw
manuscript have just lost a major enthusiast too.
Apr 14, 2016
Magnificent, isn’t it? [The Desperate Battle played by Barnaby Brown on triplepipe
(on youtube 2010)] What an achievement! I don’t think Barnaby’s got a pair of
alternating drones going there, he’s staying quite faithful to the fixed drones of
the Highland bagpipe. Some form of pipes had high status in the Welsh Laws and
so we can imagine they might have produced some form of classical music,
perhaps a proto-piobaireachd. Perhaps they were triple pipes, or covered a range
of pipes including the triple pipes, so what this shows is that piobaireachd need
not have changed much to have transferred to the bagpipes if indeed it did so.
Pipes have a very long ancestry of course, so it isn’t through any lack of pipes
that it becomes necessary to posit that piobaireachd had an ancient ancestor on a
stringed instrument. There’s no problem with accepting that the harp, the crwth
and the timpan went one way and piping went another way but the cruit is a
different matter, as I explore in my article on it.
Yes …, a double-chantered pibgorn or bagpipe could have a double-tonic

alternating drone, as long as the accompaniment chanter has a single hole. And
by in the right place I mean it needs to be opposite the lowest hole of the melody
90
chanter. I imagine this arrangement might have been used early on for
hornpipes.
Apr 15, 2016
… I don’t think there’s a tradition anywhere of sliding the hand up and down on a
wind instrument to relocate the fingers. The problem is that (on D whistles) the A
has to sound whilst the left 3 is raised to allow the right 1 to cover the A hole?
St Mary’s in Warwick, England, for [a representation of] the double pibgorn. It’s
thought that the double pibgorn with 6 finger holes in the top of each pipe was
played normally, both pipes in unison (or nearly so) with no drones. Another
design is possible, one which can give a double-tonic alternating drone. For
example, the Karpathos tsambouna has double pipes with just one hole in the
right one at the same level as the bottom hole of the left.
Jun 5, 2017
… Pibgyrn were commonly made from elder, which contains cyanide. I’ve just
read: “It is best that children not use their twigs as pea-shooters or for carved
whistles”. Perhaps we don’t have to look too far for why this instrument and its
players – as they say - died out!
Oct 25, 2017
… In respect of intonation, horns are limited to the natural series so they can't
produce the tyniad effect. But pipes can of course. …
Oct 28, 2017
I’ve been keeping an eye out for pairs of unconjoined reed chanters that are set
with their lowest notes a major second apart, because that would give the
double-tonic alternating drone we're discussing here so very easily. The Sardinian
lauddenas has a variety of relationships but not a major second. So far all I’ve
been able to turn up is Barnaby Brown experimenting with a reconstruction of a
5th century BC aulos which has that major second relationship:
http://www.doublepipes.info/introducing-the-aulos-of-poseidonia/
An alternative is to have a pair of chanters one of which has only one hole set to
give out the major second above its closed note. Such is the case with the
Georgian gudastviri in the Pshavi district which has the second pipe with one
hole, its two notes being a major second apart. That is in contrast to the other
one-holed, double-chantered pipes:- the Roumanian cimboi, the Indian pungi and
the Gasgon boha - which tend to have wider intervals: fourths. Are there any
other one-holers around which sound seconds on the second pipe? I'm on the
lookout for movable drones shifting in seconds of course, rather than fourths or
fifths.
Having come from woodwind to the harp it is very apparent to me how double
tonic imitation is so simply and naturally achieved on the harp by shifting the
hands one string, whereas on woodwind the fingering pattern has to be entirely
altered. So if indeed the double tonic was once commonplace on double-
chantered pipes - on the aulos say - it is odd that it hasn’t left more of a trace
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that can be picked up today, when the double tonic is so evident on single
chanters. …
But can anyone turn up whether it was usual for aulos pairs to be a whole tone
apart?
Oct 29, 2017
I am thinking very much that the double tonic is associated with pipes … . The
peculiar thing is that we know the double tonic from the single chanter which
doesn’t suggest the notion of the double tonic at all. But double chanters do
suggest it so strongly. I would be amazed if, when double chanters were in use in
the British Isles, they were not used to sound an alternating drone alternating
between the two chanters. …
Apr 4, 2018
I do puzzle over the ‘why’s of the title Pibau Morfydd when it doesn’t have the
single drone we associate with the pipes, such as is there in Gwyn Bibydd, so you
may well be right to point to something to do with an alternating pipe drone. That
would imply a double-chantered set of pipes, which is well within the realms of
possibility. Certainly cerdd dant harmony can be thought of as a system of
movable drones, and one which can incorporate a fixed drone on the dominant
because that note is shared between cyweirdant and tyniad. When there’s a fixed
drone on the tonic that creates a hybrid chord with the tyniad notes, I think it’s
quite probable that hybrid chords – drawing from both cyweirdant and tyniad as
they do – would be the cysylltiadau which join cyweirdant and tyniad. In some
pieces, other than Pibau Morfydd, they are formed by a bass drone on the tonic
such as that on C in the last section of Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair, and in Gwyn
Bibydd there is the same in addition to the drone on the dominant G to form a
double drone throughout - very pipes-like.
TUNING
THE ORGANIZATION OF CERDD DANT HARMONY: TRIADIC AND TETRADIC

HARMONY
May 24, 2018
Wikipedia in its wisdom has redefined the term ‘double tonic’, expanding it to
include all regular back-and-forth motion by chord progression, melodic motion or
shift of level. But when I use the term I do mean it in the sense of its established
use, coming out of Scottish piping: as I wrote here 27.10.15:
“The term was first used by Collinson: "the sense of the tonic or ‘keynote’ being
shifted between the two ‘keys’ of the true tonic key and the ‘key’ or triad one full
tone lower". So, in essence you’ve got melody organised on thirds, with just two
triads (or tetrads even) and ones that have roots that are adjacent to one
another. The certain confirmation - like the icing on the cake - is any phrases that
then get immediately repeated shifted down one step. Contextual factors are
regular periodicity, bipartite structures and swung rhythms: i.e. the presence of
those factors would help to confirm the presence of the double tonic. As would
the turning up of common measures of course, or of alliteration in the lyrics.”
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What we find as structurally standard in reels, jigs and hornpipes, and in

piobaireachd and cerdd dant is adjacent triads (or tetrads) alternating with one
another in the measure system. What is far less common is exact repetition of a
phrase reproduced a second below or above, and my point here is that it is
possible in other traditions to have that without the structure of the triads. For
example, there are cases in plainchant, such as the tonus peregrinus, where the
melodic shift happens but the triadic measures are not there nor even any tertian
structuring at all (I did a post here on 2.11.15 on all that).
The ‘double tonic’ may not have been the best choice of term for the triadic
measure system because, as Wikipedia brings out, a great many musical cultures
use two tonics in a piece so it can lead to confusion, but the term is so well
established that I don’t want to abandon it. The alternative would be to use the
only known terms indigenous to the tradition and call it the ‘cyweirdant-tyniad’
system but of course that would be disempowering to the Gaelic and English
wings of the tradition.
But please let’s not get caught up and bogged down in debating modern
terminology. What could be so much more valuable is spending time on hunting
the original Gaelic pair of terms. In English I think they must have been just (or
pure or correct or true) and tempered. And perhaps some Scandinavian terms
might be found?
Mar 11, 2014
I think that's right … [the interpretation of cynnwys dannau as ‘contained’ in the

sense of strings that are damped]. It accords with the modern understanding of
triadic harmony and also with Wiliam Llŷn's poem:
Tri, phump, a deg, teg pob tant,

Y cordia pob cyweirdant;
Dau, pedwar, di-hap ydynt.
A saith a naw sythion ynt.
Three, five and ten: fair is every string,

In concord every cyweirdant;
Two, four, are hapless,
And seven and nine are stiff.
Notice though that Wiliam doesn't mention sixths. And actually all this doesn't
exactly match what we find in the pieces themselves, as Paul Whittaker has set
out, where, instead of triads: 1-3-5, the harmony is made up out of tertian
series, of four notes: 1-3-5-6. The 'foreigners' that make the passing notes are 2-
4-7. So, at any point in a piece, there are four fully concordant notes and three
less concordant notes, rather than the three-four division that the passage we're
discussing describes.
It's a puzzle.
Maybe the writer of this passage and Wiliam Llŷn had already both been
influenced by the emerging triadic harmony which eventually supplanted the 1-3-
5-6 tertian series of cerdd dant, and of English discant (that had it too)? But I'm
afraid I don't have the breadth of knowledge to pronounce on that myself. Any
takers?
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Along with the huge scale of the pieces, it is their harmony that marks them out
as incredibly special. And their age of course.
Mar 12, 2014
Sure … . The series can and does turn up in every possible inversion, and with
every possible combination of constituents, octave doublings etc. They exploited
the full width that the tertian series enables. 1-3-5-6 is just the reduction to the
root, the modern shorthand for the tall stack of thirds that is the series, nothing
more. It is certainly all based on thirds.
It's a wonderful, mature arrangement of harmony, and the modern era has been
the poorer for its loss.
Mar 12, 2014
I think it's worth keeping sight of the fact that there are three things involved
here [regarding various uses of the term ‘cyweirdant cryf], not one or two:-
1) the actual cerdd dant pieces, with harmony built on tertian series
2) the apparently triadic theory in the 'cynnwys' passage (Peniarth 62) and in
Wiliam Llŷn, which interestingly doesn't exactly match with the pieces
3) the Guidonian hexachords of plainsong.
Let's focus on the use of the term 'cyweirdant cryf' in relation to each of these.
It's actually used in several sources, apparently with different meanings.
1) The ap Huw music text doesn't use the term.
2) The cynnwys passage uses it, in the sense of the three strings which need to
be played through until they die away and that can stand by themselves because
of the three llanw (fillings-up) that they have.
3) Elsewhere (Hafod 3, Panton 56) in relation to the Guidonian hexachords the

term is used to describe the starting point of each of the seven hexachords: i.e.
those which begin on F, those which begin on G and those which begin on C.
The term is also used, in the context of the origins of music, to describe a sound
which has the mean, treble and burden in it (Gwysaney 28, Panton 56).
Personally, I wouldn't want to fuse the different meanings in 2 and 3 here into
one meaning, because cerdd dant is a very different context from plainsong. Nor
would I want to fuse mean, treble and burden with F, G and C.
And of course let's not lose sight of the fact that we have the pieces, with their
harmonies, and which notes were sustained and which notes were damped. So,
for example, in the cyweirdant at page 45, line 1, column 5, the Gs, the A and
the C are sustained but the F is damped - we know this because the F is the short
damped note of the fingering movement it is in - y plethiad byr. I'm not about to
be convinced that the F wasn't damped because in plainsong there were
Guidonian hexachords starting on F.
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Let's face it - we're presented with inadequate theoretical explanations of their

harmony. Nowhere do they explain what the basic pair of terms - cyweirdant and
tyniad - were. Of course harmony is a very difficult thing to describe, but I think
it's fascinating that they seem not to have felt it necessary to explain cyweirdant
and tyniad, as if they were so commonplace, like sun and moon, egg and bacon,
that everyone knows what they are. Luckily, we've got the footprint of them in all
the music.
Mar 14, 2014
I know that the words ‘cyweirdant cryf' can look technical and specific at first, but
I think they're used whenever and wherever they wanted to indicate a main note,
or a main chord in the case of Gwysaney 28. There are lots of situations where, if
you're trying to describe a type of music, you'll want to draw attention to some
notes or chords as basic, main, principal or special or whatever, and I think that
is how they used ‘cyweirdant cryf' - wherever and whenever it was convenient -
and that the various uses don't share in a single identity.
Yes, I think you're right that mean, treble and bourdon takes us back to triads.
Still, it remains the case that the harmony of the music is based on a tertian
‘tetradic’ system - four notes in the octave containing three intervals of a third,
rather than a triadic system of three notes containing two intervals of a third. It's
a fundamental difference, because out of the diatonic octave you can only draw
two groups of the former (cyweirdant and tyniad) compared to the six triads you
can draw. But because four, and not three, notes are available for cyweirdant and
tyniad, they can be much richer and more varied than triads can be. Both
systems have massive validity. And when you think about it, it's surprising that
lots of modern composers haven't hit on cyweirdant and tyniad in their
experimenting.
But Paul Whittaker did very well indeed to detect the full cyweirdant-tyniad
system, because in the bass chords you commonly get only three notes rather
than the full four out of the octave, so cerdd dant harmony can often look as if it
might be based on a system of three notes, rather like triadic harmony but with
modifications and oddities.
Now, because of that opportunity for confusion, we have to wonder if these three-
fold references to main, treble and bourdon, three notes that are sustained, and
Wiliam Llŷn's (implied one and) three and five are confused, perceiving cerdd
dant as simply triadic, or whether they are simply borrowing the well-known
terminology of triadic harmony and applying it to cerdd dant because they don't
have any other vocab. Or, had cerdd dant evolved out of the triadic system, or
did the triadic system evolve out of cerdd dant? And actually, both might have
happened. These are big historical questions - extremely interesting ones - which
need to be posed properly before we can begin to understand where modern
Western harmony came from.
You're asking about the three ‘llanw’. It's difficult. If llanw means an interval, say
a nice third, between two cyweirdannau then three llanwau would imply four not
three cyweirdannau, which could be interesting. Or, if llanw means a satisfactory
sound, there being three of them can be explained by reference to the melodic
tonic. If the cyweirdannau here are indeed 1-3-5 then they are all neat with the
tonic: 1.
I feel … you might well be leaping too easily into thinking there had been a
change in cerdd dant since Gerald. “Whether the strings strike together a fourth
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or a fifth … ” - it would be easy for someone listening to cerdd dant as we know it

who was not a music professional to describe the double tonic rocking back-and-
forth in that way. You've got the tonic, and (usually) in a tyniad the fourth above
sounds and in a cyweirdant the fifth above sounds. Maybe it's wise not to take
things too literally here - Gerald's mention of B-flat is thought (Rimmer, Weller)
probably not to refer to that actual specific note but to be him, well, showing-off
a bit by getting techy, whilst actually describing final repose in consonance.
As I say, I think it's a mistake to take everything in verbal reports absolutely

literally. It's frustrating, but music isn't easy to describe, and never has
been. 400+ years and an entirely unfamiliar musical culture - we can't expect
everything to be as tight and precise as the tablature is?
It would be great if you get some of this caution in as you expand your draft.
Nov 27, 2017
Gerald’s writings on Welsh music are certainly very important indeed and are
always well worth discussing. There is a penetrating article on this by Philip
Weller, ‘Gerald of Wales’s View of Music’, Welsh Music History 2 (1997), pp. 1-
32. As regards Gerald’s mention of B-flat, as I was saying here before (Mar 14,
2014), it is generally accepted that he was using B-flat to communicate final
repose in consonance, as Philip Weller p. 22 suggests: “… Gerald knew very well
that B-fa was used to ‘round out’ a ‘false’ interval (thus avoiding the tritone)” in
the hexachords of the Parisian schools of plainchant, “and … he was in fact
referring in this instance to the ‘sweetness’ of fully rounded ‘perfect’ fifths and
fourths.” And indeed that is what we find in the manuscript, where by far the
most common final close to cadences is the fourth above the octave, i.e. a final
11:8 chord.
The difficulty, you see, with taking ‘B-flat’ literally is that Gerald would need to
be told that B-flat was uppermost in these chords, and that seems unlikely; as
Philip puts it, p. 25: “In the case of these instrumentalists he has no prior
theoretical knowledge of what they are doing, so his evaluation of it is based
only on his hearing of and reaction to their music. In this sense their art is
indeed ‘hidden’ from him.”
There is a great deal more in Philip’s article explaining the background to this
line of thought and to most of Gerald’s writing on music. …
Aug 16, 2017
This passage about the cynnwys dannau from the Dosparth (Peniarth 62, p. 18)
must be very important. Yes, your suggestion that the four cyweirdannau
gweinion or cynnwys dannau have “not one number (un rhif) between them” and
“not one movement (un gerdded) to them” may indicate that they were
tempered. The main difficulty with that interpretation is that it yields only three
cyweirdannau cryfion rather than the four notes that in the manuscript a
cyweirdant manifestly is drawn from. For example, if in the C harmonic mode
only C, E and G are just and A is not, then one winds up with cyweirdant chords
such as C-G-A or A-E which are not wholly just. And it was that very ‘A’ factor
which caused me (see from p. 41 onwards in the Tuning Supplement) to move
on from aiming at a just triad C-E-G, which I had developed through tuning
some fifths and fourths using 1/3-comma meantone, to a just tetrad A-C-E-G
which I got with the ½-comma partial meantone. Having now listened to both a
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lot, I’ve got to say I’m in awe of the effect of the ½-comma technique. With the
Highland pipe we’re used to the I-O intonational contrast against the drone, but
in the chordal context of cerdd dant the contrast is fantastically effective: totally
clean cyweirdant chords contrasted with tyniad ones which have real crunch to
them. This harmony has a pulsating life that…, well, it’s a new experience for the
ear, a dimension we’ve never heard before in any chordal music.
It has been said of Venice that if it isn’t actually sinking, it ought to be! Here, if
the tradition wasn’t using a dual system of just and tempered intonation, I
reckon it ought to have been!
I wonder if the passage means the cyweirdannau cryfion were stable and the
cynnwys dannau were unstable in pitch, because the former each had a filling-up
(llanw) whereas the latter change in a way (a newidian mewn modd), and that
the passage is describing the distinction between the three notes in the octave
sounded on the open strings of the crwth and the four produced by stopping.
Amongst the meanings of ‘cynnwys’ is ‘compressed’. If, as I propose in the
Tuning Supplement pp. 55-63, slides were performed on the crwth and page 108
indicates them, stretching right across from one note to another, then that
fluidity might explain why the cynnwys dannau had “not one number between
them” and “not one movement to them”. Slides involving open strings and the
nut are possible but they are easier between stopped notes.
But I don’t know. I hope everyone here appreciates that a vast amount of
patience is needed in trying to sort out these most difficult technical passages
about the music, because they are truly difficult. And the crwth is an enormous
challenge.
Anyone got more thoughts at this point on all this?
May 9, 2014
These are all very good questions.
One of the delights of the cerdd dant system is that it offered a drone note as an
option to the composers. Whatever the pitch level, there is always one note
shared in common between tyniad and cyweirdant, which they can both pivot on,
and it can be used as a drone. It often was - you can see where and when in my
tuning dissertation pp. 64-67. Sometimes a drone runs through a whole piece,
sometimes through just a part of a piece, and sometimes not at all in a piece.
See how this is very different from all those types of music that always have a
continuous drone. I think there aren't many types of music that use drones
sparingly or intermittently. Hardanger fiddle music is one, and that's a delight too
of course.
The double tonic principle is, or has been, very commonplace in British folk
music. If you analyze the harmony of the melodic line of, say, a double-tonic
Northumbrian pipe or fiddle tune, you get a match with the cerdd dant harmonic
system and its stacks of cyweirdant and tyniad thirds. Because of the antiquity of
cerdd dant, the Reading Rota etc., I imagine that the double tonic was once
universal in the music of the British Isles but was driven north by tonic-dominant
Continental music. So I take the presence of the double tonic in a tradition as
being evidence of that tradition being Insular rather than Continental in its origin.
When it comes to piobaireachd, the double tonic leads me to think it was Insular
in origin and that it had ancient roots. I don't think you can say more than that,
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because it could have drawn the double tonic from folk music or from the classical
cerdd-dant type, or from both of course.
Mar 30, 2016
Barnaby’s article was published in 2014 in Piping Today no. 71, and hopefully it
will have helped tremendously in drawing the attention of the wide piping
community to the manuscript. It's not only piobaireachd but ceòl beag piping that
is based on double-tonic measures, and his classification of their use in ceòl beag
is very useful. His fantastic ‘Map of the Pibroch Landscape’ - an analysis of the
entire traditional piobaireachd repertory – is an enormous advance. At the time of
writing the Piping Today article Barnaby wasn’t quite clear about all of the
technical points to do with cerdd dant which are involved here. I’ve subsequently
clarified them with him, and now the article is online it’s best if I run through
them here to avoid any future confusion.
As Paul Whittaker demonstrated in his hugely important article: ‘Harmonic Forms

in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript’ (Welsh Music History, 7 (2007), pp. 1-34), the
four notes of a stack of three thirds in a cyweirdant have as the modal centre the
second note up from the bottom of the stack rather than the bottom note. In
terms of scale degrees, then, the stack reads 6, 1, 3, 5. If we then read the
modal centre of a tyniad as one degree below that of the cyweirdant, the same
pattern applies: 6, 1, 3, 5. And because the same pattern applies, a tyniad is
inherently no less consonant within itself than a cyweirdant is. What is consonant
moves with the melody; whereas of course in a piping context with drones which
are fixed the context is different and so in any piece a counterpart to a cerdd dant
cyweirdant or tyniad, either one or the other, will necessarily be tense against the
drones.
As regards a restricted palette, in cerdd dant it was most common for pieces to
be heptatonic. Those that used gapped scales still used the other notes as
passing notes, that is, not as mere gracenotes. Much use was made of most of
the harp's tessitura.
The ap Huw diagrams on pp. 108-9: these aren’t about scordature. The strings
can't take the amount of adjustment that interpretation would require - see my
Tuning dissertation pp. 44-50. Also see Paul's article pp. 11-20. This means that
adjacent harp strings can be pitched either a semitone or a tone apart, but never
a minor third apart (except of course for the interval between D and F down in
the bottom octave, where there seems to be no E string).
Such analyzing as I’ve done of the occurrence of cerdd dant measures in

piobaireachd doesn’t throw up anything like as many matches as the ceòl beag
repertory does, but enough to show an important relationship. The fundamental
principle of cerdd dant measures – that the digits within any measure are equal in
length – does hold generally in piobaireachd. The inequality that is to be found in
ceòl beag seems to have come about in the following manner. The 6/4 form of
hornpipe tended to have short digits: two to the bar, thus: 3/4 + 3/4. When it
was partially displaced in popularity in the early 17th century by the 9/4 form,
the first digit was drawn out to become twice the length of the second, thus 6/4
+ 3/4. That 2 to 1 arrangement continued with the 3/2 form which soon followed
as very popular. The whole expansion in rhythmic complexity appears to have
developed first in Cheshire and Lancashire, and almost as if whilst the support for
cerdd dant drained away the energy for folk music next door became
supercharged.
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It’s difficult with music other than cerdd dant where there are no accompanying
chords to be really sure about the length of digits, as in: is this two, one or half-
a-digit? But this is how it all seems to me.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE DOUBLE TONIC IN MY TRANSLATIONS OF THE

TABLATURE
Nov 9, 2015
Bringing this exploration [presented here under the series of subheadings that
follow below, relating to the double tonic] of the distribution of the double tonic
back to the ap Huw manuscript, I’d like to make one important point.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s only on my identification of the single
tuning (of all natural notes and B-flat) that the double tonic pervades almost all
of the manuscript, and also that the associated shifting down a step of the
repeats of melodic phrases frequently turns up there too. Scordatura tunings,
where the diatonic series of the strings gets scrambled, scrambles the harmony
and the melody. In my time I’ve known one or two people who haven’t
immediately grasped the enormity of the impact on translating the manuscript
that my identification of the tuning has had, in that the cerdd dant tradition is no
longer perceived as a total isolate, adrift, without any anchorage to the local
substratum of folk music. Nor to the sister classical tradition of piobaireachd. I
hope that all the recent discussion of the double tonic has helped to make it clear
how effective my tuning solution has been, in that without it neither the double
tonic nor the melodic shifts, nor even the predominance of thirds itself, survives
in any coherent enough form to provide any anchorage. And without anchorage,
there can be no credibility to a translation. Translation is a precarious business -
just one inadvertent wrong move on a single basic principle and you’ve got one
huge jumble!
Note that the evidence and the arguments I put forward in my dissertation on
tuning:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/aphuw/aphuw-t.pdf
stand on their own merits and don’t include any that are based on any
extrapolating of the double tonic from other sources. I arrived at my conclusion
on tuning without recourse to any assumption or expectation that cerdd dant
should have reflected the double-tonic behaviour of other early music in the
British Isles. The fact that my identification of the tuning has that consequence -
that the manuscript is so permeated with the double tonic - joins a host of other
features that it has in common with the folk dance tradition, all of which, by
anchoring my translations of the pieces intabulated in the manuscript, give
confirmation of their historical and artistic credibility. Paul Whittaker has taken
care to guide the reader through illustrations of exactly how my tuning
interpretation makes artistic and historical sense of the harmony and the melodic
phrasing, using the clymau cytgerdd, Caniad Cadwgan and Caniad Cynwrig
Bencerdd as examples, on pages 11-16 of his article: ‘Harmonic Forms in the
Robert ap Huw Manuscript’, Welsh Music History, 7 (2007), pp. 1-34. But, if you
have any background in double-tonic folk music or piobaireachd, your ear
immediately tells you that at last, after centuries of muddle, we’re in very familiar
territory. At least, that was my experience when I got these tunes in the 1970s
and I find that’s generally true of others with that background. And the greater
the time that someone has grappled with the manuscript whilst it was unresolved,
the greater the astonishment and delight on hearing my translations. That was
particularly the case with Peter Crossley-Holland, who started on the tablature as
early as about 1940.
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Cerdd dant entering into the double tonic category of course increases the
importance of the issues: where, when and how did the double tonic develop?
THE ORIGINS OF CERDD DANT HARMONY AND THE DOUBLE TONIC
Oct 31, 2015
… I expect that the genesis of the cerdd dant system on the measures was on the
accompaniment lyre, because that lends itself so easily to these types of chords.
As a working hypothesis I like to imagine a scenario where the distribution of the
percussive, alliterative poetry of the Celtic- and Germanic-speaking peoples which
was accompanied by the lyre can tell us where and when double-tonic harmony
was in operation. That has the rather satisfying outcome that Southern England
emerges in the Late Middle Ages as musically distinct with a sharply-defined
border, only to the north and west of which are found both the double tonic and
alliterative poetry (of Welsh cynghanedd and the Northern English and Scottish
alliterative revival). South of that border: a more Continental culture.
If my working hypothesis is right, in the Early Middle Ages elements of the double
tonic might have been spread wherever Celtic and Germanic languages were, i.e.
across a lot of Continental Europe. In the British Isles the double tonic has
survived for many centuries longer than the alliterative poetry did, so perhaps it
did so elsewhere.
I doubt very much that all of the development of double-tonic harmony happened
in Ireland in the 11th century as some of the Welsh accounts suggest as likely.
What do others imagine about that?
Oct 31, 2017
Ah – a major breakthrough at last on the double tonic in Continental Europe. I’ve

long been aware of this sentence online (but can’t find it there now) in respect of
the use of the psaltery in the Eastern region of Novgorod : "Most of the gusli
tunes are instrumental-vocal. The instrumental part consists mainly of two chords
of second relationship, slightly varying in tone."
But it’s only this morning that I’ve been able to turn up a musical example:
Nikolai Findeizen, History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800, Vol. 1
(Bloomington, 2008), ex. 7.13, viewable online here, and indeed that is the
double tonic operating in the … chordal form of cerdd dant harmony, and on wire
strings so that the chords are sustained.
It is thought that the toggle technique used on such psalteries was taken from
the lyre that preceded the psaltery in the Baltic and Germanic regions, and that’s
one of the reasons why a few years ago I switched to toggling on the 6-stringed
lyre from the one finger per string plus two for the thumb you use … .
The Baltic is a region in which one would expect to find another survival of the
double tonic, remembering that – Church aside – pre-Norman Britain and Ireland
were an important part of the Northern rather than the Southern European
cultural zone. For an important example, the 10th century King of Norway Olaf
Tryggvason who was largely responsible for the Christianisation of Scandinavia
was reputedly converted in the Isles of Scilly, part of the Celtic lands.
100
Thanks, … , for having prompted me to look again at what was available about
lyre fingerings.
Oct 31, 2017
… It's a terribly important thing, that the cerdd dant harmonic system is the only
indicator we have of medieval instrumental music theory from not just Wales but
the whole of Northern Europe stretching as far as Russia.
May 13, 2019
Well, I’ve not heard of any trace of the double tonic being detected in any of the
small fragments there are of Ancient Greek and Roman music, and more
significantly in the extensive writings of the ancient theorists there is no pair of
complementary terms that might mean cyweirdant and tyniad nor any mention of
tempered fifths. The fact that the Northern Europeans used lyres as did the
Southern Europeans doesn’t mean lyres were used in the same way and to
produce similar types of music; there are many types of lyre and many ways of
playing them. The fact that the Novgorod psaltery technique produces the same
sort of chordal, triadic accompaniment that we find in the manuscript suggests
that the double tonic once was spread across Northern Europe in the same way
as the six-stringed Northern European lyre was, and as alliterative poetry also
was, amongst the Germanic- and Celtic-speaking peoples.
May 24, 2019
I follow what you're saying about the significance of St. Kevin, but we don’t have
any credible account of the origin of the double tonic you know. The references to
Glendalough and to Kevin do not involve any ascriptions of actual musical
invention, only of cerdd dant practice. Meanwhile, the old double-tonic ‘toggling’
technique on the psaltery in the Novgorod-Pskov region implies an origin of the
double tonic on the Northern European lyre, which had been in existence long
before Irish monasticism had any wider impact. As you’ll remember, we’ve set
the concept of the double tonic into the context of pagan Celtic and Nordic culture
in earlier discussions here, particularly in relation to Mercury and to dragon-pairs.
Cerdd dant shouldn’t be considered without reference to the descant

harmonization of the groups of singers that Gerald described; a practice so
deeply rooted that children from a very early age would spontaneously
harmonize. This must have related closely to the double-tonic harmonization that
we find in cerdd dant and the closely-related dance music. It would be tempting
to think of medieval Wales as having been at the leading edge of the
development of harmony but when set into the wider context of the study of
polyphony, what Gerald described appears as part of the pattern of the world-
wide disappearing of polyphony. That the Welsh tradition of polyphony which
Gerald encountered disappeared is in keeping with the global pattern; thus:
“A study of local polyphonic traditions suggests that the prevailing tendency of

the historical dynamics is the disappearance of the vocal polyphonic traditions.
Actually, this is not a prevailing, but the only tendency. Historically documented
cases of the disappearance of polyphonic traditions come from Europe, Asia,
America, and Oceania. On the contrary, the documented cases of the appearance
of vocal polyphonic traditions (as the natural evolution of polyphonic singing from
monophony) are conspicuously absent. This means that the universally accepted
101
idea of the natural evolutionary transformation of monophonic singing into

polyphonic singing is a fiction, totally unsupported by the evidence.” Joseph
Jordania, Who Asked the First Question (Tbilisi, 2006), p. 209.
There is a very useful short discussion on the Welsh and English medieval
polyphonic traditions by Victor Grauer (2008) at
http://music000001.blogspot.com/2008/03/135-music-of-great-tradition-
35spring.html.
The ability to spontaneously harmonize on a notional ground lived on in dance

music, as this story about the fiddler Peter Baille from the Edinburgh region
around 1805 shows:
"A gentleman asked Pate if he could play the 'East Neuk of Fife' with ten
variations, to which the minstrel replied in his homely way: 'Weel, sir, I'll try it'.
Off Pate set at a brisk pace with both theme and variations, till the number
bargained for was completed. But Pate did not stop here. He dashed into fresh
variations of his own improvising, more wonderful than the first, and went on,
and on, and on, the gentleman looking at him with astonishment, till at last the
fiddler did make a halt. 'Well I declare!' said the gentleman. 'Every one of the
variations must have turned out twins since I last heard them!'"
Jun 13, 2019
Yes, there is important overlap between cerdd dant and that style of polyphony,
where in early English polyphony there’s a double-tonic ostinato of 0101 below a
stepwise melody. In the manuscript Caniad Cadwgan displays it particularly
prominently. This is the area of strongest affinity between the instrumental
homophony of cerdd dant and all the many types of vocal polyphony that there
are. I do wonder, then, if a double-tonic ostinato might have been a component
of the Welsh polyphony or the Northern English polyphony Gerald described, or
even of the Irish polyphony described by Laurent Vital:
En ce lieu de Quinquesalle, je y oys chanter une haulte messe, et y faire le

service divin bien dévotement et honnorablement. Et estoit leur chant de
contrepoinct, qui n'est discant ne plain chant; mais ilz ont une toutte aultre
manière de chanter que pardechà. (In the place of Kinsale I went to hear a High
Mass sung, and there to make divine service very devotionally and honourably.
And it was sung counterpoint, which is neither descant nor plainsong, but they
have a completely different manner of singing than from over here.)
This is very puzzling. Descant is what one might very well expect, and it’s hard to
account for a manner of singing counterpoint which could have been completely
different from the styles known in Burgundy whence came Vital or, indeed, in
Continental Europe in general. This account is rather similar to Gerald’s account
of his impression of string music in Ireland more than three centuries earlier:
once again Ireland presents the cosmopolitan visitor with an established style of
harmony which is remarkable. In Vital’s case it is sufficiently distinctive for him to
comment that it is completely different from what he is familiar with, and if it
were not for Gerald’s experience of string music in his native Wales we can
imagine he would have claimed the same. I wonder, then, if there was any
connection between the systems of harmony they encountered?
In the ap Huw manuscript passages of parallelism are quite rare and its corpus as
a whole cannot be described as descant in any sense of that term as the
heterophonic development of parallelism; instead, it is decidedly homophonic. But
102
neither can it be described as counterpoint in any sense of that term as note-

against-note, the upper part being relatively florid. Nevertheless, for the purpose
of performing liturgical text it is easy to imagine a polyphonic counterpart to
instrumental cerdd dant in which all the parts are necessarily homorhythmic,
note-against-note, whilst still operating on the same double tonic principle as
cerdd dant.
It’s also worth reflecting here on the essentially call-and-response nature of the
double tonic in connection with the fact that antiphonal singing and alternatim
performing between choir and stringed instruments had been a feature of the
early Irish church, for both of which see Ann Buckley, ‘Music in Ireland to c.
1500’, in A New History of Ireland: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó
Cróinín (Oxford, 2005), p. 799.
It would be very helpful indeed to hear of any other suggestions that might help
explain the nature of what was so tantalizingly described by Laurent Vital in this
extremely important yet neglected passage with the unique insight it offers into
Irish polyphony.
Jun 16, 2019
Yes, the blooming of diatonic harmony in cerdd dant became fully-fledged. It was
a system which had been in use for long enough by the time the pieces we have
were composed for all the colours and patternings available to have bloomed. And
that includes the dynamics of harmony, such that the harmony has momentum,
that it stretches forward toward resolution.
Coming back to your thoughts … on the era in which the double tonic first
appeared, what we do have is the account about the rejection of ‘is gywair ar y
bragod dannau’. This must relate to a concept of bragod gywair (or something
very closely related to it) as having once been a new thing and of there having
been a time when it was not yet accepted, purportedly at the court of Cadwaladr
in Gwynedd. The source here must have been comfortable, then, with putting out
this detail of an evolving of cywair and placing it in the medieval era, and that
gives a sense of an expectation that the consumers of the account would
themselves be comfortable with the concept of cywair as something that during
the Middle Ages was not entirely crystallised but was at least partly open to
experimentation. The mention in the account of a location, Gwynedd in ‘Mwynen
Gwynedd’, is interesting because of the association of another cywair, gogywair,
with Gwynedd. The implication is that some development of new cyweiriau had
taken place at a time not so very remote that it could no longer be located, and it
could even be ascribed to individuals where the title of a cywair bears a personal
name (such as Seisyllt and Yr Athro Fedd). There’s also the association of lleddf
gywair with Ireland (Y Lleddf Gywair Gwyddel).
What makes it clear that tuning had been a live issue in the High Middle Ages is
the notice in the Irish Annals of the death in 1226 of a master of ‘canntaireachd’
and of ‘crotglesa’, of harp tuning or, perhaps, of lyre tuning, “who made, besides,
a tuning for himself, the like of which had never been made before”. This
individual was the erenagh of Cong which, lying in the West and with its abbey,
was a stronghold of native Irish learning, so this invention of a tuning was more
likely an indigenous development in string music than a response to Continental
practice. It confirms the impression given by the various Welsh cyweiriau which
were never taken up beyond in one or two pieces, that tuning was largely an
experimental area. And that’s quite understandable given the difficulties of
103
accomodating the syntonic comma in full triadic harmony on instruments of fixed

intonation such as the harp and the lyre.
So here at least, a date of the early thirteenth century is provided for an

important type of development within the harmonic theory of string music and
further that there is here, yet again, an association with the Church.
Jun 17, 2019
Whilst on the subject of harp tuning in Ireland, it needs to be pointed out that a
claim of the existence of a 16th century Irish manuscript on the subject kept at
Trinity College, Dublin, is in error (Pekka Toivanen, The Pencerdd’s Toolkit:
Cognitive and Musical Hierarchies in Medieval Welsh Harp Music (Jyväskylä,
2001), pp. 155-7). In fact the manuscript is a letter in the collection of Trinity
College, Cambridge, not Dublin, it is English not Irish and it is 15 th century not
16th century. The reference is O.2.53, MS 1157, f.71r; the online link to the
digital copy is https://trin-sites-
pub.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/uv/view.php?n=O.2.53#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=74
&xywh=877%2C162%2C2496%2C1499.
THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO ECCLESIASTICAL CHANT
Nov 2, 2015
I think it’s well worth bringing into this discussion the subject of chant, because
of its close relationship with medieval secular monody.
I’m sure it’s important to distinguish between the double tonic, which operates in
a tertian context, and bimodality in general. Chant is generally monomodal and
essentially drone-based, but it has also been bimodal. The Psalm tone known as
the Tonus Peregrinus, thought to be very ancient indeed, modulates: first there is
a passage centred around a reciting tone of A, followed by a cadence finishing on
F (the mediatio), and for the second half there is a reciting tone of G finishing on
D (the finalis). The Carolingian parapteres and various modulating antiphons
display a range of related patterns. Here is a list of them, where I put the reciting
tone 1 followed by its mediatio note, then a dash followed by reciting tone 2 and
its finalis note. The list begins with the Tonus Peregrinus:
AF-GD
AG-GF
AG-GD
AG-FF
EC-DC
ED-CD
BA-AB
Note the shift down one step between the reciting tones of all but two of these,
and also between the mediatio and finalis of two of them. Also note that there are
seven cases where a shift down one step happens between a reciting tone and
the mediatio or finalis that follows it. In short, shifts down one step are the
dominant pattern. And yet chant is not at all a tertian context.
I think that whilst influence to and fro between monomodal chant and all drone-
based monody can be easily traced we should have an expectation that bimodal
chant would likewise have its counterpart in secular monody. Perhaps any
appearance of melodic shifts down one step in the Cantigas or in similar sources
104
can be taken as an indication that bimodal chant was a feature of Mozarabic

chant, of which little is known.
In cerdd dant there happens to be a conjunction of tertian harmony and these

melodic shifts, but that doesn’t force a prediction that the shifts can only happen
in tertian contexts, as chant proves. Rather, it suggests that Celtic chant might
have been more substantially bimodal than elsewhere in Europe.
Oct 29, 2017
… I’m thinking of three possibilities for the origin of the notion of the double
tonic: voice, strings and pipes, each of which has left a double-tonic legacy
brought into modern times. Double-tonic song is not divided between singers and
double-tonic piping is not divided between chanters, but as regards the double
aspect you’d think that each of these legacies would have had an origin in a
physical separation that gave rise to the doubling. So, the custom of an
alternating pair of singers might have suggested it, but the main tradition of
singing in pairs in the Celtic regions today is the kan ha diskan of Brittany and it’s
simple repetition, not double-tonic. But perhaps there was once a tradition of the
alternation of vocal parts according to the double tonic. We don’t know. Certainly
there were traditions of the spatial division of singers, for the caoine in Ireland
and in Scotland for companies of singer-entertainers, where the singers were
arranged two and two together.
Kan ha diskan alternates by the phrase, as does the double tonic, whereas
hocketing tends to alternate by the musical cell – a shorter range of units. So I
think vocal double-tonic alternation might be more easily associated with the
Tonus Pereginus and the Carolingian parapteres of Chant rather than with
hocketing. Still, the difference between a cell and a phrase is a grey area, so I'm
sure hocketing can't be ruled out here.
Oct 24, 2016
... I'd be pleased to hear more about how the Ballinderry motif relates to chant.
Do you think then that this sort of motif - spanning thirds - is so ubiquitous in
modal Western music that its occurrence in laments isn't really so remarkable? I
know you have a great knowledge of melody in modal contexts. Maybe the thing
which is remarkable here is the contrast between tertian cadences in modal
Western music generally and the descending tetrachords of Arabic cadences?
PERSPECTIVES FROM ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
Nov 6, 2015
Because perspectives from ethnomusicology don’t seem to enter into national

histories of music in Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland much, I’m thinking I’d
better bring them in here, to set double tonic harmony into its wider context.
Apologies to those who know this sort of stuff already.
What is thought to have been the earliest layer of harmony in Europe, pre-Indo-
European, very much involves seconds rather than thirds. The point has been
made by ethnomusicologists and was particularly convincingly illustrated by A. L.
Lloyd with vocal field recordings from all sorts of places, including the Balkans.
There it’s particularly in connection with funereal music that close harmony
105
features, very much associated in Albania and Epirus with the long-drawn out
lamenting cry of ‘o-ho-a-ne’, and here of course I’ve recognized these are the
same syllables that used to be used in lamenting in Ireland. So I would imagine
that the still-strong Balkan tradition can supply us with much of the reality of how
lamenting would have once been right across Europe, that is, with much use of
seconds. I’ve seen it live in a ceremonial setting in Greece and it makes a very
deep impression.
Also, I’ve been calling people’s attention to one extremely distinctive and
cohesive stylistic cluster I’ve identified from within this early layer, gathered from
locations that are very distant from one another. They are evidenced
instrumentally not just vocally: the core of the sutartinės tradition in the forests
of Lithuania, the music of the tribal region in the Hindu Kush formerly known as
Kafiristan and part of the music of the Pardhan people in tribal Madhya Pradesh.
Each of these display most of the signatures of the ‘earliest’ layer, but particularly
the predominance of parallel seconds. The relevance to the British Isles here is
that this cluster will be sufficiently ancient to provide us with a model for what
was played on particularly the long trumpets of the Scandinavian and Celtic
Bronze Age and Iron Age, but also on other instruments long gone from the
British Isles such as panpipes.
Wherever and whenever the thirds of the double tonic emerged, they’ll have done
so in an environment where seconds had long been in use and probably where
seconds continued for some musical applications long after, especially for
lamentation. Now, it’s noticeable that the harmony in the Robert ap Huw
manuscript differs from early Continental triadic harmony in many ways: not only
that all inversions are regularly used but that selected major seconds are treated
as consonances. But there’s nothing surprising in that once we remember that
there ought to have been an early prevalence of seconds.
In short, I don’t think the double tonic should be viewed as a possible beginning
of harmony, but as an evolving of it.
Oct 25, 2017
And interestingly, as we've talked about before …, the sutartinės tradition in

Lithuania had long horns, daudytes, played together pitched a second apart,
although they were played simultaneously, not in alternation. …
Nov 7, 2015
A good starting-point on the development of European harmony is this page:

http://music000001.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/149-music-of-great-tradition-
49drone.html where Victor Grauer attempts a ‘stratigraphy’ of European
polyphony. If you move forwards and backwards from that page you’ll find
everything covered, with links to sound clips, in an enormous series of very well-
informed blogs.
The instrumental music I brought up is extremely obscure and difficult to

research, but The New Grove Dictionary is a good source, if you look under the
various countries involved. The sutartinės tradition was broken by the Second
World War, and the most useful article in English seems to be Austė Nakienė: ‘On
Instrumental Origins of Lithuanian Polymodal Sutartinės’, Studia Musicologica
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (2003), pp. 159-168.
106
The many Balkan vocal polyphonic traditions are very well known and some of
them at least are thriving. It’s particularly those of Epirus and Southern Albania
that I’m familiar with. A starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ugxfNKLpA
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBCE0xo-MS4
where the instruments are taking the part of the vocal keen.
Good search terms are Ipirotika moiroloi (lament) and particularly τι κακο εκανα ο
καημενος.
Try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIHSIDlnzXo
Music for raising the dead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q76hLDKC3s
That these traditions were once widespread is indicated by this quote from
Gustave Reese p. 271: “There is even mention, by Gafori in the 15th century, of
the use at Milan, at funeral services and on certain other mournful occasions, of
organizing in seconds”.
One renowned extraordinary thing to turn up in ethnomusicology is an

unmistakably-distinctive Balkan style being used by a pair of Muslim women in
Ethiopia. Absolutely unmistakable.
So of course it’s good to have as much of a geographically-broad perspective as

possible when addressing any particular tradition, such as cerdd dant with its
parallel seconds.
Nov 7, 2015
And here's a 17th century account re Southern Albania [written from a Muslim
Turkish perspective] I've just been looking for again, of just how strong and how
great a part of musical culture this keening with its seconds could become:
“The people of Gjirokastra mourn their dead relatives for forty or fifty,
indeed up to eighty years. Every Sunday all the relatives of the dead
person gather in a jerry-built house, paying professional mourners who
weep and wail and keen and lament, raising a great hue and cry. No one
can stand to be in town on Sunday because of all the noise and uproar. I
dubbed Gjirokastra the city of wailing. It is a great wonder how the
professional mourners manage to weep and wail with such feeling - more
than for their own relatives - for someone who has been dead a hundred
years and to whom they are not even related. And how they lament! It is
only when they are exhausted with hunger that they desist.”
It stretches the imagination!
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
Oct 20, 2018
Bragod have been bringing into their explanations of cerdd dant the interesting
ancient classical concept of ‘the music of the spheres’, ‘musica universalis’. This
107
was a means of describing the ancient conception of relationships between the

planets and the fixed stars using music as a metaphor. We don’t know that any
medieval music theorists ever attempted to trace a relationship between the
cosmos and cerdd dant rather than to just such understanding as they had of the
music of the classical Hellenistic world but it’s interesting to work through what
their line of thinking would have been if they had tried.
At the core of Ancient Greek musical theory stood the seven-stringed lyre, and
each of the planets was assigned to a string where that lyre was tuned in the
diatonic genus such that the strings had the tone and semitone intervals starting
from lowest to highest in this series: S-T-T-S-T-T. Classical writers differed in
their assignments but the one most accessible to medieval European theorists
was that of Nicomachus, which was carried forward correctly by Boethius,
although Boethius elsewhere in his writing also swapped round a pair of
assignments. The assignments in relation to the same diatonic genus in cerdd
dant are: E = Saturn, F = Jupiter, G = Mars, A = Sun, B-flat = Mercury, C =
Venus, D = Moon. That is what was known as the Chaldean order of the planets,
but Boethius also exchanged Mercury and Venus so that the whole series runs
from slowest to fastest in terms of apparent motion. There was in addition an
eighth sphere conceived as that of the firmament of fixed stars, beyond that of
slow Saturn and furthest from the fastest in motion, the Moon.
I wonder if anything of value for us can be got from these assignments. The
Hellenistic writers thought not at all in thirds of course but in tetrachords,
particularly then in relationships at the fourth, and what had particular appeal to
them here was the assignment of the weighty planet Saturn and the two
luminaries Sun and Moon to the three fixed strings, the hestotes, here E, A and
D, which remained unchanged on the lyre whenever it was retuned out of the
basic diatonic genus and into the chromatic genus or into the enharmonic genus,
for these three strings were the bounds of the two tetrachords the seven-stringed
lyre offered (that is, its two tetrachords were conjunct on the middle string).
Anyway, let’s have a look at the root position triads here and their associations.
Most immediately striking is that on Nicomachus’s assignments the major triad F-
A-C is analogous to the three traditional ‘benefics’ of astrology: Jupiter, Sun and
Venus, whilst the minor triad G-B-flat-D is analogous to Mars, Mercury and Moon:
a combination with very different associations. On Boethius’s amended scheme
the major triad is analogous to Jupiter, Sun and Mercury and the minor triad to
Mars, Venus and Moon, and actually in the terms of Hellenistic astrology this is an
even more meaningful dichotomy in that it conforms to the ancient
diurnal/nocturnal division of planets into what are known as the two planetary
‘sects’. In this thinking Jupiter resembles the Sun in rejoicing during the day, as
does Mercury when it rises ahead of the Sun, whereas Mars and Venus rejoice as
does the Moon during the night. So here is a simple equivalence: major triad =
diurnal and minor triad = nocturnal. I don’t imagine that any such thinking
accompanied the evolution of triadic harmony but I think I can say that whilst any
medieval music theorist with a thorough classical education coming to cerdd dant
might well have been surprised by its harmonies he or she, as it happens,
wouldn’t have been alarmed by them.
I’ve never found a pair of Ancient Greek or Latin musical terms which might
correspond to the key terms of the cerdd dant system: cyweirdant and tyniad,
but then it would be a surprise to find one because it seems fifths were never
tempered in the Hellenistic world, at least not in its theory.
Oct 23, 2018
108
Great. I urge caution as you read about relating cerdd dant to Ancient Greek
music. You’ll find there are misconceptions by Bragod about the basics as carried
forward into the Middle Ages of the practical details of Greek music making and
the concept of the music of the spheres: the fixed strings were actually
associated with Saturn, the Sun and the Moon, not with the fixed sphere of the
firmament, and the movable strings were associated with only Jupiter, Mars,
Mercury and Venus, not with all the other mobile bodies as well. If it had been
that the cyweirdannau were associated with the fixed strings then the ‘I’s would
have carried the symbolism of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon, not the eternal
nature of the firmament. But, as I say, the fixed strings were E, A and D, not G, C
and D as Bragod report. And we know from the manuscript that the set E, A, D
never made up the cyweirdant notes of any of the modes so it’s incorrect to
associate the ‘I’s with the fixed strings. The fixed strings belong to the
tetrachordal system of Ancient Greek music, lightyears away from the tertian
system of cerdd dant. It would be really exciting to discover any link between the
two beyond the established fact that they both used the diatonic series, but
because the music of the spheres and the fixed and movable notes were based on
tetrachords those features don’t provide a link, they only expose the sharp
contrast between the two traditions.
Jones’s reported tuning of the crwth was G, C, D with octave doublings, and
Bragod assume that the cerdd dant tradition had used that tuning for the crwth
and claim those notes were not only those of the fixed strings but also those of
the cyweirdannau. But again, as with the E, A, D set, in the manuscript the G, C,
D set never made up the cyweirdant notes of any of the modes. For example, G
and C together can be used in combination with E, A or B-flat but not D. So
there’s an incorrect basis – the wrong chords - to the whole conception in the first
place of ‘I’s and ‘O’s equating with the fixed and movable strings and through
them with the firmament and the moving heavenly bodies.
I know the technical details here can seem daunting but I believe these issues are
ever so important, because it is the fact of the distinctiveness of cerdd dant, that
it is so very different indeed from all the early music that we have from outside
the British Isles, that makes its recovery so much more valuable than it would
have been otherwise, if it had been merely an echo, a reflection or a shadow of
what had been happening in Continental Europe and beyond. So it’s worth looking
into these differences with the Hellenistic theory of music.
Oct 23, 2018
I’m afraid I don’t know much about how they [the Ancient Greeks] thought about
the aulos … . Perhaps there aren’t any records of that? I have the impression that
it may have been thought of very differently from the stringed instruments. If
they did use them ever with one pipe for melody and the other for a fixed drone
then I suppose they would have been tempted to equate the firmament with the
drone, but I don’t think any record of that which may have once existed passed
into medieval Europe. Is that the sort of thing you were asking about?
Oct 24, 2018
… in the absence of a match between I and O and hestotes and kinoumenoi I

have asked Stefan Hagel if there might be any pair of terms in Hellenistic theory
which would suggest the bipolarity of the double tonic and essentially he thought
not.
109
THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE CANTIGAS DE SANTA MARIA AND OTHER MEDIEVAL

MUSIC FROM CONTINENTAL EUROPE TO DOUBLE-TONIC HARMONY
Oct 27, 2015
That’s very interesting indeed … . If some of the Cantigas move in a double-tonic

way, that would be an outlier remote from the British Isles and so would suggest
a leftover from some time when the double tonic had been in use in Continental
Europe. I often entertain such a scenario, that double-tonic music was what was
displaced by Moorish culture as that moved north, starting perhaps with elements
of that musical culture being taken into Aquitaine in 1065 after the Siege of
Barbastro and moving into Britain perhaps with the troubadours in the time of
Eleanor of Aquitaine: florid music, based on a drone, organised in tetrachords,
played and accompanied on instruments of Moorish origin such as the lute and
the rebec. Alternatively, the Cantigas as I know are a patchwork of extraordinary
variety and English harpers were known in Iberia around that time, so perhaps an
appearance of the double tonic there could be accounted for as an import from
Britain?
The double tonic as it’s manifested in the British Isles isn’t known as yet from
medieval Europe as far as I know, but the Cantigas is way beyond my patch. It
would be great if you - or anyone else - could look as deeply as possible into
these particular pieces and come to a conclusion as to the strength of the display
of double tonic in them. … I’m very interested. I gather the Cantigas aren’t yet
done and dusted in terms of everything that’s there, so I appreciate that things
can still turn up.
Oct 28, 2015
Sorry … - yes indeed. I should have checked with you if it’s ok for me to bring it
up and then done so. Following you flagging that one [no. 120 of the Cantigas de
Santa Maria] up with me as double-tonic in 2012, I’ve been hoping to get more
into the Cantigas but I’m afraid I haven’t yet, so I’m not really equipped to assess
them, whereas you … will be much better placed. I was indeed convinced by the
shift down a tone that happens between the two phrases, as happens also in the
Tonus Peregrinus, and it’s that same phenomenon that you … are calling attention
to as well, isn’t it? Like the call-and-response of the way the double tonic can
operate in the British Isles?
That is what I’m describing as the icing on the cake. Looking again now at no.
120, the one you so interestingly found … , indeed the icing is there. But are we
sure the cake itself is there in the first place? How strong is the evidence for
triads? I think it’s a bit difficult to judge because all the motion is stepwise?
Easier if there were intervals of thirds, and if the range was greater. How do the
other Cantigas shape up in terms of triads?
Contextual factors:- I’m a bit worried by the melismata. Regular periodicity and a
bipartite structure are there. What are the chances of swung rhythm? A measure
of just 0I or 00II isn’t problematic, although it’s not exciting. Any bits of
alliteration to be found in any of the lyrics? If not that also wouldn’t be
problematic.
110
With the double tonic in the British Isles, the thinking would have been harmonic.
Here’s a quote from the 19th century:
“The old musicians used to think of their harmonies while they were
making their tunes, as all real musicians do now. Common fiddlers and
pipers perhaps thought more of these bases than of their tunes, trusting
to their facility in making division or variation for the latter.”
It’s not easy, but is there enough here to penetrate the mindset? To work out
that this Cantiga shows they were thinking in terms of triads rather than just a
single-line melody with a shift in tonality between the two phrases? I don’t know
enough about the Cantigas and other Southern region music to say. It affects
whether an accompaniment would have been drone-based or chordal of course,
and the chances of there having been some link with the British Isles. And also
how relevant the Tonus Peregrinus might have been to the development of the
double tonic. These are mightily interesting issues. I can’t judge. Over to you
please …
Oct 28, 2015
Thanks a lot. Yes, I see [Cantigas] 119 and 120 both contain bimodality, on
adjacent tones. How strong do you … think the evidence is that they were
thinking in terms of triads there? You know, that they thought of thirds as
consonant?
Oct 29, 2015
It might be worth mentioning in connection with the Galician, Marian Cantigas

that the See of Bretoña, which served the churches of the Britons in Asturias and
Galicia, was one of nine I think, implying that a fair proportion of the population
would have been ‘British’. It is last mentioned in 962, having been absorbed
earlier. It was centred on the monastery of Santa Maria de Bretoña, near
Mondoñedo. Also the 1140 mention of British and Welsh pilgrims singing to the
accompaniment of the harp and crwth at Santiago de Compostela. So there might
be a realistic chance of finding British musical practice in the Cantigas?
Oct 31, 2015
And that concept of parallel organum at the fourth with drone for accompaniment
to Continental monody is in ever such a sharp contrast to the full tertian, tetradic
perpendicular harmony we find in the ap Huw MS. Europe was on an entirely
different course. As far as we can tell, the development of tertian harmony
happened in the British Isles, whilst it was long disliked and shunned elsewhere in
favour of fourths and fifths. If I’m not out-of-date here, it’s not until Johannes of
Garlandia in 1240 that a tentative recognition of thirds as imperfect consonances
appears on the Continent, in Paris, and not until the early 15th century that they
first arrive in full force, taking a further century or so to really penetrate, in vocal
music. Instrumental music later, as you say …
Nov 10, 2015
Ah! Looking now at Victor Grauer’s site, I spot the double tonic in medieval
Continental Europe: Amor Potest - a double motet from the French Montpellier
111
Codex, which was compiled in Paris around 1300:

http://music000001.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/141-music-of-great-tradition-
41hocket.html
It looks quite primitive, in that the digits are very short and the pattern is just 0I
repeated apart from the cadence. From the hocketing there, perhaps it was
inspired by a folk tradition, such as that recorded from fishermen in Southern
Portugal:
http://www.portugalnummapa.com/leva-leva/
There are so many extraordinary, fascinating things out there. I've even been
told of a manuscript from Normandy which has organum at the second, but I
don't know its identity.
Oct 21, 2016
Thinking more widely, the crónan cadence can be compared with the classic
Arabic/Andalusian cadence: say: E-D-C-B-A-G (all prefaced by a short C) and
with the B, which is a narrow major second to the A, drawn out and embellished
to emphasize its flatness. I see most of the examples of descending cadences in
both the Hungarian laments are actually four-step descents rather than three-
step ones and in that they more closely resemble the Arabic cadence than do
most of our examples from the British Isles. I’m sure it’s right for me to stress
here again the clear divide between the Insular double-tonic system and the
tonic-dominant system of music elsewhere. The cyweirdant-tyniad system is built
out of imitation at the single step level whereas elsewhere the imitation is at the
fourth or the fifth, as in the tonic-dominant of Western music generally, the
durak-güçlü of maqam and the vadi-anuvadi of raga. Cerdd dant does have
imitation at the fourth or the fifth but it is restricted to operating within the
cyweirdant digits and within the tyniad digits of a piece, never between them.
Another way of explaining that is that if we took all the tyniad digits out of a piece
then all of its imitations and substitutions would be conventionally tonic-
dominant, and the same if we took all the cyweirdant digits out. That illustrates
the nature of the bimodality of double-tonic music: each of the two modes
behaves normally as viewed from other traditions; but what is extraordinary here
is that there are two modes, interwoven together in the measures.
Oct 22, 2016
… I guess the keyword here and in the crónan motif is gravity. The idea was
carried forward into the Baroque era with ground bass figures for 'lament' art
music. I suppose there might be some examples somewhere that instead of 4-3-
2-1 use the 3-2-1-1 of the Ballinderry crónan ground? I don't know.
Oct 22, 2016
Yes, that's it, except the same applies to all the music, not just to descending
patterns. And that bimodality is what marks out double-tonic music from all other
modal music, which is always monomodal, apart from when a piece modulates
from one mode into another. That might happen once or twice in a piece, as it
does in cerdd dant too.
I think the classic that says it all about your point about lyrics and descent is:
"Down among the dead men let him lie".
112
May 22, 2018
Paul Whittaker and I took a good look at that extract from Romania yesterday
[Lament from Romania, in Ben Dijkhuis: A pre-existential motif in Celtic music
forms, p. 47] and we agree that it isn’t the double tonic in the sense of how the
term is used in the British Isles, because the shift down is not set in a triadic
context. Although both lines span thirds nearly all the movement is stepwise, and
the scale is exotic with the G-sharp being an augmented fourth with the tonic D –
very Balkanesque. My feeling is that the shifting-down-a-second melodic device
here is closely allied to the Eastern European fascination with the interval of the
second which is most evident in much of the polyphony of the Balkans, in which
seconds very often manifest in the vertical sense. Here it is as if there is a
monophonic counterpart to that polyphony, where the principle of seconds is
manifesting in the linear or serial sense. The brief and abrupt drop or release at
the end of each phrase is highly characteristic of vocal melody in S. E. Europe,
and we feel the flavour is Romanian. The British and Irish double tonic is, as you
know, very much a triadic – and tetradic – affair.
May 24, 2018
Yes, that's exactly it. Van der Merwe uses it [the term ‘double tonic’] in such a
way that it is no longer useful as a definer of what we are specifically interested
in here - the central factor that unites much of the traditional music of Welsh,
Irish, English and Scottish culture and which we're using as the litmus test of
what will or may have been closely related way back in history, such as the music
of the Baltic psaltery and some instrumental music in Galicia.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF RENAISSANCE MUSIC TO CERDD DANT AND THE DOUBLE

TONIC
Oct 10, 2015
“… how is the hornpipe variation thing you're describing relate to

the extremely common Renaissance musical concept of playing divisions
on a melody? Which is something common to pretty much every instrument.”
Well, the music I’m talking about is double-tonic; that is, it is built on an implied
(not expressed) ground of just two notes a tone apart, not on an expressed
ground of more than two notes and one structured in tonic-dominant harmony. It
is associated with dance: generally the hornpipe but also the jig, and with
instruments used for dancing - generally the bagpipes and the fiddle, not with the
lute, cittern, guitar, virginals or the division viol. The variations tend to be
haphazard in their relationship to one another, not organized in the renaissance
manner. They all originate to the North and West of the British Isles and never
from Southern England or the Continent, although the double-tonic Reading Rota
implies that they had once covered Southern England.
Of all those distinguishing features, I think it is the double tonic that is the acid
test. These pieces operate on the same system of harmony as does the music in
the Robert ap Huw MS. The only substantial differences in the harmony are that it
is expressed in the chords of cerdd dant, the measures of cerdd dant are of
course generally much longer than the four bars of the dance music, and in cerdd
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dant several cycles of a measure or several measures are often combined to

make a single strain. But both the classical cerdd dant and the folk dance music
are based on measures of cyweirdant and tyniad - the Is and Os.
Divisions on a ground bass are rarely on grounds of just two notes a tone apart.
We can think of the ground as acting as a cantus firmus - a simple but entire tune
- on top of which is built a series of variations. Cerdd dant doesn’t work like that.
There’s a fundamental, major fork in the road of harmony that’s based on thirds -
you can either take the triadic route of having three notes in the diatonic series
that are consonant at any one time or you can take what I call the tetradic route
of having four notes that are consonant. Cerdd dant and the native, Insular dance
music go for the four. They show that there’s not just one available option for
harmony based on thirds but two options, and both are valid and in use today.
This is all quite difficult to write about clearly and quickly, but this is about the
best that I can do here. John Ward went into the differences you’re asking about
in his 1990 article on The Lancashire Hornpipe in a book ed. Lockwood and
Roesner, with illustrations, if you want to go into it more deeply …
THE CARRYING FORWARD OF DOUBLE-TONIC HARMONY
Oct 26, 2015
… here’s a list I’ve compiled from John Ward’s article of pieces on an expressed
double-tonic ground: that is, on just two notes a major second apart. These,
then, are the points where the folk tradition that relates to cerdd dant had a
direct input into the ground-bass and divisions renaissance music that you’ve
brought up.
Firstly, for lute, cittern or keyboard:
A horne pype (Hughe Aston): Royal Appendix 58, fol. 40v-44v.

A hornepippe: Folger MS, fol. 9r.
A Horne pipe (William Byrd, 1st 30 vars.): pr. Brown 1969, 137-43.
A hornpipe: BL Add. MS 15118, fol. 33v.
A horne pipe (Robert Hall, 1st 4 vars.): Bunbury MS, fols. 15v-17r.
The Knave of Clubs: Leycester MS, fol. 36r
Sedanny/Dargason: Ravenscroft, 1609, no. 30; Playford 1651, 71; etc.
The Scottish Jig: Robinson 1609, 15; etc.
A Scottish Jig: Leycester MS, fol. 35v
A Scottish Jig: Ballet MS, 83
Up with Aley, Aley
The woods so wild (Orlando Gibbons)
Sedanny here is associated with Wales.
Secondly, for division viol or violin:
The little house under the hill / Cork Hill

Whistling Jenny: Wright c. 1730, 9
Scotch Ground call’d the Hilland Laddy: Wright c. 1730, 14.
Jenny & Georgy: Wright c. 1730, 19.
The expressed ground in these cases may reflect a folk practice, as John Ward
cites depictions of countryside dance scenes where the violin is used together
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with one or two instruments - violin, oboe, ‘cello, bagpipe, bass viol - plus a late
17th century mention that in Oxfordshire the violin had hitherto been used in
consort only by common musicians, ‘who played but two parts’. In Scotland the
‘cello continued to be used at dances into the 20th century, to provide an
accompaniment described as ‘a kind of accented drone’ (Collinson, 1966, 226, n.
1). It would be nice to know if that had been a single drone or if it had been a
double-tonic ground.
Oct 27, 2015
P.S. That ‘cello accompaniment I was just talking about would have been a
double-tonic ground, to judge from Niel Gow’s basses. Apart from departures at
cadences they are generally on the two adjacent roots. His setting of The Flaggon
(aka The Flogging Reel) is a good example: the accompaniment is almost entirely
on two notes. To get back to earlier days, that is what I suggest could have been
played (an octave higher) on some double-chantered pipes, and on the crwth
trithant. In the instrumental double-tonic music of the Middle Ages it may have
been that cerdd dant was not alone in having an accompaniment part.
Oct 27, 2015
Yes, the double tonic and triadic harmony having been general to the British Isles
is borne out not just by the music in the ap Huw but by medieval English
polyphony, and by the Magnus hymn from Orkney etc. As to what happened to
the double tonic outside of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, it has survived in
unbroken traditions, in particularly Northumberland, Nova Scotia and the
Southern Appalachians. Then you’ve got the folk revival, which of course has
carried Irish traditional music across the world. There’ll be others on the list who
know much more than I do about this but I’d mention England, Holland, Germany
and Japan there.
Then you’ve got indirect connections. Hornpipes, especially in Lancashire, became

used for clog dancing. Clogging was exported from Liverpool to New York, where
it fed into the development of tap dancing. Tap in its turn had a big influence on
the development of jazz in New York. It means there’ll be a small bit of the spirit
of cerdd dant in the DNA of some jazz, not just in that of renaissance and
baroque music.
It’s a small planet!
May 7, 2019
My discovery of the double tonic running through the whole of the manuscript
changes the modern perception of the antiquity of the double tonic. It confirms
the already existing belief that in the world of Insular traditional dance music,
from Shetland to the Appalachians and the Ozarks, the tunes which are double-
tonic are older or in an older style than those based on Italian chord progressions
such as the passamezzo moderno and passamezzo antico. But it also strongly
implies the style is medieval, that the double-tonic dance music was the crwth
and pipe folk music that co-existed alongside cerdd dant. So I’m surprised that
the manuscript hasn’t yet prompted more survey work than it has by those
involved in the dance music tradition, to quantify the proportion of traditional
tunes which are double tonic - or are partly so - for each region. Then we would
have an atlas of that, showing to what extent tune styles reflect the harmonic
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theory of medieval cerdd dant and to what extent tune styles result from post-
medieval, Continental development.
A thorough survey of the distribution of the double tonic in North America would
be particularly interesting, because of the light it throws back, through the
migration routes, to regions of origin in the British Isles. One double-tonic hotspot
has been Cape Breton, a direct carry-over of Scottish Gaelic culture. The central
part of the Southern Appalachians, particularly Kentucky, has been another which
is more complex in its origins. The so-called Scots-Irish there are descended
primarily from plantation settlers in Ulster, who were originally drawn mainly
from the Border Region; that is, from across Northern England and the Southern
Uplands of Scotland. The Border Region has of course been a particular
stronghold of double-tonic piping and fiddling through to the present day, and it’s
worth me calling attention again to the ways in which Celtic customs lingered late
there and in the Welsh Marches, detailed in William Rees: ‘Survivals of Ancient
Celtic Customs in Medieval England’ in H. N. Savory: Angles and Britons (Cardiff,
1963), pp. 148-168. The total anglicization of yr Hen Ogledd, the ‘Old North’,
lagged very far behind that of Southern England. The suggestion, then, is that
the strong survival of the double tonic in the Border Region has been a legacy of
that. The plantation of Ulster included relatively small numbers from many areas
other than the Border Region, including from Wales (into Donegal for example).
See Rhys Morgan, ‘From Soldier to Settler: The Welsh in Ireland, 1558-1641’,
Ph.D. thesis, Cardiff, 2011. Welsh settlement in Ireland was highest in the
Munster plantation incidentally, reaching a proportion of about 17% of the total
population. Prior to 1609 Welsh settlers would have tended to be Catholic, and
after then almost all would have been Protestant. And some of the Ulster people
who emigrated to the North American colonies would have had Irish ancestors
who had converted from Catholicism to Presbyterianism. The whole background
to early Irish settlement in America is a complex one. The vast exodus later
because of the Famine was mainly direct to the major cities like New York, Boston
and Chicago, and by that time tune books meant that things like the double tonic
were rather universal in the English-speaking world. Early settlers direct from
Wales were mainly Quakers who would not have carried music with them.
If all the true historical and cultural significance of the double tonic became more
widely appreciated today, perhaps that might lessen the enthusiasm that session
musicians often have for adding common-practice harmonies to old double-tonic
tunes?
Nov 7, 2015
… Once again we see how music doesn't respect borders. People have always
been interested in music from elsewhere. That transnational aspect of music I'm
sure will be part of the attraction of ethnomusicology for good socialists such as
A. L. Lloyd. Their work is an important counterbalance to the co-option of music
into the service of nationalism which is so very prevalent at the moment in
traditional music.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF BRETON MUSIC TO THE DOUBLE TONIC
Oct 31, 2015
Yes, I reckon that [Greg ar C’hroazour in Barzaz Breiz] is almost standard double-
tonic, and certainly triadic. Well spotted! Is there much more of the same?
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If that style is ancient in Brittany, as it might be, it makes me think again of a

British culture along the seaboard once stretching down to Galicia and Asturias.
In this connection, there are brief records of there having been a style of part-
singing in Cornwall.
And the early mention of thirds as being favoured by clerical singers in the West
Country (i.e. of England).
Oct 31, 2015
Thanks … .
I guess there's no simple answer to how reliable de la Villemarqué was and how
old these tunes might be, so that has to be borne in mind and these tunes kept in
context.
TUNING AND INTONATION IN CERDD DANT
Oct 21, 2014
I think I'd better run through the basics of these aspects of my work on tuning
and intonation.
It's not that we have a lack of names for inflected notes. We have a sufficiency of
them. See chapters 2 and 3 in my dissertation on tuning, especially about
dyrchafaeldant, tro tant and breiniol. So, as we already have a cerdd dant
vocabulary for what we would today call sharps and flats, there isn't a vacancy
there into which we can slot the concept of cywair. Let's put it in terms of houses.
The house of sharps and flats is already taken with tenants. Meanwhile, there is a
vacancy in the next house down the road - intonation. And it's a very big house,
with an awfully big number of rooms, and a lot of corridors, staircases, lofts and
what have you. Fire-escapes even. That size and complexity is something that
musicians who are used to thinking in terms of bungalows - single-line melody -
monody - find it takes time to get to know their way around. But we have an
awful lot of homeless people and this big empty house. I'm suggesting they
belong together.
Why is the house of intonation so big and so empty? And why have we got so
many homeless people? The music in the ms. isn't single-line melody, it's very
full and complex harmony, characterized by thirds, with various pieces in modes
which are different from one another and in pitch levels of harmony that are
different from one another too. The toughest thing to grasp and accept about
fully-developed harmony, no matter whether that's modern harmony or this
ancient harmony, is that perfection is always, necessarily, out of reach. We
cannot square the circle. Compromise has to be reached. It's frustrating. A just
intonation solution which is perfect for one piece will make a mess out of another
piece, so some tuning adjustment is needed as you switch between pieces. But
for most pieces there is no just intonation solution that can be perfect, because
those pieces have got more chords in them than just intonation can cope with! I
don't think … that you've taken on board how fantastically mature the music is.
It's not just that it's from outside of our experience but that it's very
sophisticated too. So, if just intonation can't cope with most pieces, what can we
fall back on? The modern world, facing again the same problems but in different
contexts, has fallen back on equal temperament as a basic strategy. That doesn't
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give pure thirds so singers and players of instruments where notes can be bent
usually make ad hoc adjustments, temperings, as they go along, to do their best
to get as many pure chords as they can. Alas, you can't do that on the harp.
Another set of fallbacks is meantone temperaments, and amongst those are 1/4-
comma which gives pure major thirds and 1/3-comma which gives pure minor
thirds, but no meantone temperaments give pure fifths, and that's a bit of a
shame. You get the picture. Whatever their solutions were, there would have to
have been many of them. And as I say, we have a lot of cyweiriau terms hanging
around, about twenty of them, homeless, but the inflection house is already
occupied.
A non-starter in all this is Pythagorean intonation btw, because that makes a

mess of thirds, and thirds of course is what we've got so much of here.
Pure intervals aren't considered to be a good thing in lots of kinds of music of

course, but here I believe they were.
It was a long road that was trodden over the centuries for the modern world to
arrive at its solution to harmony. The same must have been true for this ancient
harmony, so now it's a complex thing to unpick how intonation came to be
handled here at the end of their road. In the end for us it comes down to knowing
exactly what is in each piece and, even more usefully, what is NOT in each piece,
and then crunching the numbers on that info. The results of my work on that are
in my chapter 9.
Other things. Gosteg Dafydd Athro is associated with the Bragod Gywair in the
tune lists? Are you sure about that … ?
Occam's Razor - no, that isn't normally applied where you've got two competing
theories. I'd say it's to do with keeping hypotheses to a minimum. If you don't
need to construct a hypothesis, it's agreed (in the secular world) that it's better if
you don't do it. But I can't find it mentioned in my dissertation on tuning.
Coming now to [the] point that cywair as gross retuning is a blind alley, if you
want to try to re-open that alley … you need first to overturn each and every one
of the contra-arguments I set out in pp. 33-49. That's a formidable task I think.
Nov 24, 2018
Yes … Gwysaney 28 (c. 1562-4) f.72r item 35 is ‘kanniad kadwgon’; item 36 is ‘y

kanniad mawr i gadwgon’, and both are listed under ‘kras gowair’. That, however,
is the only source that has ‘kadwgon’ and ‘gadwgon’: the other closely related
sources of caniadau listed under a cras heading all have ‘ca. bach i gydwgi’ and
‘ca. mawr i gydwgi’ in place of those two items.
Nov 25, 2018
But looking into it further ‘kanniad kadwgon’ appears also under cras headings in
BL 15046 p. 74 and Havod 24 p. 796.
It is possible that these sources could be in error, that they could have wrongly
identified the title ‘caniad bach i gydwgi’ with the piece Caniad Cadwgan, but
there’s no obvious indication that that was the case. The entabulated piece is
indeed relatively short, i.e. ‘bach’, and ‘caniad Cadwgan’ does not necessarily
imply that Cadwgan was the composer and not the dedicatee. Nevertheless, it’s
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not possible on these bases to conclude that Gwysaney 28 [NLW 17116B] etc. are
definitely not erroneous and so I encourage everyone to avoid considering this
issue as closed. To sum up how I feel about the current situation: we have
evidence of the entabulated piece being ‘ar y cras gywair’ and so have to proceed
on that basis but perhaps – who can tell? - that evidence might one day be
faulted. What do others feel?
Aug 2, 2016
I think I can get bit further with the ‘och-one’ crónan keening motif. I should
have thought of this before: it can be played on the Celtic three-note instrument.
Which instrument has only three consecutive notes? The flared quadrangular cast
bronze hand-bell of the early church in Scotland, from around the 9th century.
John Purser (Scotland’s Music, Edinburgh 1992, p. 39) noticed in the three
surviving examples he examined that the clapper produces three different notes
according to which of the four faces it strikes. He cites examples of tone +
semitone and tone + tone, so they could have been used to play both the minor
and the major versions of the motif. John reports that the capacity to produce
these notes is unique to this design and that “Irish bronze bells, which are
generally less flared, hint at it but do not achieve it”. I gather early Welsh cast
bronze bells don’t either but perhaps they need further looking into. As the sound
of these Scottish bells carries several miles they obviously were used to summon
people to church, so I can imagine them being tolled in the crónan sequence to
signal a funeral.
It would be good to know the exact intonations of all the examples and
particularly whether the thirds are pure or not because that ought to give some
insight into the possibilities of the intonations used on the stringed instruments of
the period. In my dissertation on tuning in the manuscript I’ve made a case for
1/4-comma meantone, particularly for many of the pieces, and for just intonation
also, for a few of the remainder, and I think that Pythagorean intonation is less
likely. If the proposition of 1/4-comma meantone strikes anyone as rather
advanced for the Middle Ages, it’s well worth me pointing out that a huge set of
65 ancient Chinese bells from 433 B.C., each producing two strike tones (a pure
major or minor third apart, as the Scottish bells can), has revealed quite reliable
data on intonation: 1/4-comma meantone gives the best fit, better than just
intonation or 1/3-comma meantone, and Pythagorean intonation was not used;
that is, all fifths were tempered to approximate 696 cents in order to yield pure
major and minor thirds. See http://www.neuroscience-of-
music.se/Zengbells.htm. The inference is that once a culture concentrates on
thirds it will adjust the fifths and develop 1/4-comma meantone.
I wonder if the impetus for developing metal strings came from the impact of
bells? They were highly revered in the Celtic regions.
Aug 5, 2016
Looking into those questions now [on if there are any other hints from medieval
bells about intonation] it doesn’t look very promising. As regards sets of frame-
mounted cymbala I don’t think any medieval sets have survived. The 12th-
century account of bellfounding by Theophilus clearly uses Pythagorean intonation
for cymbala, although this may originate from Germany and might be only to
illustrate intonational theory and not actual practice. Before the 17th century
belfry-type church bells were generally only rung solo, not as a set. Then when
change-ringing was brought in it seems that 1/4-comma and 1/5-comma
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meantone were used, as on organs.
What seems clear from what I’m reading is that the casting of multi-tone bells
was imprecise because it’s very difficult indeed to pitch accurately more than one
tone within a single bell. So I suppose that if the Scottish thirds were way off
being pure that would be understandable, expecially when you bring in the
centuries of damage. But the fact that they are reported as thirds and not fourths
or fifths suggests that they were at least aiming at pure thirds, and that implies in
a diatonic context that either a meantone or just intonation would have been the
preference. And that is a slightly stronger implication of tertian temperament
than we can get from the manuscript itself, since of course that includes fourths
and fifths as well as thirds.
INTONATION FOR THE LYRE
Dec 10, 2015
It depends very much on what music you're playing, and what period it comes
from, what intonation would be appropriate. For medieval six-stringed lyre or
harp music, I suggest just intonation or meantone temperaments, especially if
you're playing chords and particularly thirds, which is what I expect the six-
stringed accompaniment lyre was used for. See my writing on intonation at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/aphuw/aphuw-t.pdf pp.
74-84 for a discussion of just and meantone in relation to the medieval harp, but
I'm sure it's highly relevant to North European medieval lyres as well. I use these
happily on my lyres, and getting to grips with these types of intonation should
prove very helpful.
RECENT ADVANCES IN INTONATION, CYWEIRDANT AND TYNIAD
Jun 5, 2017
I’m pleased to hear you’re still looking into the ‘cywair’ issue. I can offer an
account of the development of my experience of intonation in my realisations of
the music that was intabulated in the manuscript during the years since I wrote
my ‘Tuning’ dissertation in 2000, in my ‘Tuning Supplement’ of last March, online
at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/aphuw/aphuwtuning.pdf.
I believe it solves the long-standing query over the full meaning and origin of the
terms ‘cyweirdant’ and ‘tyniad’ which were the fundamental lynchpin of their
musical theory and of the music itself. But it does not offer a conclusive solution
to all the challenges presented by the ‘cywair’ terms, particularly that such very
different pieces shared in being designated as ‘bragod gywair’ and as ‘cras
gywair’. It does outline the areas in which more research is needed, and since I
wrote the Supplement I’ve become confident that those bragod gywair and cras
gywair disparities are capable of solution; that is, that they are not the result of
faulty recording.
Jun 6, 2017
Yes, 'cywair' certainly can't be rushed. It needs to be approached from every

angle, each time with a fresh mind, ready for absolutely anything. It's a very hard
nut! And that nagging suspicion lurks, that if and when it's sorted it’ll be revealed
to be so simple. So many mysteries to do with the music have turned out to have
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simple answers.
Jun 13, 2017
I’ll explain more about what I’ve found now about the pieces’ intonation. My
understanding is that music worked on a system of dual intonation, such that
the cyweirdant tetrads were just and the tyniad ones tempered, and that that is
exactly what ‘cyweirdant’ and ‘tyniad’ meant. An attempt has been made to
explain those terms as a consequence of a supposed inherent dissonance in the
intervals used in tyniad chords, a dissonance which is supposed to be lacking in
cyweirdant chords. This attempt fails because tyniadau actually use the same
range of intervals as cyweirdannau do. It's true that in double-tonic music played
on drone instruments like the pipes the ‘away’ notes form intervals with the
drones which ‘home-chord’ notes do not, but this doesn’t apply in cerdd dant:
with its moving harmony the same intervals are formed in both tyniadau and
cyweirdannau. Only when any particular interval, such as the fourth, is
understood to be pure in a cyweirdant but impure in a tyniad can the terms
cyweirdant and tyniad be unravelled. When we play or listen to the music, unless
that dynamic intonational contrast is present, we are missing the very heart of
the music. Every piece was made out of that contrast, all of their harmonies and
all of their metres. The tunes and the chords were all built out of intonational
contrast: impurity resolved into purity, ‘blue’ notes resolved by ‘clean’ ones,
tyniadau always followed by cyweirdannau.
It seems they actually characterised tyniadau as ‘blue’, along with cyweirdannau

as ‘white’. The simplest measure: 0101010101 etc. was named ‘Calchlassar’:
‘llasar’ is blue, as in ‘azure’, and ‘calch’ white, as derived from lime: for a deep
examination of these words (in an armorial context) see Jenny Day, ‘Shields in
Welsh Poetry up to c. 1300’, Studia Celtica XLV (2011), pp. 33-40. ‘White’ of
course is associated with purity.
It is this impure-to-pure progression which I believe Gerald was accurately

describing in his “tam dispari paritate, tam discordi concordia” (“such unequal
equality, such discordant concord”) and his report of the returning (to B-fa) so
that everything may be rounded out with “all the suavity and pleasure of
delightful sonority” (trans. Philip Weller).
The presence of ‘blue’ notes also helps to account for Stanihurst’s passage in his
critique of the 16th century Irish nail harpers [in translation]: “that barbarous din
… from their discordant and badly-strung harps”, that he took a native stylistic
feature and chose to use it as an opportunity to misrepresent their collective level
of competence. I’ll expand on the theme of the barbarous din later.
Nov 27, 2017
… I’m sure that Gerald was highly perceptive about the music which captivated
him so much, and that he perceived with surprise and admiration the alternating
impurity and purity of its chords, as he wrote: “tam dispari paritate. tam discordi
concordia”. What else could he have meant here? Certainly not the alternation
between fourths and fifths he mentions, as they were commonplace as perfect
concords in Parisian plainchant and would not have struck his ear as being in
themselves at all remarkable.
Jun 14, 2017
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"That barbarous din". The tuning which achieves a just cyweirdant tetrad for
the Mixolydian mode, for A-C-E-G, which I presented on p. 42 of the Tuning
Supplement, is one which is quite familiar to our ears. The Highland pipes are
generally designed to give out from the chanter notes for the 1st, 3rd, 5th and
6th steps which are just with the drones. The other steps are markedly not so,
and it is these that are responsible for the reputation of the pipes as being ‘out-
of-tune’. Here are the figures in cents for the differences to equal temperament,
first for the bagpipe (1954 survey) and then for the harp:
8th step -4 0
7th step +20 +18
6th step -13 -16
5th step +4 +2
4th step +15 +9
3rd step -17 -14
2nd step -4 -7
1st step 0 0
A measure of the overall difference between the two scales (pipe and harp) is the
sum of the squares of the differences on each step, which is 87. That compares
with pipe comparisons to Pythagorean intonation: 1,967, to equal temperament:
1,131, to 1/4-comma meantone: 389, and to 1/3-comma meantone: 342. In
other words, it is a very close match indeed relatively speaking. It may very well
be, then, that on the pipes not only the double tonic itself but double-tonic
intonation as well has survived and been carried forward from medieval music.
And I’m sure Stanihurst would have described the pipes as a barbarous din.
Jun 15, 2017
Thanks. Yes, equal temperament is very different indeed from these double-tonic
scales. It robs the double tonic of its power, by flattening out all the intonational
contrast, such as the Highland pipes have.
That set of dual intonations in my last post serves the Mixolydian mode: it is one
of two ways in which a just tetrad can be formed in that mode. It gives a just G-B
as well, to form a just ‘pentad’: A-C-E-G-B. The other way gives a just pentad F-
A-C-E-G, and for each of the other modes there are two tunings with similar
results. But the most common tuning that the pieces in the ms. require is that A-
C-E-G-B one, which I call the superior or upper Mixolydian pentad, and that is the
one which so closely resembles the Highland pipes.
The dual intonation solution to cyweirdant-tyniad makes sense of the double tonic
construction in all the music that is made out of the double tonic, and so I
suggest that artistically all double tonic music is best played using dual
intonation. Although you’ll notice the -4 cents figure on the pipes for the 8th step:
high A. That isn’t a mistake. It reflects the fact that many piobaireachd players
have preferred, and some still do prefer, a substantially flat octave interval here,
as a considered choice. I like it too, in piobaireachd, for a warlike flavour. But for
dance music and cerdd dant it would reduce the all-important contrast between
cyweirdant and tyniad, by slightly souring the cyweirdannau. The contrast is
strongest when all the cyweirdant notes – generally they number four but
sometimes five – are all just.
Jun 15, 2017
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Yes, the Ionian mode needs different intonation from the Mixolydian mode. The
superior Ionian pentad is achieved by setting these fifths just: F-C, D-A and A-E,
and by the others tempered by the 1/2-comma. Although some intonations serve
more than one mode …
Jul 2, 2017
I think the main point about llasar is that blue contrasts with calch – white; it
introduces a darker tone. The compound noun calchlasar is used in the time of
the Princes, to indicate shield and armour decoration, and its origin is attributed
to the mythical Irish figure Llasar Llaes Gyngwyd. ‘Llasar’ is derived from the
Persian lāzhward: lapis lazuli, via an unidentified language (not Latin), although
Day notes the Old Irish lasar: flame, fire.
But the musical terms themselves give the strongest indication of their meaning.
Tyniad as a stretching, a tensioning, in contrast to cywair as a proper order, or
even as a restoration of health, carries the sense of the narrative of the
measures, that maladjustment is corrected into proper order. The wonkiness of
tyniad digits is brought into alignment by the cyweirdant digits. The music
portrays the processes of healing, the acts of curing. Can we see the four notes of
the tetrad as the four humours of medieval medicine being brought into balance?
It also, as I touched on in the Tuning Supplement, expresses the strong

partisanship of Christianity in respect of Christianity’s dualism. It encourages the
search for Redemption. I think not enough is known about pre-Christian Celtic
spirituality to know if the music could have had the same appeal before
Christianity was introduced, but the Celtic Otherworld seems not to have had the
same imperative about it that the Christian Heaven has?
In terms of the militaristic nature of medieval Welsh society, as drama the

measures are tales of triumph. The associations of the music with Cadwaladr and
Arthur place it into the context of the Celtic Heroic Age. And it’s interesting that
the heroic ethos dominated Norse mythology, where the tales are either that the
giants launch an attack to gain territory from the gods and godesses which is
repulsed, or the gods and godesses launch an attack on the giants and succeed in
gaining territory. I can see here the difference between those measures which
begin with tyniadau and those which begin with cyweirdannau.
Then of course there is all the dragon-slaying mythology found everywhere…
Jul 4, 2017
That’s all very interesting. See what more you can dig up on the medieval
associations of blue?
As regards white, the curious word ‘alban’ which crops up so much in the
repertory lists comes from the Indo-European for white, and I’ve long wondered if
it refers to white-robed priests or monks rather than to Scotland (which occurs in
the lists in its normal Welsh form as ‘Sgotland’, as in Wiliam Ysgotland – which
would refer to William the Lion). The White Monks were the Cistercians, and I’ve
gathered a little evidence for arguing that ‘alban’ was used in connection with
them. ‘Calchlasar’ is an archaic term though, so the association of tyniad with
white may well predate the arrival of the Cistercians. I wonder, then, what
colours were worn by the monks of the clasau, and by the Celi De ones, etc.?
123
The medieval Church as a whole greatly patronised music and poetry, but as to
their use in pagan ceremony, for what it may be worth, there’s the reference by
Diodorus Siculus to the land of the Hyperboreans: “There is also in the island a
precinct sacred to Apollo and suitably imposing, and a notable temple decorated
with many offerings and looking like a globe. There is also a community sacred to
this god, where most of the inhabitants are trained to play the lyre and do so
continuously in the temple and worship the god with singing, celebrating his
deeds”.
This suggests that the eulogising of heroes that was so common in Indo-
European culture had its roots in religious worship. Or perhaps the two had
always run side-by-side.
Jul 5, 2017
Um, yes, as you say, it's better to stick with classical or medieval sources. Or see
what the study of psychology has to offer on blue and white together.
I wonder if the combination has anything to do with the blue-and-white crossed

saltire, as on the flag of Scotland, where it is supposed to represent the white
cross on which St Andrew was crucified set against a field of blue sky. The
crossed saltire is a design that was associated with music: it appears on the
Trinity College and Queen Mary harps and on the representation of a harp in
stone at Keills and on a stone slab at St Kevin's 'Kitchen' at Glendalough, the
Irish monastery associated with cerdd dant and with Kevin's 'harp'.
It isn't known what designs were used on calchlasar shields. Perhaps they
included saltires.
Architecture, boats and furniture in Greece are dominated by the blue-and-white

of the flag of the modern state, where the thinking is that blue is the sky and
white the waves of the sea. Note, then, that in the case of both Scotland and
Greece the blue is the field, the background, and the white the figure. Perhaps
the right way of hearing cerdd dant is tyniad as ground and cyweirdant as figure,
and in practice they hit my ears rather in that way.
Jul 8, 2017
Yes, how interesting, that blue recedes but draws you in. That matches with how
I feel attracted to tempered tyniad chords. They seem opaque, mysterious, and
enticingly so, whereas cyweirdant chords can positively gleam with light. That’s
especially so where the onset of a cyweirdant follows some tyniad digits and
contains a triad, as at 96.1.16 and 97.3.1. A shift toward maximum accessibility,
maximum brilliance.
In terms of timbral texture, tempered tyniad chords are rough and just
cyweirdant ones smooth. Tyniad chords have friction and suggest heat, which
may account for why the measure calor with its high proportion of tyniadau was
named for heat.
Has anyone been able to dig up info on the colours worn by the Insular Christian
priesthood, and by the monks? I see that the Cambrai Homily associates ‘blue’
(Irish glas) martyrdom with self-denial such as fasting and ‘white’ martyrdom
with the more extreme separation and withdrawal of the peregrini, and that’s in
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accord with my interpretation of cywair as more pure than tyniad in the spiritual
sense.
Aug 7, 2018
I see now that it gets stated online, although no sources are given, that the
Culdees wore white robes. I continue to wonder if the Cambrai Homily account of
blue and white martyrdom was reflective of the colours worn by the monks. …
Aug 20, 2018
… The Bonhommes didn’t make it to Wales, but it’s interesting to learn that they
wore blue robes. I wonder why that was so. They were fairly mainstream and not
descended from escapee Cathars, at least not in the 15th and 16th centuries at
Ashridge – I’ve researched them before. The white-robed Cistercians were
numerous in Wales – 18 houses, many of them large, and they very much
patronised cerdd dafod and so no doubt cerdd dant too. But the blue and white
martyrdom which I suggest relates to the blue and white of calchlasar is from an
earlier age – the Age of the Saints.
Jul 9, 2017
To put the monastic background into context, it is estimated that there would
have been between 150 and 200 Welsh clas monasteries. Bangor Is-Coed,
perhaps the largest, once had populations according to one account of 2,100 and
by another of 1,200. It is thought that the original standard model was to have
the main settlement around the church and in addition remote daughter
settlements, possibly seasonal ones, for isolated retreat. I wonder, then, because
of the report in the Cambrai Homily, if those in the clas itself once wore blue and
those on retreat white, but I’m beginning to think that it may not be known if the
claswyr wore any particular colours or not. I'd be grateful for any information on
that, in respect of all the Celtic regions.
Jul 11, 2017
Glastonbury, reputedly founded by St David and associated with Bangor Is-Coed,

would have been a clas, up until about 970 when it was taken over by the
Benedictines. The word ‘clas’ doesn’t imply anything about the colours worn by
the monks. I expect the origin of the ‘glas’ in ‘Glastonbury’ is obscure, but it has
a Welsh or Brythonic flavour.
Aug 16, 2017
This passage about the cynnwys dannau from the Dosparth (Peniarth 62, p. 18)
must be very important. Yes, your suggestion that the four cyweirdannau
gweinion or cynnwys dannau have “not one number (un rhif) between them” and
“not one movement (un gerdded) to them” may indicate that they were
tempered. The main difficulty with that interpretation is that it yields only three
cyweirdannau cryfion rather than the four notes that in the manuscript a
cyweirdant manifestly is drawn from. For example, if in the C harmonic mode only
C, E and G are just and A is not, then one winds up with cyweirdant chords such
as C-G-A or A-E which are not wholly just. And it was that very ‘A’ factor which
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caused me (see from p. 41 onwards in the Tuning Supplement) to move on from

aiming at a just triad C-E-G, which I had developed through tuning some fifths
and fourths using 1/3-comma meantone, to a just tetrad A-C-E-G which I got
with the 1/2-comma partial meantone. Having now listened to both a lot, I’ve got
to say I’m in awe of the effect of the 1/2-comma technique. With the Highland
pipe we’re used to the 1-0 intonational contrast against the drone, but in the
chordal context of cerdd dant the contrast is fantastically effective: totally clean
cyweirdant chords contrasted with tyniad ones which have real crunch to them.
This harmony has a pulsating life that…, well, it’s a new experience for the ear, a
dimension we’ve never heard before in any chordal music.
It has been said of Venice that if it isn’t actually sinking, it ought to be! Here, if
the tradition wasn’t using a dual system of just and tempered intonation, I reckon
it ought to have been!
Oct 24, 2017
Thanks… - very interesting [re the possibility that the citole was tuned, like the
cetra and cittern were, in such a way as to produce an accompaniment of
alternating drones a second apart, as suggested by Ephraim Segerman].
Alternating drones.
We can look at the double tonic as tonic and subtonic or we can look at it as
formed from two adjacent modes, and that is a more accurate way because the
notes used during a cyweirdant or a tyniad are not confined to those of the
relevant root triad but can - and often do - include most or all of the notes of the
diatonic scale. So really, the double tonic is a combination of two modes. So, for
example, in the 'Mixolydian mode' pieces, the tyniadau are formed by switching
out of that and into the Lydian mode. It is a fundamentally different system from
that of all other modal music, in that it has these short-range oscillations, these
short-range modulations, constantly pointing up the difference between pure and
tempered intervals. It is bimodal music, as opposed to monomodal music. It is, to
the ear, what binocular vision is to the eyes, as opposed to monocular vision. It
has the added dimension of depth to it. It's a brilliant system.
Nov 26, 2017
Yes, it’s getting more and more fascinating, that Gerald perhaps didn’t know the
whole story. But at least he had a suspicion that there was a Viking involvement,
in the two-part singing of the English north of the Humber and in the York district
which he wrote was similar in its harmony to the multipart singing of the Welsh.
On the other hand, I had always thought that the hugely puzzling lack of any
explanation of what a cyweirdant was and what a tyniad was meant that they
must have been so widespread across Western Europe that it was felt there was
no need to explain them. But now with the dual intonation solution I see there
was no need to explain them because the terms were, after all, simply and
straightforwardly self-explanatory.
Nov 26, 2017
And despite all the wider possibilities I should say I think it’s correct to stick with
Gerald’s experience and today categorize the music and its system of harmony as
‘Medieval Celtic’, with the proviso that the Northern English harmony he noted
126
may well have also been double-tonic (perhaps as a legacy of earlier Celtic
practice) as was the Southern English Reading Rota and other vocal pieces.
Sep 4, 2017
… On the subject of Ireland, can anyone help with this: I have quite a large
compilation of notices of ‘cyweirdant’ and ‘tyniad’ from Welsh poetry. Have all the
Irish language texts been combed for musical terms? Would O’Curry have found
them all? I know there are about five times as many Welsh strict-metre texts as
there are Irish, but there ought to be some chance that corresponding terms are
there to be found.
Sep 6, 2017
Thinking again about the terms O’Curry discussed, perhaps there’s a slight
chance that the musical term ‘dord’ and its antonym ‘an-dord’ might have served
as counterparts to ‘cyweirdant’ and ‘tyniad’. The related word ‘ord’ means order.
Another possible pair is ‘rind’ and ‘leithrind’. I guess those are the sorts of
pairings one would keep an eye out for in searching the poems.
Sep 6, 2017
Yes, that's right. What I'm thinking is that O'Davoran's Glossary was meaning
that 'rind' is fully harmonious, and that 'leith-rind' is only half so in the sense that
the purity is compromised. That is a different explanation from the usual one: the
idea that 'leith-rind' might refer to either one of the two halves of the harp's
strings. But quite a few more notices of them as a pair would be needed before
some clarity on this could be gleaned, I feel. …
Sep 8, 2017
I think it’s a case of a specialist searching through the poems, looking for relevant
pairings, paying particular attention to these that we’ve discussed here from the
glossaries, especially ‘binn’. That turns up in Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh’s harp
poem in the line “a nuallánach bhinn bhlasda”, but without an opposing term such
as one relating to ‘ciubdius’ [sic.]. If there’s a searchable database of bardic
poems such as there is for the Irish language post 1650 a search would help but
that would not throw up a relevant pairing that wasn’t evident from the
glossaries. An Irish counterpart to Henry Holland Carter’s Dictionary of Middle
English Musical Terms is needed, and perhaps that is already in progress?
Sep 8, 2017
Thanks. I think the general feeling has been that 'dord' and the other terms it is
associated with refer to different types of voice production, as this example
clearly does. Nevertheless, the opposition between 'dord' and 'an-dord' makes it a
bit of a candidate for intonational contrast, I feel.
My interpretation of 'cyweirdant' and 'tyniad' opens up such a kaleidoscope of

intonational colour in cerdd dant that I would expect it to have been remarked
upon in Irish; the issue could turn out to be: are there enough Irish poems to
have captured it?
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Sep 8, 2017
Ah, I’ve got further with ‘cuibdius’. I thought it was familiar. I have this in a copy
from a book [Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1961)] p. 86: cuibdius
(m. u) (subst. formed from cubaid) ‘rime’. And more precisely, p. 28: The Irish
words for this final foot (comprising the final syllables of a line of syllabic verse)
were rinn and tarmforcenn. When it was thought of as a foot that rhymed it was
called cuibdius or cubaid.
Also, in Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics,

p. 119: The term cuibdius ‘harmony’ and cubaid ‘harmony’ is sometimes used of
‘rhyme’, from com + fid ‘of like stave, fid ‘wood’ also ‘(Ogam) letter name’.
Interestingly, Kuno Meyer suggested a connection between ‘cubaid’ and ‘cywydd’.
So, coming back to ‘binnius’ and ‘cuibdius’, insofar as they may relate to one
another through opposition, I wonder if the former relates to instrumental
accompaniment and the latter to accompanied vocal performance of rhymed
poetry?
Anyway, they both seem to carry a sense of harmoniousness, of agreement, so

I’m afraid they don’t seem to be what we’re on the look-out for here?
Sep 9, 2017
Grattan Flood had turned Meyer's 'cuibdius' into 'ciubdius'. That's what made the
word difficult for us to trace.
David was understood to have sung the psalms with the accompaniment of his
lyre, so I think the original text was describing those two components to
psalmody.
Sep 12, 2017
More on ‘tyniad’. The cognate in Irish is ‘tarraingt’, from ‘tarraing’, to pull, the
cognate of Welsh ‘tynnu’. Related to ‘tynnu’ are Latin ‘trahere’, Old Norse ‘toga’,
Middle Cornish ‘tenna’, Middle Breton ‘tennaff’. For an English translation of
‘tyniad’ in this context I’d suggest ‘tension’: a stretched condition, from Latin
‘tensionem’: a stretching.
‘Cywair’ seems to have no recognised cognates whatsoever -

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
Brythonic/k%C3%BCw%C4%97r but Old Irish ‘cubaid’ is accepted as cognate
with ‘cywydd’ so perhaps it is also cognate with ‘cywair’ (compare ‘cywair’ and
‘cywydd’). This needs the help of scholars of Irish.
For an English translation of ‘cywair’ in opposition to ‘tyniad’ I’d suggest

‘reparation (of harmony)’.
What, I wonder, is the significance of ‘cubaid’ as ‘a letter of the Ogham alphabet’?
Sep 14, 2017
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Well done [re a calling of attention to the metre reicne]. This is relevant. It’s our
friend ‘cubaid’ again. The metre is called reicne dechubaid: two-harmonied
poetry. I’m using Gerard Murphy here: Early Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1961). Other
metres with similar names are cetharchubaid, lánchuibdius and salchuibdius. Each
term refers to a particular rhyme scheme, so in reicne dechubaid there are two
rhymes involved in a stanza. The cywydd metre is in rhyming couplets, and
perhaps ‘cywydd’, like ‘cubaid’, originally referred to the rhymings.
But the ogham letter names - it seems to me - extend the use of ‘cubaid’ beyond
rhyme, more into conceptual consonance – the tree names. Perhaps they were
considered cubaid because they fitted together and belonged together, to form an
agreeable set. If so, that would be rather like the notes of a cyweirdant fitting
together with one another well through just intervals. So perhaps ‘cubaid’ might
have been the musical counterpart of ‘cywair’ after all, and not only an indicator
of rhyme. I guess it would probably be worth bearing it in mind if anyone was to
start going through the poems?
Sep 17, 2017
More on cywair. Thanks … for pointing out to me years ago that it is cognate with
Irish cóir. I see there is a hypothesized proto-Celtic adjective *kowaris, “just”,
“rightful”, “correct”, to account for Brythonic *küwėr, Old Welsh couer, Middle
Welsh kyweir and Modern Welsh cywair, and also on the Irish side to account for
Old Irish coair and the Modern Irish noun and adjective cóir, the cognate of Welsh
cywair. This is in sympathy with the understanding of cyweirdant as a just chord
played on a stringed instrument, and so cóir should be expected as involved in
the same in an Irish or Scottish Gaelic context.
Indeed it occurs in the description of the Dagda’s cruit, as coircethaircuir, and, as

O’Curry points out, in the poem by Geoffrey Keating to his harper Tadhg
O'Cobthaigh and in the Brehon Laws in relation to a broken string. O’Curry
pointed out also that it is cognate with Welsh cywair, although he believed that to
indicate either “key” or “mode”.
In contrast, so far it seems to me that cywydd and cubaid seem to relate to

poetry rather than to instrumental music.
AVOIDANCE OF THE TRITONE
Nov 11, 2015
I think there are two big problems with having E as flat in Caniad Bach ar y
Gogywair. Easily overlooked is the fundamental fact that it’s not marked as flat in
the tablature. The second is the tritones that E-flat creates when sounded with
the A below, which is why E-flat makes the piece sound so very very odd and
completely out of kilter with not just this piece when played with E-natural but
with the whole of the rest of the tablature. Tritones come thick and fast with an
E-flat in section 1, making their first appearances at 44.1.1, 44.1.15, 44.2.1,
44.2.3, 44.2.6, 44.2.16, 44.2.18, 44.2.20. Those types of motif carry on through
to section 8 where they get joined by more ‘tritonal’ ones at 45.3.12 and in
section 9 at 45.4.17. If it was that the odd brief passing tritone got created, that
would be credible, but here tritones become structural and endemic.
That’s what I’d call the Heavy Metal approach to deciphering the manuscript, but
I don’t think Black Sabbath were around in the Middle Ages!
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Nov 11, 2015
Yes indeed, you bet it [the insertion of the tritone through introducing E-flat into
Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair] sounds odd! Depending on the precise intonation
system used, we’d be looking at intervals of things like 729/512 or 88/63, i.e.
one where the vibrations are famously not combining happily. Compare those
figures with a pure fifth from A to E natural: an interval of 3/2 - somewhat
sweeter!
It’s not because an E-flat here repeatedly breaks all musical common sense that I
derived E natural, but it certainly helps to confirm that I was right. If I had had
tritones everywhere I would've gone straight back to the drawing-board.
Nov 13, 2015
So … if you accept my single tuning with the B-flat for all the pieces other than
these two [Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair and Caniad Tro Tant], do you take the
point that these diminished fifths in prominent positions produced by having an E-
flat in Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair are massively incongruent with the simple,
harmonious intervals found everywhere else: the perfect fifths and fourths, along
with all the thirds and sixths?
There has been a strand of thought, still current in some circles perhaps, that has
floated the idea that tyniad chords might be dissonant within themselves, to
contrast not just in modality but in texture with cyweirdant chords. A very long
time ago I myself thought that that might have been the case in respect of tyniad
chords, but my single tuning solution yields perfect fifths for both tyniad and
cyweirdant harmony throughout, and of course this is what we find for all music
in the entire double-tonic tradition. But here in Caniad Bach it’s not tyniad chords
but cyweirdant ones that you’re suggesting feature diminished fifths, i.e. tritones.
What is your current thinking on this?
TRO TANT
Nov 13, 2015
I appreciate the point you’ve brought up about Caniad Tro Tant. If the E natural
there was other than a very short passing note then I’d agree that the piece is
indeed in the Lydian mode. However, as E never enters as a full melody note and
nor really does G either I experience the piece as pentatonic; that is, that if you
view the piece as built throughout on a mode beginning on the final of the last
section - B-flat - then it resists classification as either Ionian, Lydian or Mixolydian
(the three heptatonic modes that share a major third above the tonic). But if
there was some reason that caused us to take tiny passing notes into account
and classify the piece as heptatonic rather than pentatonic, we’d need to qualify
that classification of it as Lydian by making the point that it differs from a fully
Lydian piece because of its pentatonic nature. Otherwise the impression would be
given that the augmented fourth that characterizes the Lydian mode and causes
it generally to be avoided features strongly here when it doesn’t. It arises in my
interpretation only in brief and unstressed instances: when a short unstressed
treble E prefixing and introducing a stressed D happens to occur above the tail-
end of a bass chord that includes a B-flat. In the first section of this piece, that
occurs at 67.4.10, 67.4.19 and 67.5.10. To put that into perspective, it happens
130
in 3 columns out of the total of 48 columns the section has, and in less than 3
columns in some subsequent sections.
I’m sure that many instances of such ‘clumsiness’ can be found in early Western
polyphony, but I do think it’s a bit odd to find it in the ap Huw manuscript, where
harmonies are normally managed in an effortlessly smooth way, and I have a
colleague who makes the point with me that even occasional, unstressed
augmented fourths as tiny as these are uncharacteristic of folk music. So perhaps
there’s something wrong here with the piece appearing to be in all natural notes
apart from B-flat. And of course there might well be a connection between this
harmonic anomaly and the designation ‘tro tant’: turned string. Certainly the
piece is unusual in having finals on D and B - no other piece has those
throughout.
Panton 56, p. 38 uses the phrase 'tro'r tant' in the sense of tightening the string
in the context of the raising of B-flat to B natural. Realistically, that cannot be
applied successfully to this piece as intabulated, since it yields diminished fifths
with F. Nevertheless, I’ve worked out that there is a possibility to account for the
title of the piece without having to posit that any inflections in its intabulation in
the manuscript need to be added. Accordingly, I’ve produced two translations of
this piece: one true to the tablature as I understand it and true to what I’m sure
the intabulator intended, and another to capture what I think the composer
created as Caniad Tro Tant. My proposition, of long standing now, is that the
piece was composed one step higher than intabulated but with B natural, hence
the ‘tro tant’ of the title. With both C natural and F natural it would have had no
augmented fourth you see, but a perfect one. Then the intabulator, worried that
readers wouldn’t necessarily be clear about the meaning of tro tant nor about a
marking of the B as natural, simply moved it down one step to conform to the
rest of the tablature and to avoid the need to mark the inflection, with this
clumsiness as a minor consequence but with all the other contours of the piece
being preserved correctly. This solution makes a lot of sense to me. Note how,
when moved up one string, the formulas and chords of this piece become pitched
on strings already very familiar from other pieces. Thus originally the piece would
have been unusual only in respect of an inflection - tro tant - but after
intabulation it becomes unusual in respect of its pitch and string levels. As a
harper well-used to the pitch and string levels of the other pieces I’d rather
retune than move position on the harp, so it seems to me that to get the variety
contained in only the very rare pieces such as this they’d have retuned rather
than have performed the shift in tonal position that this piece as it’s intabulated
requires. I set great store by such practical, kinaesthetic factors as these and by
the formulas through which they bind different pieces together, because the
music exhibits such a high degree of homogeneity throughout. But an alternative
or complementary explanation would be that whereas traditionally the piece was
played with B natural (as its title indicates), perhaps some or most performers
had already begun to play it shifted down, either because they preferred the
lower pitch or because they’d rather shift hand-position than retune.
My central point is that once we take the possibility of shifting into account the
‘tro tant’ in the title here doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to abandon the
notes of the piece as they’re intabulated and look for a note amongst them that
needs to be altered.
It’s a complex issue but, to keep it in perspective, in the catalogues of pieces it’s
just two or three pieces that have inflection designations - either tro tant or
dyrchafaeldant - out of the total of about 320 pieces listed.
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Nov 14, 2015
Correction - I was hurrying - the short E above B-flat happens in 6 columns out of
the total of 48 columns of section 1 of Caniad Tro Tant.
Nov 14, 2015
But, as I say, Caniad Tro Tant is essentially pentatonic [and not Lydian
heptatonic], and profoundly so.
For general consideration, here’s a caution about applying modal qualities from
other music to cerdd dant. The difference between a perfect fourth and an
augmented fourth in relation to the tonic is of great harmonic significance in
modal music generally, since a perfect fourth step is consonant with the tonic but
an augmented one is dissonant. That’ll surely be why the Lydian mode, with the
augmentation of the fourth step, isn’t common. However, in the cerdd dant
context the importance of that distinction between the perfect and the
augmented fourth doesn’t hold since, on Paul Whittaker’s and my understanding
of the harmony in my translations of the tablature, in a cyweirdant fourths above
the tonic centre (along with seconds and sevenths) are treated as dissonant
anyway (and the same holds in a tyniad). Hence the nature of the fourth step in
cerdd dant doesn’t have the same critical significance as it does elsewhere, and in
monomodal music in particular, since a fourth above the tonic centre will, if it
appears, tend to be quickly damped anyway, as is the case with E in these
cyweirdant digits in Caniad Tro Tant.
Nov 17, 2015
Thanks … - that's a useful overall perspective on the Lydian mode.
Collinson 1966 pp. 15-16 notes just a couple [more examples of the Lydian
mode]: a waulking-song-type from Vatersay with a brief augmented fourth and
one version of the ballad Tam Lane where they are more prominent.
TUNING SETS FOR EARLY HARPS IN WALES, ENGLAND AND IRELAND
Nov 14, 2015
I should explain that the thinking in the scheme [proposed by … ] here relates to
my teasing out of a provisional concept of two suites each comprised of three
tuning sets for the harp in use at a relatively late date - one suite for Wales and
England and another suite for Ireland - in which the interrelationships between
the three sets in the Welsh and English suite match those of the Irish suite. This
is introduced in my Tuning dissertation, pp. 15-17, 23-26, where I bring into
relationship the terminologies of turned strings used in a range of sources: 1)
from cerdd dant: tro tant and dyrchafaeldant, 2) from English terms used by
Gwilym Puw: flat, ordinary and sharp, and 3) from Irish terms reported by
Edward Bunting: fuigheall-beag, uan fuigheall and fuigheall-mor. The central
concept is of a stage in the evolution of tuning the harp that each region passed
through, with probably different start- and end-dates and different durations,
during which a total of three tunings were considered to be available. In each
case, unsurprisingly, the three tunings are adjacent to one another in the cycle of
fifths. Indeed both suites overlap in the cycle, such that they have two tuning
sets in common. But do see my dissertation for the details, because the details
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differ [from those proposed by … above].
Since two of the three tunings barely impinged on the classical cerdd dant
tradition, I’d expect the same with the classical Irish tradition. If that’s correct,
then the significance of these suites would be very limited except that I expect
they became much used generally at some period for folk and popular music
played on the harp.
On that point I’d like to add a quote from the end of my Tuning dissertation, pp.
108-9, in explanation here of why different tuning sets like these were hardly
used in cerdd dant:
“A final point to be made is that the music produced by this literal interpretation
exhibits a very great range of tonal contrast and diversity. The composers
evidently enjoyed exploiting the very wide palette of harmony that was available
to them, supporting melodic lines of various modalities and pitched at a wide
range of heights. The breadth of the parameters that were available here was
sufficient to develop a large repertory of really long pieces. We would do well to
reflect on just how much diversity was achievable through the very sophisticated
use of all the potential of a simple, small, single-strung diatonic harp, without
needing to resort to any gross retuning or any use of accidentals. In this respect
the music really is a great credit to the inventiveness of the tradition that
produced it.”
I’ll have to break off here for the moment I’m afraid and get on with other things
…
TUNING SETS AND THE CHURCH MODES
Nov 16, 2015
Quite tough questions [asked on cerdd dant tuning and the church modes]. The
melodic final and modal centre of Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair is C and the pitch
level of the harmony is Paul Whittaker’s number 2 - the one which normally
accompanies C-mode tunes. Accordingly, the notes which are available to be
sustained for the beginning of a cyweirdant digit are A-C-E-G. Relating that to the
root, C, then the opening bass chord: C-G-A is indeed a 1-5-6 chord. And, at that
point in the digit, 2, 4 and 7 would be treated as dissonances. Hence the damping
of the short sounding of the 2, D, in the treble in the first column of the piece,
whereas the 3, E, is left to ring against the bass chord.
You ask about the relationship of church music to cerdd dant. The chant to which
the Guidonian hexachords relate - and they aren’t good descriptors of it - is
monomodal whereas cerdd dant is bimodal, so the opportunity for drawing
possible parallels is very restricted. Nevertheless, the most common melodic
finals in cerdd dant: G, C and F coincide with the lowest notes (ut) of the three
types of hexachord: hard (durum), natural (naturale) and soft (molle). Note that
those three notes are adjacent, in series, in the cycle of fifths, such that G is a
fifth above C and C is a fifth above F. I’ll come back now to my proposal about
suites of three different tuning sets for the harp, where I said that the sets are
adjacent to one another in the cycle of fifths. In order to compare those with the
rather Ionian-resembling Guidonian hexachords by expressing their scales in an
Ionian fashion, the Welsh/English sets become Ionian on F with B-flat (the flat set
per Puw), on C with B natural (the ordinary set) and on G with B natural and F-
sharp (the sharp set). We then need to take out the seventh so that they’re all
hexatonic in order to relate them to the three types of Guidonian hexachord, and
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they match. Thus: F with B-flat = the soft hexachord, C with B natural = the
natural hexachord, G with B natural = the hard hexachord (the seventh, here F-
sharp, is of course not included in the hexachords). Relating this now to cerdd
dant: the flat set (on F with B-flat) is predominant in cerdd dant, the natural set
(on C with B-natural) was tro tant as I understand it and the sharp set (on G with
B natural and F-sharp) I expect was dyrchafaeldant.
Bunting’s Irish tuning sets seem to have moved one step along the cycle of fifths,
in the direction of adding sharps. Instead of F, C, G they are C, G and D although
the names still reflect the English usage of Puw and the Latin usage of Guido in
that the term for the central set is flanked by a qualifier on either side, thus uan
fuigheall flanked by fuigheall-beag below and by fuigheall-mor above resembles
the sense of ordinary/naturale flanked by flat/molle below and by sharp/durum
above.
Very interestingly, the early existence of that same move along the cycle of fifths
is indicated in the ap Huw manuscript. The most useful information that the
diagrams on pp. 108-109 provide for general tuning (rather than the fine tuning
concerning intonation) is the diesis symbols on p. 109. These diagrams (apart
from that relating to the cras gywair) relate to very rare cyweiriau. The one on p.
109 called y lleddf gower gwyddyl is marked with a diesis symbol for two of its b-
durum (b natural) symbols, emphasizing b natural. This is in sharp contrast to the
b-rotundum symbols of the tablature in general which indicate b-flat. Evidently it
was thought there was or had been an Irish (or Norse) version of the common
lleddf gywair which involved B natural in contrast to the B-flat of cerdd dant in
general. This is evidence of the same move Bunting’s information yields: a
sharping move along the cycle of fifths from the flat set of F to the ordinary set of
C. (I say ‘move’ here for the purposes of explanation, not that I think the one
predates the other, you understand).
This is a lot to take in, so do please remember to read this in conjunction with my
deriving of the various tuning sets in my dissertation on Tuning, especially the
chapters: ‘Modern Interpretations of Tuning’ pp. 15-17 and ‘The Terminology of
Inflection’ pp. 23-26. And if any credence at all is to be given to Panton 56 and to
Peilin in Hafod 3 then it would be the identification there of begwri (Panton 56)
and b ysgwar (Hafod 3) - both in the sense of the note b-durum, not the durum
hexachord - with tro’r tant, an association I hadn’t myself worked out a
confirmation of at the time of writing back in 2000.
To keep all this in perspective: as I’ve said, I think that swapping between tuning
sets has more relevance to folk and popular music played on the harp than it
does to the early classical tradition, but it’s still very interesting from the cerdd
dant perspective, particularly because it helps in bringing cerdd dant and folk
tradition into relationship. Modal Irish traditional music today, for example,
mainly uses one or two sharps.
PEDRYLEF WYDDEL
Nov 16, 2015
I’d like to finish my comments on the relationship between chant and cerdd dant
now, but not before sharing this curious account. A few years ago I came across
it in the Cambrian Journal for 1858 in a letter to the editor written under the
pseudonym ‘Tubal’. I’ve come to think now that it might well be spurious in the
sense of being a deliberate antiquarian confection (for reasons too detailed to go
into here) but nevertheless it is an account of early interaction between Ireland
134
and Wales concerning music which hasn’t been picked up by other scholars and
hasn’t been carried forward into modern Irish or Welsh music scholarship. Here’s
the passage, explained as being drawn from an old manuscript in the possession
of the correspondent, although it’s in modern orthography:
“Gwido hen oedd y cyntaf erioed a wnaeth Gerdd Bedrylef, gwr o'r
werddon oedd ef, ac a ddaeth i Gymry ar amcan Llys Aberffraw blwyddyn
oed Crist 1119, pan oedd Gruffudd ap Cynan yn dywysawg Aberffraw ym
mon, ag yno y bu Gwido yn Bencerdd gorchestol, ai gerdd ef a elwir
Pedrylef wyddel.”
“Gwido Hen was the first ever to make Cerdd Bedrylef; he was a man from
Ireland, and he came to Wales by arrangement to the Court of Aberffraw
in the year of Christ 1119, when Gruffudd ap Cynan was prince of
Aberffraw in Anglesey, and there he held Gwido as an accomplished
Pencerdd, and his music was called Pedrylef Wyddel.”
Gwido Hen - Guido of Old - here will probably be intended as a reference to Guido
d’Arezzo of the early 11th century, he of the hexachords, who was brought up in
the region of Paris. He is also mentioned in one version of a poem by Dafydd
Llwyd (15th century). There’s also one early mention of ‘pedrylef’, in a poem by
Cynddelw (12th century): Marwnad Rhirid Flaidd: ‘pedrylef cwynfan’: four-voiced
lamentation. The prefix pedry- also carries a sense of balanced completeness (as
in ‘four-square’ in English) and so may relate to the full tetradic harmony that
cerdd dant works on.
Nov 19, 2015
It’s intriguing [the 1858 letter by ‘Tubal’ on Irish influence I reported on Nov 16,
2015]. As I say, I suspect that the old manuscript never existed, but if it did it
has never come to the attention of music scholars. That doesn’t mean to say it
could not have existed, since actual old manuscripts can, I believe, come and go,
especially around that sort of time.
Setting it into the medieval context, this passage is distinct from the accounts of
the congress at Glendalough and of the eisteddfod at Caerwys. The congress had
dates associated with it by Lewis Morris of about 1096 and also about 1097.
Given the vagueness here Lewis probably wasn’t following an old manuscript
containing those dates but was working on assumptions 1) that Gruffudd ap
Cynan was present at the congress and 2) that that would have been after he fled
to Ireland - by 1098. 1119 was the year in the early part of which Muirchertach Ó
Briain died, having been out of action for two or three years prior due to illness.
No date is given for the Caerwys eisteddfod, but if it took place it would have to
have been whilst Gruffudd was in power in that area - either around his marriage
to Angharad of that parish, princess of Tegeingl, or after the subsequent
overthrow of the Tegeingl dynasty with the killing of all her brothers by one of her
sons in 1125.
Geographically, this passage forms a neat link between the accounts of the
congress at Glendalough and the eisteddfod at Caerwys in that Aberffraw is
almost halfway between the two. It is perhaps overly neat.
Nov 19, 2015
135
You're presupposing that he [the writer of the 1858 letter above] was a man of
integrity. We don't know that.
Nov 23, 2015
Iolo’s take on the importance of the poets in conferring degrees in music at the
eisteddfod has some slight historical basis, as is the case with much of his fakery.
He liked to take a lot of care to embed little pieces of authentic material here and
there in his confections, not so much to further sweeten them as to convince the
reader of the authenticity of the spurious material. The less well-known the
authentic material the better of course …
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN TRIADIC HARMONY
Sep 15, 2018
Yes … in terms of its harmony it (Y Ddigan y Droell) is an absolute gem. It takes

the principle of modulation from one mode to another and explores what is
possible. We get modulation over the long range in a piece like Caniad Marwnad
Ifan ab y Gof, where there’s just one change of mode in what is a long piece, but
in others there are more frequent modulations. In Y Ddigan y Droell there are
four modulations in what is such a very short piece. It starts in the Aeolian mode,
D, then at 56.6.7 it modulates to the Dorian, G, then repeats both of those, then
stays in the Dorian until 57.1.7 where it modulates to the Ionian mode, F. The
changes come thick and fast. It is this that gives the piece that extraordinary
quality where it sounds so familiar, so modern, because the chord changes are
operating on the modern principle of triads above a root bass. Nevertheless, it
also conforms to the double-tonic principle of cerdd dant, once the modulations
are taken into account. So it occupies a curious area of overlap between the two
systems. Having alighted on such an interesting area to the ear, it must have
been that people were fascinated and wanted to explore it, as this piece
illustrates.
This comes from, then, an absolutely pivotal point historically. Either some cerdd
dant people had experienced grounds elsewhere and had worked out a way of
incorporating that style into the double-tonic measure system, or some people
outside the cerdd dant tradition were in the process of becoming inspired by this
particular area within the double-tonic system to launch out and to build triads on
a fully melodic ground, in effect to think chord-by-chord rather than digit-by-
digit, to evolve a new system of harmony by abandoning the double-tonic
measure system.
But whichever way round it was, this is a terribly important area of overlap
between the two systems which otherwise appear to be both in theory and
practice quite different from one another. And if modulation had not been
developed in cerdd dant there would have been no area of overlap: it is
modulation which brings about the possibility of overlap. It is the key here.
Y Ddigan y Droell isn’t unique in this: most of the profiadau have modulation over
the short range too. I have not much idea about when it was introduced – there’s
quite a lot of it in the manuscript so it wouldn’t have been as late as the 15 th
century I think. It might be very ancient.
Sep 18, 2018
136
Yes, that might explain the terms digan and erddigan – compact, concentrated.
The bass part of Y Ddigan y Droell is made up of twelve different chords,
including four different root position triads and four different empty fifths (with or
without octave doubling), and that degree of variety is without precedent in the
rest of the manuscript. There is real triadic mobility here.
It’s also significant that all the triads here are in root position. Elsewhere in the
manuscript inversions are common. Now inverted triads were certainly a later
development of the baroque so the styles of the rest of the manuscript did not
directly prompt baroque harmony in that respect. But for a long time baroque
music and its antecedents had only root position triads, as does this piece. So in
that respect there is a strong implication that the style of this piece was the
prompt for, or was prompted by, triadic music elsewhere.
As regards digan or erddigan as a form, to set things in perspective, there is only

the one digan piece and three other digan titles in the manuscript, and just a few
references in poetry and in early dictionaries. It wasn’t mentioned in the Statute
requirements, the repertory lists nor the datgeiniad requirements.
TECHNIQUE
THE FINGERING MOVEMENTS
Jul 2, 2012
I'm sorry about going into detail, but it's not good to see my techniques being
divorced from the evidence for them, so here are the refs - the page numbers in
my dissertation on technique, for:
y plethiad byr 74
the thumb variant of y plethiad byr 79
plethiad mawr 72
plethiad y bys bach 67
tagiad dwbl 57
takiad fforchawg 65
taked y fawd 48
Taked y fawd is also covered in Paul Whittaker's thesis p. 91, where it was first
proposed, and plethiad y bys bach in his article on Paul Dooley's website.
Evidence for the remainder of the damping techniques Bill Taylor is teaching has
yet to be put forward, I think.
I should also mention that, although Bill has now adopted my thumb variant of y
plethiad byr, I've identified a lot more variants in the manuscript which don't
appear on page 35. Here are their page refs in my work:
plethiad y bys bach - two variants: 68, 69
plethiad y pedwarbys - one variant and two families of variants: 85, 86, 88
krafiad sengl variant 94
hanner krafiad variant 98
After nearly 40 years now, I still recommend all of my techniques, as the ones
that were actually used.
I must get back to what I'm currently busy with - the datgeiniaeth - but I hope all
the above is helpful to each person in their quest for clarity across the centuries
137
Jul 14, 2016
I haven’t said much here before about fingerings. I’ve seen there were some long
discussions here a few years ago and I have some technical points to make about
Bill Taylor’s sliding-finger dampings, which I think have been the main new thing
he has brought to interpretation of the tablature.
What people have been missing about these dampings, I’m sure, is the
fundamental point that Bill has misread a crucial word in the texts of the old
documents on technique. In his 1999 article on technique in Welsh Music History
3 (pp. 85-6) he credits AB MS Peniarth 147 and CDp MS 2.634 (Havod 24) with
the information that it is crafiadau which “join ‘I’s and ‘O’s” when in fact they
explain that it is cysylltiadau which do so. The two words are not in any sense
interchangeable: cysylltiad means a joining whereas crafiad means a scratching
or a scraping, so he is wrong to associate the crafiadau with joinings. This
mistake has led him to presume that the crafiadau involve joinings of ‘I’s and ‘O’s
achieved by delaying the damping of one note until after the next note has been
sounded, thereby contradicting the essential purpose of damping in the first
place: to avoid the simultaneous sounding of ‘I’s and ‘O’s, as these old texts
explain.
The misreading has had far-reaching consequences:-
1) Bill has applied his joining technique and its interfering with the harmonic
hygiene not only to the fingering movements that include in their title the word
‘crafiad’ but to two more that do not. The full list is: plethiad y pedwarbys, crafiad
dwbl, crafiad sengl, haner crafiad and plethiad dwbl, affecting in total 627
movements in the manuscript text.
2) By attaching so much musical significance to the word ‘crafiad’ he has led

himself into placing greater significance than belongs on words involved in the
movement titles such as ‘crafiad’ and ‘tagiad’, hence he becomes prompted to
write of “seven different ways of playing a single note”. Yet common sense tells
me that all soundings of a note, including those involved in a movement named
‘tagiad’ involve a scratching of the nail against a string: a crafiad, and conversely,
as we know from p. 35, all of the movements named as ‘crafiad’ involve a
damping: a tagiad. A crafiad or a tagiad are components of a movement, not a
defining feature exclusive to a class of movements.
3) It would be surprising to me if some historical indication of these delayed

dampings was ever to be found, as they are improbably and unconvincingly
awkward to execute. Either the damping has to be very slow, to allow even
more time for the damping finger to get back to the plane of the strings after it
has pulled off from the string it first strikes, or the finger has to be straightened
and angled so as to bring the pad close to the string that is to be damped without
first properly pulling-off: that is, away from the plane of the strings, for that
retracting action is what produces the best tone and is the most natural action to
perform with the hand posture that close nail technique requires. It should be
explained that this damping action is possible where the strings selected are
adjacent to one another, which they often are. But once one straightens fingers,
one is forced into heaviness of attack. In playing this music, nothing is more
deadly to expression than stiff fingers.
138
4) I’ve taken great care to take into account all of the contexts in which all of the
movements occur in the tablature text, with regard to the positioning of the
fingers and the hand. For example, plethiad y pedwarbys with my covering-finger
damping concludes with the thumb plucking a string whilst a string which can be
between one to five strings below and which has just been plucked by the ring
finger, is damped by the middle finger. Everything is then in the right place
for the particular movements that typically follow plethiad y pedwarbys, such as a
second strike of the upper string with the back of the thumbnail. It is
also common for the lower string to be played next, by the middle finger, and
here the middle finger is already resting on the lower string ready to pluck it.
These are classic examples of the ways in which the music dovetails finger
movements that naturally lock together. Bill’s sliding fingerings for his delayed
dampings wreak havoc with the dovetailing. His alternative approach to plethiad y
pedwarbys, to take one example, involves leaving the lower string sounding until
the thumb can be brought down to finally silence it. The thumb is then quite out
of position to continue playing on the upper string and, since it is not the thumb
but the middle finger which is commonly used to next play the lower string, it is
hard to understand why he has chosen for the thumb to be brought down to the
lower string here. The result is that the all-important continuity in the fingering
between one movement and the next is broken, not just the harmony.
5) If we get the music produced by the fingering movements wrong, we will come
to the wrong answers about the tunes that were built out of them. To use
plethiad y pedwarbys as an example again, there are clear examples where the
movement is used successively to form a chain, which is to say that as, in my
fingering, the first execution of the movement concludes with the middle finger
already on the right string to begin the second execution, the whole chain can be
played very fast, very compactly; whereas on Bill’s fingering the wrong digit – the
thumb – is on the string, so that will lead to gaps in the chain whilst the middle
finger is brought back to replace the thumb. The result is that Bill’s ‘I’s and ‘O’s
need to be longer than they should be here, and, if one is consistent about the
length of digits, everywhere else as well. One will wind up with the wrong bar
lengths, the wrong time signatures, the wrong tunes, everywhere.
My last point is that all the evidence and argument for these five movements that
I’ve taken such pains to discover and present in my 1996 dissertation on
technique has not been challenged, let alone refuted, in Bill’s article. It’s not just
a matter of courtesy to take account of existing work, it has practical
consequences. The consequence here is that my evidence and argument, twenty
years on, all still stands. One may choose to contradict my work on this but
unless and until a researcher manages to address it and to overturn parts of it it
will stand. But as regards the covering-finger damping my reasoning all coheres
and interlocks, and also it matches what Bunting wrote about his perception of
the “noble system” which he thought used to underlie the fingerings he
encountered. Coming back again to the plethiad y pedwarbys chains for example,
Bill watched me play these many years ago but I don’t know why he’s never
offered any illumination of why he flatly contradicts my fingering and timing of
them.
I’m sorry to be this critical, and for long I’ve held back from commenting, but I’m
aware that Bill has been teaching his fingerings and that many of them have been
accepted by some who read here. Meanwhile, time is moving on and these are
crucially central issues of interpretation which could do with being put to rest. It’s
an important area. As I say: the movements are important building-blocks in
determining what music it was that was played, not just in determining what
range of expression was possible when it was played.
139
PLAYING CERDD DANT ON THE METAL-STRUNG HARP
May 13, 2013
I do hope that nobody gets put off by getting an idea that the fingering
movements were designed to be difficult, to challenge the player. They're simply
the easiest way of integrating the damping that's needed into the melodic lines.
They're designed to help the player and they're actually very successful in that.
They're wonderful things. The challenge to the player wasn't in the playing but in
the learning and recalling of the pieces, which were often enormous and
extremely clever. That's why it was the composers who deserved the respect, not
the players.
I want to get it across that it isn't difficult to play this music, as long as you take
the easiest route. So here are the main points which my experience found
produces the music in the easiest, most comfortable and most convenient
way (convenient in terms of speed of movement and economy of movement),
with the best quality of tone production and control over attack in general and
over the timing of the short notes.
I'm not suggesting for a moment you should use all these points for any other
music - cerdd dant is very different music from anything else. Neither am I
suggesting you can't play it except by using all these points. It's simply that this
is the easiest way, and if you don't follow these points I think it could become
really difficult to play it, and unnecessarily so.
There are things about the harp, like optimal string-spacing and the
seating, that take quite a lot of explaining so I won't do those here. But the
uppermost stringholes do need to be offset.
Have the harp high, resting on the shoulder, not on the chest. Upper
torso erect, balanced, supported and comfortable - no slouching, or hanging your
head down. Think of being there for 8 hours maybe - a medieval working day
anyway.
Rest the wrists on the box so that the fingers and thumbs are around the
midpoints of the strings. That means it's actually more often the forearms than
the wrists. Averaging around the pulse points and an inch or two further toward
the elbow, I'd say. But use the heel of the hand against the curve of the box
when playing the uppermost strings. Always keep that contact with the box - i.e.
slide up and down it, don't break away from the box.
The movements dictate the palm position, so that doesn't need explaining in
detail. It's a natural, relaxed, sort of ‘cup-holding’ position, not a 'banner-holding'
position with thumb up.
Wrists and hand and digits comfortably and slightly bent, and not extended - no
little finger and ring finger sticking out away from the rest. For soft playing,
relaxing the last joint of the fingers is the trick. That's a skill.
Surprisingly, upper hand fingernails fairly short, at a length about the same as
the fingertip, thumbnails can be a bit longer. Both little fingernails kept
short. Lower hand fingernails can be a bit longer than the fingertips, but not
by much. Nails need to be very gently pointed towards near their centre and
trimmed close at the sides.
140
Use placement, with the string very close to the nail, keeping the last joint of the
fingers or the thumb near to right-angles to the plane of the strings, never at any
kind of an acute angle. Having large palms helps. Then pull off with the nail in
contact with the string, away from the plane of the strings, not at an acute angle.
Keep the pull short, so the finger's still close to the strings afterwards.
Use anchoring in the upper hand - wherever practical, keep at least one digit that
has damped on its string.
It helps sometimes with finger backstrikes to close fingers together for extra
strength.
Remember that the main object is to have full control over the duration of the
short notes, so they can be varied for light and shade as needed. That's the main
thing a player needs to bring to the music.
If you find something difficult or a strain, know that something somewhere ain't
right, so find the easiest way of doing it and that'll put you back on the right
track.
There's a lot here, so I'm not inviting questions but you can read more about
these things and their context in my dissertation on technique and in my article
on the cerdd dant harp.
It all should help.
Pob lwc - good luck!
29 Dec 2015
You might like to try slightly offsetting a couple of strings in each octave on the
tuning pins. Before I started on wire I pondered long and hard whether or not the
medieval harpers marked strings and, if they did, how they did it, and this is what
I came to think they did. It’s what I’ve always done and I can’t imagine being
able to cope without some offset strings that are slightly proud of the general
string plane. It means you can not only hear and see where you are on the
instrument but feel it too.
Keeping the amount of offset to the minimum needed is critical - too much offset
and it would begin to upset the fingering. The music in the Robert ap Huw
manuscript and its technique can cope with offset strings but there may well be
some fingering techniques and some music that can’t tolerate any offsetting at
all, so I don’t suggest this as a general solution, only as a medieval one.
Feb 27, 2016
Thanks … . And Andrew [Lawrence-King at

http://andrewlawrenceking.com/2014/09/09/historical-technique-for-early-irish-
harps/ ] so rightly brings up the ap Huw manuscript as relevant to the Irish
metal-strung harp tradition. As you know, my research on the Welsh technique is
written up in my 1996 dissertation on technique and my post on this forum May
13, 2013. We seem to be in broad agreement about things, such as the
importance of contact with the soundbox, and Andrew brings out points from later
Irish images which echo what we know in much greater detail from the ms. Thus
the ms. gives us the precise information on the extent to which in the Welsh
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tradition one hand played the treble and the other the bass, the degrees to which
the hands were separated and overlapped, and how common it was for the hands
to swap position.
There may be some divergences regarding the interpretation of the tablature

here, so I’ll just briefly reiterate some features of my translating of it:-
I’ve presented a substantial weight of argument that exposes the assumptions

made by many earlier interpreters that the short damped notes were gracenotes
and that the movements that contain them were played beginning on the beat. I
demonstrate the role of the short damped notes as having been linking notes or
passing notes, each having a measured duration and with the movements as
having begun before the beat. My adoption of those reclassifications resulted in
the dramatic emergence of fully-fledged tunes, relatable for the very first time to
those of our experience (in the area of Insular traditional music) and brought
about what I think it’s fair to say was, to the ear, probably the greatest change
and advance that my interpretation made to the course of the reconstruction and
recovery of the original music.
By the way, although the short damped notes became functionally melodic (and
‘syllabic’ too if you relate them to the texts of cerdd dafod, as I do), I wouldn’t
want to say they ceased to be ornamental, since ‘ornament’ to my mind covers a
greater area than just crushed-in notes and appoggiature.
Connected to the issue of the short damped notes, Andrew observes that the
technique of the ap Huw as he understands it doesn’t correspond to the
‘Good/Bad’ notes principle of later music, and whilst that may well be true with
my understanding of it as well, I hope it’s understood here that cerdd dant had its
own rules of what notes were and weren’t harmoniously congruent according to
their context, and that those rules had a crucial impact on which fingers played
which notes and on which notes were damped and which were left to ring.
Andrew’s section on selecting which finger to use today for which note in
renaissance and early baroque music is fascinating. The particularity of cerdd
dant harping in this regard certainly shows that it’s always been an important
issue, at least where there’s a big need for damping.
All very interesting.
Feb 11, 2018
I find it best [where the same note appears in both the treble and bass parts] to
pluck with both hands – that’s less bother than to disturb a familiar chord voicing
in the upper or lower hand by leaving out one of their ingredients, particularly
because these instances always seem to involve the lower thumb which balances
out the action of the lower hand – bass chords are more comfortable where they
involve the thumb. I’ve written about these duplications of notes in my
dissertation on Technique, pp. 130-131.
The double row of strings on the early harp psalteries of Western Europe that I
was talking about recently have caused me to think again about if these
duplications might indicate two rows of strings, but they don’t force such a
conclusion. Has anyone been thinking about those harp psalteries and their
relevance? About their stringing and about what sort of music they might have
been used for?
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PLAYING CERDD DANT ON THE CRWTH
May 16, 2013
… And as you explore your crwth, do remember the alternate-stopping I've been
pointing you towards, in my writing on technique pp. 137-138 and tuning p. 100.
I wouldn't like to say about the folk crwth, but the classical, cerdd dant crwth
must have accompanied its melody with an alternation of cyweirdant-tyniad
harmony, just as the harp did. That alternation, the measures, is the root of
cerdd dant of course, so it's unthinkable that the crwth wasn't up to it. ‘Ac yn y
llaw yn gan llais’ - and in the hand a hundred sounds. Any idea that the pieces
had to lose their alternating accompaniment when played on the crwth, and just
have continuous drones as a substitute, is to misunderstand and to throw away
the very fundamentals of cerdd dant. My alternate-stopping solution is the only
one that's been put forward so far I think. Perhaps others might turn up in time.
May 8, 2014
Have you read my chapter on crwth technique? - pp. 134-142 in my technique

dissertation. There are explanations of why various techniques don't work, and
why I developed ALTERNATE STOPPING as the only answer - playing on only one
pair of coursed onboard strings at a time, whilst leaving the other pair open. That
gives you the melody on the stopped course and the double tonic of the measures
on the open course. It depends on the two courses being a tone apart of course -
see my chapter on crwth tuning in my tuning dissertation pp. 97-104 for evidence
of that. When a I is followed by a 0, or vice versa, you simply switch courses.
For those pieces that don't have a drone in the bass the same alternate-stopping
technique must have been applied to the two thumb strings, so that instead of
being tuned in unison or at the octave, they were tuned a tone apart.
The main point here is that the really heavy droning that you hear today in the
crwth revival might possibly be how the crwth was played in the folk tradition but
it doesn't begin to capture the essence of cerdd dant harmony - the double-tonic
alternation that happens in the measures. You do get drones in cerdd dant here
and there, but they are not the essence of the music. Free the crwth from its
bondage to drones!
May 8, 2014
There are things the harp did that the crwth could never do, like play seven notes
together. So yes, you'd have to adapt the pieces for the crwth and get around
what it can't do. But the trouble with doing that is the manuscript doesn't give us
those extra things that the crwth must have done in compensation for the loss of
the extra things the harp did. So you'd wind up with a rather impoverished
version of a piece, which would be a shame. So it's probably better to just play
the pieces on the harp, unless it's desperately important for some reason to
arrange them for the crwth. Given that the wire harp already has the sustain to
bring out the harmonies adequately, it isn't that important to hear them on a
bowed instrument as well.
And adapting brings its own problems too of course. Personally, I'd rather not see
the pieces mucked about with. It has to be good to hold the original tradition in
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respect, whilst our forebears are no longer here to look after it themselves of
course.
Aug 16, 2017
… I wonder if the passage [about the cynnwys dannau from the Dosparth
(Peniarth 62, p. 18)] means the cyweirdannau cryfion were stable and the
cynnwys dannau were unstable in pitch, because the former each had a filling-up
(llanw) whereas the latter change in a way (a newidian mewn modd), and that
the passage is describing the distinction between the three notes in the octave
sounded on the open strings of the crwth and the four produced by stopping.
Amongst the meanings of ‘cynnwys’ is ‘compressed’. If, as I propose in the
Tuning Supplement pp. 55-63, slides were performed on the crwth and page 108
indicates them, stretching right across from one note to another, then that
fluidity might explain why the cynnwys dannau had “not one number between
them” and “not one movement to them”. Slides involving open strings and the
nut are possible but they are easier between stopped notes.
But I don’t know. I hope everyone here appreciates that a vast amount of
patience is needed in trying to sort out these most difficult technical passages
about the music, because they are truly difficult. And the crwth is an enormous
challenge.
Anyone got more thoughts on all this at this point?
Aug 20, 2017
As regards your suggestion of ‘bar’ double-stopping by holding a finger flat across

the crwth fingerboard: no, it isn’t easy. It is rather awkward to double-stop
across both courses with a single finger, given that the default angle of the
fingers in alternate stopping needs to be bearing downwards onto the fingerboard
as is the case with the modern violin. It is thought that the medieval vielle may
have been stopped across multiple courses to produce parallel organum by the
fingers being held flat to the fingerboard, but that would not have been the case
here with this style of oscillating harmony. Double stops by a single finger on
bowed instruments are largely avoided in writing today, across the fifth on the
violin, viola and ‘cello and across the fourth on the contrabass. And so I’ve used
that fact to try to identify the interval between the two onboard crwth courses by
analysing the frequencies of chords that the crwth would need to produce on
those courses to closely replicate the intabulated pieces, looking for absences to
reveal the predicted anomaly. To my surprise – I’d never noticed it before - the
interval of the fifth turned out to be a very strong contender, and so I now
recommend that (i.e. Bingley’s tuning) as the most likely basic tuning of the
crwth. Its absence in y plethiad mawr is particularly compelling.
As regards the llanwau, the fillings-up, as in the flowings of the tides: each
cyweirdant cryf had one, in the sense that each had that property since it was
principal or special and so it could stand and must be played through to its end,
and that implies that the others – the cynnwys dannau – were either checked or
altered in their course, that they were weak and did not have the continuity or
stability that having one number or one movement implies for the cyweirdannau
cryfion. The cyweirdannau gweiniaid, the cynnwys dannau, were subject to
change in a certain way, and so I suggest they were subject to sliding. Slides are
commonplace today in all traditional fiddling, but particularly in those older
traditions where double stops dominate (e.g. in Norway and Sweden). The crwth,
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with its nearly flat bridge, could be said to be played with continuous sextuple
stops.
I doubt that ‘cysylltiad’ refers to vertical connections between cyweirdannau and

tyniadau, because in the context in which the term is explained the other terms –
crychiad, plethiad, ystopiad, tagiad, tolciad – refer to the horizontal dimension,
and also the primary meaning of the pairing cyweirdant and tyniad is a metrical
unit with horizontal duration. So I think a cysylltiad is more likely to have been a
horizontal connection, and if so that could only be a slide. But ‘hybrid’ chords do
exist in the music, so it may be that the term refers to these. On the other hand,
all the other terms refer to physical actions, not to chordal composition.
What was played on the harp and how it was produced is in the main clear, but a
successful explanation of cywair has to explain how the crwth worked: the two
passages about crwth technique: firstly how it was that the second finger kept
three cyweiriau, the forefinger two, and that the thumb, the ring finger and the
little finger were ministering and varying in every cywair, and secondly how the
eight principal cyweirdannau and the eight principal tyniadau were fingered. Note
… that by both accounts the thumb was apparently used to stop.
Aug 22, 2017
Yes, “tros y tannau” could refer to a finger held flat to stop all four onboard
strings, in which case both the ring finger and the long finger could be used in
that way: the passage ends ”a’r graenfys a’r hirfys tros y tannau”. Alternatively,
it could refer to a finger pad stopping both the strings of one of the courses, or –
perhaps less likely – to a finger releasing from a stop: i.e. being positioned over
(tros) the strings. The “tyniad croes” refers I think to all the ‘tyniad’ actions here,
not just to “a’r hirfys tros y tannau”. The “croes” is a puzzle to me. Perhaps it
refers to stoppings solely on the middle course, away from the palm, but strictly
‘croes’ here refers to a cross formation, not to the sense of ‘across’. Because of
the flat bridge, the entire passage must be describing not a series of single notes
but a sequence of chords each made up of six notes or, if we amalgamate octave
doublings, of three to six notes. Perhaps contained within all that is an exercise
that gives prominence to the four notes of the cyweirdant tetrad and their octave
doublings (4+4=8) and then to the four notes of the tyniad tetrad and their
octave doublings (4+4=8), since it is noteworthy here that the passage is talking
about groups of eight sounds rather than the seven of the cynnwys dannau
passage we were discussing earlier.
The wonderful thing about alternate stopping is that it provides an oscillating

accompaniment wherever the melody is single-line without tying-up any of the
four fingers, so they are all free to use all of their versatility on the melody line:
the tunes require mobility of the stopping hand on the crwth, depending on the
design of an individual instrument up to about finger 4 of 5th position. Alternate
stopping gives that freedom. And the bowed open strings ring better than
stopped ones of course. So there are two good reasons for making as much use
of the open onboard strings as alternate stopping does. Where the melody or the
upper part becomes chordal, I believe the open course would be enlisted in it,
since the ear gives precedence to what is uppermost and these pieces demand it,
but with the interval of the fifth between the onboard courses almost all of the
harp movements in the manuscript can be comfortably realised on the crwth no
matter if they are begun on the lower course or the higher course.
As regards slides, the crwth offers a fantastic range of opportunities. Slides can
be by one finger at the octave on both strings of a course, or double-stopped by
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two fingers on both courses, or, because the string-spacing in a course on the
crwth allows it, that one finger can slide on a single string or even that one finger
can slide on one string of a course whilst it holds a stop on the other string: on
current understanding, based on the surviving examples, the strings were paired
in octave courses but with sufficient width between the two members of each pair
to allow for some degree of independence in their stopping. This allows small
slides, perhaps even as wide as up to a half tone in higher positions, to be played
as ‘split’ slides by the pad on one string whilst the tip of the same finger is
stopping and holding the destination note on the further string. This is most
easily done for small ascending slides, by bringing the finger to an angle closer to
a right angle to the strings whilst pivoting close to the finger’s tip, a movement
rather like an exaggerated vibrato action. Another possibility in theory is that
slides were achieved by rolls across one, two or three fingers, as on the South
Indian classical violin, but with four strings to control with the fingers together
with the thumb used to do some stopping on the offboard course, the hand
posture and orientation would have to have been pretty constant.
With such a range of opportunities, it’s not surprising that these passages on the
crwth and its fingering are hard nuts to crack!
Aug 25, 2017
Some suggestions.
I’m sure the point of the pairing of strings into courses is so that a finger pad can
stop a course without interfering with another course?
The opening of Gosteg Dafydd Athro is unusual in that the treble part isn’t double
tonic, and so it doesn’t warrant alternate stopping. Try the tuning: C G D, stop
the outer D course in 1st position with fingers 2 and 3 for the F to G throughout,
but stop the C course to D with the thumb for the shift in the bass to D for the
tyniadau. The opening of the second section is double tonic, so use alternate
stopping: for the cyweirdant F to G movement stop as above, but for the tyniad E
to F movement stop it on the G course, so the D course is open, and stop the C
course at B, or perhaps G. And so on in the same manner. That would be an
illustration of standard alternate stopping. But it’s not a great example because
as it happens Gosteg Dafydd Athro and Caniad y Gwyn Bibydd are unique
amongst the Mixolydian pieces in having drones throughout the lower part, on G,
rather than a full cyweirdant-tyniad oscillation. So it’s best to leave the G course
open, rattle the whole thing off on the outer course alone and use the thumb
course to provide the oscillating accompaniment. But the great majority of the
pieces, with fuller oscillation, are best served using alternate stopping you see.
I hope that all makes sense.
Aug 25, 2017
The thing about the crwth and its three courses – I hope I’ve got this right – is
that it may be a carry-over from the timpan with its three strings. So the droning
style of two pieces – Gosteg Dafydd Athro and Caniad Gwyn Bibydd – may be a
carry-over as well: so one way of playing the timpan, also perhaps not the most
common way, may have been to leave open one of the two upper strings as a
drone instead of using both as alternate-stopping accompaniment, and to use the
thumb to do some stopping for tyniad accompaniment on the lower string (in the
way in which the thumb can be used on the guitar). The five-stringed crwth with
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its solitary outboard string may be a staging post between the timpan and the
six-stringed crwth, illustrating how each course of the latter has a foundation in a
single string. And that implies that at least some of the time, and perhaps all of
the time, the courses were each treated as a single string. I doubt that the
strings of the onboard courses of the crwth were fingered individually and not in
pairs, whereas, interestingly, the distance between those of the outboard course
seems to have been wider. But I do seriously entertain the possibility of the split
slides I was describing before, and they would take us into new territory not
known from elsewhere, and perhaps into a new vocabulary as well.
A complex instrument, the crwth: ac yn y llaw yn gan llais: and in the hand a
hundred sounds!
Aug 31, 2017
I expect that the timpan was normally played using alternate stopping between
either the top two strings or the bottom two, but if it was ever used with the
middle string as a drone then the oscillating accompaniment would have needed
to be provided by the thumb on the bottom string, stopping it on the fingerboard.
But on the crwth the thumb strings are off the fingerboard so the thumb doesn’t
need to wrap around onto the fingerboard to stop them. It can simply access
them directly, as on the 5-stringed medieval fiddle or vielle. So I’m not
suggesting that the middle course as well was ever stopped by the thumb?
Yes indeed: Tant i bob bys ysbys oedd, A daudant i’r fawd ydoedd: a string for
each finger is spied, and there are two strings to the thumb. That couplet follows
the line about 100 sounds in the hand, in the cywydd on the crwth by Gruffydd ap
Dafydd ab Hywel. And I think 100 sounds would be pushing poetic licence if slides
were not used on the crwth you see.
On your Heyward crwth reproduction, are the thumb strings sufficiently close to
comfortably stop both of them together? I worry that that might not be the case
on all the extant instruments. And obviously the horizontal alignment of the two
holes [at the peg end, in the yoke] is critical, to get an accurate octave doubling
produced by a thumb that may not comfortably be square to the strings.
Sep 1, 2017
Here's an extract from my unpublished writing on the crwth, which explains more
about what I've been saying here about alternate stopping:
Here follows a more detailed investigation than that of the chapter on tuning the
crwth in ‘Tuning’ pp. 97-104. Firstly, however, is a resumé of the alternate-
stopping technique introduced in ‘Technique’ pp. 134-142, which offers the best
solution to reproducing on the crwth the oscillating harmony of harp cerdd dant
where the upper part is melodic rather than chordal. One note of the
‘accompaniment’ harp chords can be sounded on one of the onboard courses left
open whilst the melody is stopped on the other course, and then one can reverse
the open and stopping courses as one moves from cyweirdant harmony to tyniad
harmony or vice versa, so that there is an oscillation of single-line
accompaniment. A second note of the accompaniment chords can be added by
alternately stopping the offboard course with the thumb and leaving it open.
Hence two out of the three notes that the harp pieces typically have as
accompaniment in the lower hand can be provided by the crwth. Where the
upper-hand harp part contains chords, on the crwth double-stopping two notes
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could be used instead of leaving one course open, in order to give precedence to
imitating the melodic line of the harp piece. In addition to where the upper harp
part has become entirely chordal instead of melodic, two-finger stops would be
necessary where the chords are part of the melodic line; that is, where the chords
are part of harp fingering movements. Another option available occasionally is to
reproduce harp drones either by not switching stopping courses (especially where
the drone is G) or by not alternating with the thumb between stopping and not
stopping.
That suite of options is the most that the crwth with the strings paired in three
octave courses can offer the harp pieces. It is a workable system, in that
melodically the complexity of what the harp fingering movements produce can be
reproduced by the stopping fingers on the crwth, and harmonically there is
enough richness, enough variety, for the system to be musically viable and
historically plausible. The limitation is that the stopping hand cannot go high,
above around sixth position, which means the crwth cannot reproduce the
multiple octave levels of the harp pieces. So the sections of pieces that use them
have to be either abandoned, replaced with different variations or brought down
to within the range of the crwth. The octave pairing of the crwth courses is
obviously a response to that, to create ambiguity between one octave and the
next in order to reduce the impact of those passages which need to be brought
down as well as to flesh out the sound generally. So where different octave levels
of the harp are collapsed into one on the crwth, which could be described as
octave merging, a rising harp figure may sometimes become a falling one on the
crwth. Obviously, the greater is the interval between the two onboard courses,
the greater is the melodic range of the instrument.
Sep 1, 2017
So, how all those stopping techniques fit together with tuning is that the tuning
which best suits most of the manuscript is C, G, D; C being the thumb course.
But as it happens Caniad Tro Tant is better suited by C, A, D, and in some senses
so is Caniad San Silin, and that offers an explanation of the term ‘tro tant’.
To sum it up, a passage or a piece in a particular harmonic mode is generally best

played using the combinations of stopped and open courses for each mode shown
in the table below. A stopped course offers an assortment of notes for the melody
or for the oscillating accompaniment, for one example: G, B, D or F, according to
the requirements of the column of tablature being played.
Harmonic Cyweirdant Cyweirdant Tyniad Tyniad
mode offboard onboard offboard onboard
Mixolydian open C open G G-B-D-F open D
Ionian open C open D open C open G
Dorian E-G-B-D open G D-F-A-C open D
Lydian G-B-D-F open D open C open A
Note how the two-note accompaniment harmony this system provides, involving
only one retuning of a course, has a sufficient variety, a sufficient contrast
between the modes, to express the character of each mode without blurring any
of them together. There are no exact matches between the modes, only half-
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matches: the Mixolydian cyweirdant harmony is the Ionian tyniad harmony and
the Mixolydian tyniad harmony is the Lydian cyweirdant harmony. Any system for
the crwth strung in octave courses inevitably involves reducing the harp
accompaniment harmony to two notes, but beyond that the main drawback in
terms of reproducing the harp harmony here is that the note D is somewhat of an
addition to the cyweirdannau of the Ionian mode and to the tyniadau of the
Dorian mode. But I believe this system gives the best fit available, and that it
maximises the available flexibility of the crwth. It needs to be taken into
consideration that double stops across the onboard courses, to reproduce upper-
part harp chords and chordal harp fingering movements, will often break and
relieve the sounding of the open onboard course and in so doing reduce the
impact of the largely added D in the Ionian cyweirdannau and the Dorian
tyniadau.
Also, very importantly, note that this system allows the crwth to accommodate
and reflect the modulations that happen within intabulated pieces between the
Mixolydian and Dorian modes - as is indeed essential - without retuning.
Sep 1, 2017
That system of tuning and playing the crwth is I believe the first model to be
developed that closely mimicks the intabulated pieces. It means that, if slides
were not used, in terms of the variety in the notes and chords produced the crwth
was the poorer sister to the harp, but only slightly poorer. If slides were used,
then the crwth would have been the richer, and that may account for why, in
1567 at least, it was more popular amongst musicians than the harp.
Sep 4, 2017
Thanks for that good photo of your crwth.
So, about the thumb stoppings: the thumb needs to move to some extent with
the hand as the hand moves up beyond first position. I suggest that comfort is
most important, and that when the thumb needs to stop that, from the selection
of appropriate notes shown in the table I gave before, the note that is most
comfortable should be selected, and where several of them are comfortable that
the one used in the intabulation of the piece should be selected. I’ve inspected
the David [Richard] Evans crwth from 1742 for wear marks, and they stretch
right up along the right side of the neck.
The Heyward crwth has a tailpiece which is slanted in the wrong direction for the
recorded tunings, but I wonder if it is original. I haven’t looked much into the
provenance of the existing instruments I’m afraid.
PLAYING CERDD DANT ON THE TIMPAN
Sep 14, 2015
On the timpan, I expect the melodic line would be played most commonly on the
top string or the top two strings, but sometimes on the middle string or the
lowest string or a combination of those two strings. The thumb would be
important. The two accompaniment strings, when there were two, I expect would
not generally be in parallel motion. It would be challenging to work it all out. I
imagine there would be bending of notes. And probably no frets.
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The issue of timpan playing technique is discussed briefly in my dissertation on

Technique, pp. 143-6. To the arguments there I will add here that if the timpan
remained three-stringed throughout the period of its high-status use, and did not
develop extra strings, then certainly those three strings must have been more-or-
less constantly sounding together, so important is vertical harmony in cerdd dant.
This means that whichever string, or perhaps whichever pair of strings, were
acting as melody strings at any one time, the remaining string(s) would have
needed to be sounded and alternately stopped and left open, to accommodate a
modicum of double-tonic alternation in the measures. The thumb is the obvious
economic means of providing that stopping, on any one, two or perhaps, more
usefully, across all three strings at a time, perhaps aided by wearing a slide or
even by pressing against a fret. It could ‘shadow’ the fingers when they are
brought high up the fingerboard. The thumb is certainly shown stopping two,
perhaps three strings against the fingerboard in the Charles the Bald example, a
method which, significantly, is not a feature of three-stringed bowed instruments
- neither lyres nor the lyra. It is conceivable that such a thumb action, alternately
releasing and stopping the strings in cyweirdant and tyniad respectively, is what
gave rise to those two terms in the first place, in the sense that ‘cyweirdant’
implies the sounding of open strings (i.e. ‘cywair’ in the sense of initial tuning)
and that ‘tyniad’ so strongly implies the stopping of strings (i.e. ‘tyniad’ in the
sense of ‘pulling’, ‘stretching’, ‘tensioning’), an origin suggested by Paul Whittaker
p. 134 and by myself in my dissertation on Tuning, pp. 29-30. In the absence of
a really viable solution as to how this could have originated on the other stopped
instrument, the crwth (see my Part 4 on Technique, p. 144), it seems most likely
that it would have originated on the much more ancient timpan. If so, then the
timpan would go right back to the very origin of cerdd dant and the double tonic.
The theme of the silver - bronze - iron series of strings is developed in the
Agallamh na Seanórach (translation in O'Curry iii. 223-4.):
The names of the not-heavy strings

Were Suantorrglés; Geantorrglés the great;
Goltarrglés was the other string,
Which sends all men to crying;
If the pure Goiltearglés be played
For the heavy hosts of the earth,
The hosts of the world without delay
Would all be sent to constant crying.
If the merry Gentorrglés be played
For the hosts of the earth, without heavy execution,
They would all be laughing from it,
From the hour of the one day to the same of the next.
If the free Suantorrglés were played
To the hosts of the wide earth,
The men of the world, - great the wonder, -
Would fall into a long sleep.
This passage illustrates the broad principles of the ancient and ever so important
associations between density of string material, pitch and psychological affect,
but surely should not be read as a sign that in practice playing a piece would only
involve one of the three strings. It must have been that, depending upon the
affect a piece was designed to evoke, the melody would centre on the appropriate
string - and therefore pitch range - thereby relegating the other two strings to
providing the accompaniment. That sort of principle operates in the Robert ap
Huw manuscript, in that generally where the melodic line is dropped low into the
pitch range normally occupied by the chordal accompaniment, the chordal
accompaniment is not terminated but continues intact and is displaced, either
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partially or wholly, to a new higher range above the melodic line (examined in my
Technique dissertation, pp. 128-133).
PLAYING CERDD DANT CHORDS ON THE LYRE
Oct 28, 2017
It [the fact that double tonic alternation on pipes requires much more complex
fingering than it does on harps and lyres] makes me think that as an instrumental
phenomenon it first appeared on lyres and got onto harps that way rather than
through pipes. A chordal accompaniment to chant on the strummed lyre can so
very easily be produced, by allotting two strings to each finger, with a finger
inserted between each pair of strings and acting as a toggle to block first one
string then, by a tiny movement, the other. With the strings tuned in a diatonic
series, as reported by Hucbald, the result, with every other string tending to be
left open to sound, is chains of intervals of a third.
Oct 29, 2017
I like to work backwards from cerdd dant when trying to work out how lyres were
used, because cerdd dant is all we have to go on in terms of what was played. I
wonder if melodies were used to accompany verse? In cerdd dant you generally
have chordal accompaniment in the lower part supporting melody in the upper
part. It is most probable, then, that the lower part came from a custom of chordal
accompaniment on the lyre and that the upper part was inspired by a custom of
vocal melody (or at least of vocal intoning).
If you use the bottom two strings of a 6-stringed lyre for the double-tonic
accompaniment that rather restricts the melody to the other four strings. That’s
very narrow in terms of cerdd dant melody. Lyres with more strings than six hold
much greater promise of having been melodic instruments, and with the 9-
stringed cruit I’m sure that was a solo melodic instrument. It may have been
used also for collaborative accompaniment, but I’m sure the 6-stringers were
used by vocalists to accompany themselves, and cerdd dant implies that would
have been with chords.
I know 5-stringers are used in Africa for melodic accompaniment, but that’s a
culture that’s very different from Northern Europe, where the ‘special’ on the
menu is polyrhythm, not harmony.
Oct 31, 2017
Thanks … . That's all very interesting and clear [a method for playing limited-
compass monody with single-line accompaniment on the 6-stringed Germanic
lyre].
It is very different from how accompaniment worked in the medieval cerdd dant
tradition.
The modern style of playing reconstructions of Anglo-Saxon lyres that you

describe has at its core the technique recently drawn from that used on the 5-
stringed [often 6-stringed today] bowl lyres of Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, the Red
Sea coast, the Hadhramaut and Basra in Iraq. Nowadays you might also hear the
songs prefaced by a plucked taqsim – a prelude – but that is thought to be a
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recent import from Arab music in Egypt. For the medieval 6- and 7-stringed lyres
of Northen Europe it is the kantele and gusli psalteries that offer the technique
most relevant to the medieval music of Northern Europe, because of the identical
chordal accompaniment in the archaic gusli and in cerdd dant, and because of the
capacity of and tendency for techniques to transfer between instruments. Thus
you can read:
“While a tradition can undergo a significant change over a short period of time, it
often retains archaic elements. For example, an ancient way of playing the gusli,
the Russian version of the Baltic psaltery, was to place the fingers of the left hand
between pairs of adjacent strings and to move the wrist up and down in the same
position whilst strumming with the right hand. This technique was first
documented in the late nineteenth century and is still used by most traditional
players of the Pskov and Novgorod regions of north-western Russia. As button
accordions rapidly replaced the gusli over most of the territory, the accordion
players adopted the same technique of alternating between two chords in the
same position by placing fingers between buttons which is sufficient.”
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilya_Temkin/publication/236215028_Evol
ution_of_the_Baltic_psaltery_a_case_for_phyloorganology/links/00b495170bf815
9312000000/Evolution-of-the-Baltic-psaltery-a-case-for-phyloorganology.pdf>.
This highly distinctive chordality is totally different from the fixed left-hand
playing and the monophonic accompaniment of bowl lyre playing in Africa. It is
the only tradition of double-tonic chordal alternation that I’ve been able to locate
beyond the British Isles, and the lyre is the early link between the Baltic regions
and the British Isles, so I think we can confident that this is how the 6- and 7-
stringed N. European lyres were played, and perhaps the 8-stringed one as well.
But once you get to the larger 9-stringed cruit I think that was a different story
again - much more complex.
Nov 5, 2017
… Here’s an example of the simple toggling double-tonic technique of the Baltic

lyres: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3JNU7pEDZQ>. What indicates that
block-and-strum like this is very ancient indeed is that it is used on arched harps
in Asia, and the arched harp is likely to be the most ancient of stringed
instruments. …
Nov 30, 2018
… I’ll do a series of posts on the 6-stringer as an accompaniment instrument, as

that is the main interest on this list. There’s one important area there that I could
really use some help on.
Dec 1, 2018
Carrying on now about the relationship between the six-stringed lyre and the
double tonic harmony that characterizes the cerdd dant of the ap Huw
manuscript, the traditional dance music of the British Isles and also piobaireachd,
for years I’ve searched high and low for evidence of any early tradition of double-
tonic music beyond the British Isles, without success except for the small wing-
shaped gusli psaltery in some Baltic regions. And here I’m entering an area I can
find little about on the internet, so if there’s anyone here that has deeper
knowledge or some actual experience of the particular tradition I’m about to
describe I’d really appreciate a better historical perspective on that tradition and
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its ups-and-downs over the last 200 years.
The gusli psaltery was apparently traditionally used by the North-West Russians
of Ingria, the Setos of Southeast Estonia, in Eastern Latvia and by the Vepsians of
Karelia by allotting two strings to each finger, with a finger inserted between each
pair of strings and acting as a toggle to block first one string then, by a small
movement, the other. Because the strings are tuned in a diatonic series, the
result, with every other string tending to be left open to sound, is chains of
intervals of a third. On a six-stringed gusli with its traditional hexatonic tuning -
that is, one like Hucbald’s lyre tuning - the technique produces an alternation of
two adjacent triads: the double tonic. Confirmation that indeed a double-tonic
alternation of pairs of chords runs through much of the Baltic psaltery tradition
today in the area of the former Rus state of Novgorod appears in the following
two accounts:
“Most of the gusli tunes are instrumental-vocal. The instrumental part consists
mainly of two chords of second relationship, slightly varying in tone. It generally
serves not as a subordinated harmonic accompaniment but runs asynchronically
to the vocal part.”
“The reference to church bells is important for the Estonian kannel playing of the
Setumaa area. Names of local Orthodox churches or monasteries are extended to
musical compositions, suggesting the reflection of their particular chimes in
kannel pieces. The resulting musical texture is a pulsating alternation of two basic
chords with rhythmic or melodic variations.”
http://www.music.lv/mukti/BalticMI.htm
In addition to the six-stringer there was also a five-stringer (presumed to have

been tuned pentatonically), and other small psalteries with greater numbers of
strings, starting with seven. On the seven-stringer the hexatonic sequence of the
six-stringer was or is added to by a drone string a fourth below, and that is
perfectly within the scheme of the double tonic. Yet the earliest account of the
whole double-tonic toggling technique itself is from 1890 concerning a 96-year-
old seven-string guslar, where the drone string was only one whole tone below
the two major triads it supported, and that is outside of the scheme of the double
tonic (and indeed of all triadic theory). See
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SZexDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT291&lpg=PT291&dq
=famintsyn+podgoloska&source=bl&ots=7NFTU7fD7A&sig=mrQ31QQhNd82qXlb
K5jsIZVHO8g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAydz50f7eAhVrVBUIHU5vC6IQ6AEwA
HoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=famintsyn%20podgoloska&f=false
Was that an aberration and the drone a fourth below represents the true
tradition? It’s hard for me to tell. From what I can gather, the tradition ceased,
possibly entirely, during the Second World War, and so I wonder if the custom of
the drone a fourth below is a modern adoption or not. I need a better perspective
on the recent tradition and what is archaic within it than can be gained, it seems,
from the internet. Is anyone in a position to help?
This is the only tradition of double-tonic chordal alternation that I have located
beyond the British Isles. Considering that remarkable rarity, there is a strong
implication that the two styles have had some historical relationship. The psaltery
would not have provided a direct link, as the first Welsh mention of it is by
Dafydd ap Gwilym in the fourteenth century, as ‘sawdring Sais’, thereby
associating the psaltery with England: it was not an instrument traditional to
Wales. But the Baltic psalteries will have developed from the lyre, as is made
clear by the resemblance to Baltic psalteries of the various lyres excavated at
eleventh- to fourteenth-century levels at Novgorod and Gdansk [and Opole]. The
psaltery would have taken over the techniques and repertory of the lyre, resulting
153
in the lyre’s complete displacement in the region in the fourteenth century. The
small block-and-strum lyre, then, rather than the psaltery, I suggest is the
obvious link here, that once united the music of the double tonic from one end of
Northern Europe to the other. That’s a huge concept, but one that’s entirely
compatible with the interchange and the trade routes that were heavily used in
the medieval period east-west across Northern Europe.
Dec 2, 2018
Thanks a lot … for those leads. Valdis Muktupavels explains those Latvian two-
drone tunings as a modern development, such that the newly-added drone at the
minor third below the tonic has been introduced for minor tunes and the
traditional one at the fourth below the tonic continues for major tunes.
http://www.music.lv/mukti/Kokles_styles.htm
I’m thinking that the fourth below the tonic seems so widespread on Baltic
psalteries in early reports that the 1890 report of Trofim Ananyev on the Russian
gusli using a major tone below, queried at the time, probably is an aberration.
Here’s an example of the simple toggling double-tonic technique of the Baltic

psalteries: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3JNU7pEDZQ>. What indicates
that chordal block-and-strum like this is very ancient indeed is that it is used on
arched harps in Asia, and the arched harp is likely to be the most ancient of all
stringed instruments. There the chords are not tertian but, broadly-speaking,
tone-clusters, but, remarkably, rather similar clusters appear in sutartines on the
block-and-strum kankles psaltery of Northeastern Lithuania, not far from the
Russian chordal block-and-strum gusli region surrounding Pskov. I can imagine,
then, in the realm of block-and-strum on various instruments, close harmony
anciently giving way to tertian harmony, with the instruments involved moving
from arched harp through lyre to psaltery. Our view onto chordal block-and-strum
has been almost totally obscured by an overlay of the monophonic block-and-
strum and the monophonic plucking on various stringed instruments that came to
so dominate the Ancient World, so we’re lucky to be able to pick up these ever so
important, small and scattered remnants of chordal block-and-strum.
Dec 8, 2018
I’ll continue now with what I’d like to pass on about I’ve found using chordal
block-and-strum on the six-stringed lyre, as I argue it was used in order to
provide accompaniment to the voice. I’m thinking here of the type of scenario
where the Bishop of Dublin in the late 11th-century described using a six-stringed
‘cithara’ to accompany his performing of poetry.
The fingers and thumb of the left hand are very comfortable whilst covering the
strings with the pads. To produce a pair of adjacent triads, the index finger,
middle finger and ring finger can each cover two strings in that Baltic toggle
technique I explained before. On the Baltic psalteries the fingers lie between the
strings and resting against the soundboard, blocking the strings with the sides of
the fingers rather than with their pads. But on the lyre there is nothing to rest the
fingers against and there is less space between the strings so I find it’s more
natural for the fingers to block using the pads. It’s also more natural for damping
strings already sounding.
The fingers, more-or-less parallel to the strings, can only produce a ‘press’ pluck
and I find myself unconvinced that they would have been used for producing
154
cutting-in notes. If the accompaniment was made out of just simple double-tonic
triads then I’m sure the thumb would have been used as an anchor, just resting
on the upper arm of the instrument.
However, a consequence of using only three fingers in a toggling action to

produce the basic chords is that the thumb is freed up for other uses. The thumb
can produce a strong ‘pull’ pluck, because of the angle at which it is to the
strings. The thumb can, with practise, sound or damp any of the upper three
strings but not beyond those (the angles are wrong). Note that any string plucked
by the thumb can be immediately damped by a finger, and here perhaps we have
the genesis of the medieval system of covering-finger damping for the harp I
uncovered in my work on that instrument (see
http://pauldooley.com/aphuw_pages/intro.html).
Additionally, I’ve discovered the thumb can, with practise to build up the muscles,
strum across all six strings with the back of the nail whilst the blocking fingers
remain in place on their strings. Indeed, some depictions of the Hellenistic and
Roman kithara clearly show the thumb brought forward, either to perform such a
strum or to pluck. Six strings is the absolute maximum range for a thumb strum;
four strings is more comfortable. It can be seen here that the lyre can be used to
produce rich and complex ostinato rhythmic patterns, combining up and down
plectrum strums with up strums of the thumb and with pluckings by the thumb,
and with lots of opportunity for staccato playing as well. It does not have to have
been restricted to simple chordal accompaniment.
Dec 9, 2018
Thanks … Groovy video! Yes, I used to use traditional krar technique for chordal
accompaniment, with a wrist strap, years ago. But that was before I worked out
from the Norwegian lyre from Kravik that it had a neck strap and would have
been played horizontally, with the fingers more parallel to the strings than on the
krar. The details of that I posted here 20.2.16. I also had become aware of the
chordal Russian gusli technique that I’ve been explaining here lately – the one I
call toggling between two strings – so I abandoned the krar technique, my prime
focus being the music of medieval Northern Europe.
The krar used to commonly have five strings whereas the numbers of strings on
Northern European lyres had a tendency to exceed six, and that may have some
additional bearing on why it is that there is this contrast between fixed-finger
blocking and toggling blocking. Once one encounters lyres with seven or more
strings, the dual responsibility of a finger in toggling is inevitable because
although the thumb can block two strings at once that is not comfortably
achieved by the fingers. And if the strings are as tightly bunched as is indicated
by the excavated bridges from Europe, so you can't sound selected strings, the
monophonic accompaniment produced by the krar becomes no longer possible:
one has to enter the chordal realm.
Obviously the krar music of Sudan, Ethiopia etc. is worlds apart from the block
triadic chords of medieval Wales and the most archaic of Russian and Baltic string
techniques, so I don’t have any difficulty in understanding why the techniques
and the types of lyre differ as much as they do between Africa and Northern
Europe. Altogether, on lyres, arched harps and psalteries there are a surprisingly
large number of block-and-strum techniques, covering an astonishingly wide
range of musical styles just for accompaniment. And that’s before you get into all
the plucking techniques. But note that although it is becoming increasingly
common for Sudanese and, sometimes, Ethiopian lyre players to preface their
155
strummed accompaniment to their singing with an instrumental introduction or

taqsim plucked by the left hand, that is not indigenous but in imitation of the
lute-based Egyptian maqam tradition.
How secure is the evidence of wrist straps on Northern European lyres, I wonder.
The basic toggling technique that I described yesterday where the thumb rests on
the upper side of the left arm doesn’t need one, but it does help to have one if
the thumb does up-strokes with the back of the nail.
Dec 10, 2018
That’s what I suggest was the case on the nine-stringed cruit as a solo
instrument: using the plectrum to sound selected individual strings and selected
sequences of consecutive strings. In contrast to that I think the six-stringer was
designed for strumming across all the strings. I doubt that the right hand was
brought out to strum nearer to the yoke where the string spacing is wider,
because the use of the neck strap means the bottom-right rounded corner of the
soundbox so comfortably nestles into the curve made between the right arm and
the body. The dimensions make a perfect fit there, it feels so right, and the
strumming point on the strings feels like it is in the right sort of place too. Check
it out. But if the arm is brought out to reach towards the yoke the lyre, no longer
held in place by the arm, shifts to hang to the player’s right somewhat, so that
and the reverse action – the resumption of the regular cradled position - are both
a bit disruptive to the playing. It doesn’t feel right to do that in the course of a
piece.
Dec 10, 2018
Well, you can do ‘press’ plucks, coming off the blocked strings, but just not as
effectively as you can on the krar where the left fingers are much less parallel to
the strings. But being able to do something doesn’t mean they did it. I need to
emphasize here that I’m coming at this from cerdd dant, not from Ethiopia, and
the lower hand on the harp by-and-large was used to play block chords, usually
of three notes, to provide an accompaniment in full tertian vertical harmony in
support of the melody line of the upper hand. There’s an exact parallel between
that lower part and what Baltic toggling technique produces without any cutting-
in notes, right down to the alternation of two adjacent triads. The result on the
metal-strung harp is something of a Phil Spector-type ‘wall of sound’ when there
are chords of six or seven notes being played. It’s a very different soundscape
from the monophony of the krar you see, one where things are crowded vertically
but uncrowded horizontally.
The other factor that must be brought into account here is the poetry that the
lyre was traditionally used to accompany before it was displaced by the harp in
that function. In the case of Welsh, Irish and Old Norse strict-metre verse this
was very densely and intricately ornamented indeed (although verse in the
Germanic languages was much less so). The verse and the stringed
accompaniment would have been in rhythmic counterpoint to one another and
not in melodic unison, so with a lot of action in the accompaniment the vocal
ornaments would stand less clear. Minimalism in the accompaniment here would
be helpful, and that may explain why the lyre held its ground against the harp as
the instrument of self-accompaniment long after the frame harp was developed.
The strummed lyre is also more percussive in its action and sound than the harp,
and that would have matched the essentially percussive nature of the verse
better I feel.
156
Jun 11, 2018
I don’t know which way round the strings were on the 6-stringed lyre. If it was
used with the fingers toggling between pairs of strings to play triads, as on the
small Russian gusli, it wouldn’t make much difference musically. But if I’m right
that the larger 9-stringed lyre produced the music that piobaireachd was
modelled on then on that lyre it would have to have been that the lower strings
were the ones closest to the body – see my article on the solo lyre p. 16 – so I
suggest that was the case on the 6-stringed lyre also, although it’s not much to
go on. The fact that the crwth was strung in that order … is a rather stronger
indication I feel.
As regards connections between the lyre and the harp, it seems to me that the
tendency in the Celtic regions, where the lyre lingered longer, to play the harp
treble with the left hand must have been a simple and direct carry-over from the
strummed lyre on which the left fingers were used to block and perhaps pluck
whilst the right hand, normally the dominant hand, strummed. And of course in
cerdd dant it is the treble hand work that is most intricate. But note that Robert
uses in relation to the hands the terms ‘ucha’ and ‘isa’ – upper and lower – and
not left and right. That implies that it was not a rule that the treble hand was the
left one, and so perhaps left-handed people would have preferred to play the bass
with the stronger left hand and the treble with the right hand.
I expect, then, that if right-handed harpists today play cerdd dant with the harp
on the right shoulder, so that the bass is played with the left, non-dominant
hand, that care should be taken to consciously increase the volume of the bass in
relation to the treble. I’ve certainly noticed a tendency amongst other interpreters
to bury the bass part, but perhaps that’s more a consequence of unease about
the harmonies that arise on their interpretations. Harmony is the central pillar of
this music and not something to be tucked away.
Nov 25, 2018
… And with the flat bridge that, like the vielle, it seems the six-stringed crwth
had, we’re looking at the sort of full and rich vertical harmony that is in the ap
Huw manuscript. I can well imagine the tertian block chords that support the
melodic line there on the harp having come originally from the accompaniment
lyre and having been first developed on it, by simply using three fingers of the
left hand to block first every other string and then using those same fingers to
block the other strings, thus creating the double-tonic harmony so well known
from the British Isles. With the lyre tuned pentatonically then both triads of the
double tonic cannot fully spring into being. It would encourage monophony
instead.
… - for plectra to get a good tone I use slightly soft and fairly thin leather bits
sourced from my partner's old handbags. I find this makes a huge difference to
the tone - much sweeter and fuller than even the thinnest nylon plectrum. Hope
that helps.
Nov 26, 2018
Thanks for your interest on this.
157
Yes, I think you’re quite right that the six-stringed lyre would sometimes have
been retuned away from Hucbald’s tuning. The music in the Robert ap Huw
Manuscript is modal and whereas on the harp the tonal centre was shifted to
change mode, on the much more confined lyre it would often be more effective to
change tuning and leave the tonal centre as it is, so I expect that that is what
they did.
I’m convinced the six-stringed lyre was used for self-accompanying the delivery
of poetry, using blocking and strumming and was held in such a way as to
preclude cutting-in by the left-hand fingers (although not by the thumb), to
produce tertian chords of the nature found in the lower part in the manuscript but
played to produce rather more active rhythmic patterns out of the measures.
Basically a chordal accompaniment then, rather than a melodic one, although I
wouldn’t rule out brief melodic fills where there are vocal rests. For complex
instrumental melody I suggest the other two ‘pre-harp’ stringed instruments –
the lyre with a different design and greater numbers of strings (such as nine) and
the timpan – would have been used for independent instrumental music, not the
six-stringer. It may be, then, that people have been aiming too high today in
terms of their expectations of what the six-stringer was designed to produce. I
absolutely don’t believe the early alliterative poetry was sung to a tune. The
primary musical component is the percussive rhythms already built-in to the
vocal texts, but the manuscript suggests, if I’m right that the harp bass was
borrowed from the lyre, that the lyre would have added a harmonic dimension
when the vocalist was accompanying himself. But after the lyre had become
displaced by the harp as the instrument of self-accompaniment, with its greatly
expanded numbers of strings, self-accompaniment had a melodic component as
well as a harmonic one, as the manuscript shows (Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd and
Cainc Ruffudd ab Adda ab Dafydd there).
My main point here though is that we have lots of information to work from. It’s
not as if there’s no information that relates to the music of the six-stringed lyre
and that all we have to work from is the physical instrument itself. And that’s
good news.
Nov 30, 2018
… as I say, I argue that the 6-stringed lyre was a chordal instrument of

accompaniment, not a solo instrument producing purely instrumental music, and
that it gave rise to the homophonic chordal accompaniment that is found in the
bass part of the ap Huw harp music. That leads me to believe it was played using
basic block-and-strum but leaving more than one string at a time open (as on
some Asian arched harps and Baltic psalteries). My experience is that the timbre
of the instrument is extremely dependent on the nature of the plectrum, and for
homophonic accompaniment I find a fairly thick (3-4 mm.) but not very rigid
leather plectrum most appropriate. This produces a much softer, more ‘vocal’
timbre than a cut quill plectrum or a modern nylon plectrum. Those produce a
rather harsh, sharp timbre on this instrument, less suited to the voice. I find the
upstroke naturally more powerful than the downstroke, slightly. I find the string
spacing at the strumming point such that a strum needs to cover all the strings:
in order to strum selected strings the crook of the arm would need to be brought
out from under the end of the soundbox and across to the left to get the plectrum
near the yoke, where the string spacing is wide enough to give control over
selected strings, and that is not very comfortable nor how the instrument appears
to be designed to be used. A more rigid plectrum would be needed, as I suggest
for the 9-stringer.
158
Dec 11, 2018
The last new point I want to introduce about the chordal block-and-strum
technique for the six-stringed lyre is an important one for harmonic finesse. It
concerns the stopping point by the left hand and the controlling of the ‘plunk’
sound of the plectrum-struck blocked strings. The point on the strings’ length at
which the fingers of the left hand block has an important impact on the sound. If
the finger lies on or near to the harmonic nodes of a blocked string its sound is
still muted of course but the pitched aspect is amplified. In the case of the
standard-sized Northern European six-stringer the fingers naturally fall roughly in
the region of the second harmonic; on a small lyre, where the soundbox occupies
a greater proportion of the instrument, they fall in the region of the third
harmonic; that is, two-thirds of the way up the vibrating length of the string. On
the Ancient Greek barbitos it would be around the third harmonic one-third of the
way up the vibrating length. The playing of full harmonics, by releasing an
individual string as it is strummed or plucked, may have been a special effect
used by some Greek kithara players, although if played with an open left palm
the lyre does not lend itself to more than one finger at a time being placed
accurately enough to play a full harmonic. If one is playing music where harmony
is not an important ingredient, it may be helpful to exploit a relatively loud ‘plunk’
by centering the left-hand stoppings on the nodal points. But in a chordal,
homophonic block-and-strum context, these harmonic nodes need to be avoided.
The pitches they produce on the blocked strings inevitably conflict with those of
the chord being sounded on the open strings, which is to say, the adjacent notes.
Putting it in cerdd dant terms, if a cyweirdant chord is being played the blocked
strings sound tyniad pitches, and vice versa. The timbre of the blocked pitches is
slightly reminiscent of that of a marimba, and the effect necessarily interferes
with the harmony. Suppose, for a Hucbald-type example, the sounded chord is F,
A, C and the blocked strings are G, B-flat, D, blocked as they easily can be
around the midpoint nodes of the strings on the standard size of six-stringer. The
G, B-flat, D strings will ‘plunk’ with a pitch element at the octave above their
open pitches, thereby conflicting with the harmony of the open F, A, C chord. If
the fingers are moved away from the region of the harmonic node the
interference reduces in volume. However, there is still a pitched element to the
sound produced on the blocked strings and that can be used to advantage, to
reinforce the sounded chords on the open strings, if the fingers are placed with
care higher up the strings to stop around the minor seventh rather than the
octave. I say ‘around’ here because the pads of the three stopping fingers do not
all align with one another so not all three minor sevenths are reachable. I find the
best solution generally to that problem is to concentrate on the lowest, thickest
pair of strings because they are the ones that produce the greatest element of
pitch, and stop higher up the string thereby flatting the pitch of the plunk in order
to put it into concord with the sounding strings. Overall, the correct stopping of
the blocked strings adds greatly to the harmonicity the lyre produces in a
homophonic context. It turns out here that there’s more to playing the lyre than
first meets the eye!
Dec 14, 2018
Apologies … having dug out my lyres I see that with long fingernails as I have
right now and hooking the thumb over the upper arm of the instrument you can
produce very satisfactory cuttings-in with the left fingers. Less satisfactory
without the long fingernails.
METRE
159
CERDD DANT MESUR PATTERNS IN FOLK MUSIC
Aug 9, 2014
With metre in the manuscript, we're looking at their measures - the 'digits' - the
‘I’s and ‘0’s. Adjacent digits usually have about the same number of notes,
showing those digits were even in length. That isn't something that we could have
taken for granted though - it doesn't necessarily have to have been so, as 9/8
hornpipes have uneven digits - odd numbered digits are twice the length of even
ones. It's one example of how dance-type music needed to take rhythm further
than cerdd dant needed to.
Apr 8, 2016
I should add the names of the cerdd dant measures for the patterns that can be
seen in early double-tonic folk music. There’s been no information that’s been
handed down in any tradition other than cerdd dant about the patterns: it’s only
in the cerdd dant tradition that names have been written down, that the patterns
have been abstracted into notations and that they have been explained a little.
A very common pattern indeed is 000I00II. This is Calor, which is also the Latin
word for heat. A related pattern – the same cycle but beginning halfway through -
is 00II000I, but that has no cerdd dant equivalent. There is also no equivalent in
cerdd dant to a pattern quite commonly found: 000I000I. Perhaps this was also a
derivative of Calor and in both derivatives the musically satisfactory II at the end
was abandoned or forgotten. This group of patterns is unusual in that the number
of tyniad digits exceeds the number of cyweirdant digits – most other cerdd dant
measures have a greater proportion of cyweirdant digits. Perhaps a tyniad was
viewed as a ‘hotter’ thing than a cyweirdant?
Also very common in double-tonic folk music is the pattern II00IIII – Mak y Mwn
Byr – or perhaps that should often be read with the digits twice as long: I0II
since a recorded measure is I0III0II, Ysgwirin. A related pattern 000000II, which
has no cerdd dant equivalent, may be derived from Mak y Mwn Byr, through
beginning halfway through it, as IIIIII00 but then requiring the symbols to be
reversed (since by definition [in harp music] it is a cyweirdant not a tyniad which
concludes a measure).
Also quite common is 0I00I0II, which is one commonly recorded version of Trwsgl
Trwynci (sometimes sources vary in their notations).
The simple pattern 00II00II is the very common cerdd dant measure Tytyr Bach.
Perhaps it should sometimes be read with the digits twice as long, since 0I
repeating ad infinitum was a measure: Calchlasar, and 0I0I was also a recorded
measure: Dim a Dim: ‘nothing and nothing’, an indication of a disparaging view of
folk music perhaps.
A common pattern is II00II0I, which is one recorded version of Ffowram Hen and
of Ffowram Newydd. It closely relates to the patterning in the measure Corffiniwr.
I’m sure other cerdd dant measures occasionally turn up - I’ve noticed a case of
Trwsgl Mawr 0000IIII0000I0II – but these are the main patterns that are to be
found.
In cerdd dant, where strains and sections were not restricted to the four- or
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eight-bar cycles of the folk music, the general tendency was to use longer
measures than these ones and often to use two or more measures in conjunction,
often with Tytyr Bach being one of them. This difference in length is of course one
of the things which marks out cerdd dant as what I believe it’s right to call
‘classical’ traditional music, similar to the way in which classical nauba, maqam
and raga music is set apart from folk music partly by the length of its rhythmic
cycles. The difference is that in cerdd dant it was by harmonic cycles: the use of
long measures or of long concatenations of measures.
AN ANCIENT AFFINITY WITH THE MEASURES
Apr 9, 2016
Yes, we all feel these binary patterns wherever they are in music even if we don’t
conceptualise them as the cerdd dant culture did. The patterns aren’t random.
Each tells a different story and like stories they’re based on archetypal patterns.
The pattern of the measure Odid am Gwypo 0I0I00I0I0I0II turns up in the 2nd
century Gaulish Coligny Calendar, where the arrangement of 'mat' and 'anmat'
months follows the same sequence except that the Calendar is necessarily two
digits shorter and doesn’t contain the 0I at the beginning. Reading ‘mat’ as I and
‘anmat’ as 0 it has this sequence: 0I00I0I0I0II. Some system, probably also
based on the calendar, of calculating mad/anfad days was used in the 9th century
in Wales to form a simple predictive method for the classification and judgement
of nativities (mad = good/ seemly/ lucky, cf. Gaulish mat = happy/ blessed;
anfad: the negative of mad, cf. Gaulish anmat = wicked/ wretched/ terrible).
Cyweirdant as a point of repose relates to mad and tyniad as the complement

relates to anfad. If they ever used to think consciously along those lines at all
then they would have understood the measures as cosmological statements:
models of the ways in which reality was perceived to unfold through time, veering
suddenly between opposites but not just in a simple ding-dong, yin-yang rhythm.
The interest in and attraction to these types of pattern was much more
sophisticated and profound. But whether or not we reflect on these things, each
pattern, like a particular story, does its work anyway and that’s fine.
THE I O SYMBOLS
Feb 2, 2017
All those points [re: the I 0 symbols as decorative borders on the carved roundels
of ‘heads’ at Stirling Castle] are well put. I think that the importance of the
resemblance to the digital notation of the cerdd dant measures needs to be
assessed in terms of how rare ‘I0’ decorative motifs are elsewhere. Hopefully, art
historians will be able to answer that in time. I imagine such motifs might be very
common because the pairing of the symbols reflects gender-difference pictorially.
I know they [I and 0 as symbols] are used in the ancient ashtakavarga technique
of Hindu astrology in the form of vertical bars 'I' and large dots (which now are
printed as ‘O’), which comes into the record in medieval manuscripts. See Girish
Chand Sharma: Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra Vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1995), p. 507. It
is thought the origin of that tradition of using the contrasting pair of symbols is
their convenience when writing in sand. The outer stone circle at Avebury has
pillar-shaped stones alternating with diamond-shaped ones, and the West Kennet
Avenue nearby has the same placed opposite to one another. So this pairing has
had its admirers in different cultures. That's why I would expect art historians
would be able to come up with lots of examples of I0 pairings, from across the
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world.
If the pairing is common, that would mean the Stirling example might well have
no connection with the Welsh notation for the measures and no musical
significance; it might be just a decorative border for its own sake, with the carver
using patterning [on one of the roundels] that appealed to him more than the
tedium of regular patterning. If the pairing isn’t common, there’s still the difficulty
of reconciling the double ‘II’ symbol with the measures notation which lacks it.
Feb 2, 2017
That’s terribly helpful … [that a I0 style of pairing of contrasts occurs in the

widespread egg-and-dart motif]. Given then that the motif is on this Stirling head
as a circular decorative border and not in a linear music manuscript, it appears to
be an abstraction of the basic elements of the egg-and-dart motif. I wonder then
how common such abstractions of them are, and if there are other examples that
depart from the regular I 0 alternation.
All these pairing seem to be, no matter what the context, universal, archetypal
symbols of the dyad. Except for the Stirling II [roundel].
UNDERSTANDING THE MEASURES
Oct 26, 2018
In addition to the Boethian planetary associations of the notes there’s another

valuable interpretive resource that can be brought to bear on cerdd dant from
ancient tradition elsewhere. It can very usefully be applied to the measures
wherever they can be broken down, as they usually can, into four-digit units: the
standard length of a pwnc. As it happens, four-digit binary sequences received a
lot of attention and deep thought because they came to be used in a form of
geomantic divination (a poor man’s substitute for horary astrology in that horary
charts were generated by resorting to chance rather than by calculating the true
positions of the planets). All of the nuances in the stories that make each of the
sixteen possible four-digit sequences unique were identified and carefully
classified in astrological terms, thus entering the vocabulary of astrology – the
universal conceptual language of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
There’s no particular reason to suppose that there was any awareness of

geomancy in the cerdd dant tradition, especially as the geomantic tradition
probably passed first into Western Europe no earlier than the 11th century, from
the Arabs. But the measures weren’t arbitrary and those features that are
inherent in the abstract sequences of geomancy are necessarily also inherent in
the cerdd dant measures as they are played through, so knowing the astrological
associations of the sequences is very helpful in cerdd dant appreciation.
Let’s take a simple example: Tytyr Bach: 00II and 00II. The geomantic sequence
known in Latin as Fortuna Major is in that pattern and carries the sense of things
joining, coming together successfully. The measure begins with a sustained
statement of instability - two tyniadau, resolved by a sustained statement of
stability – two cyweirdannau. The geomantic sequence is associated with the
zodiacal sign Leo, and indeed the measure pattern 00II displays the
straightforward boldness, pride, confidence and optimism of Leo. It will be those
properties in the sequence which account for how popular Tytyr Bach was in
composition and particularly how it was the most commonly-used measure to
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follow other more complex measures to conclude sections of a piece, to round

long cycles off in the most aesthetically satisfactory and emphatic way.
Another example, a closely related one, is the measure Calor: 000I and 00II,
very common in the double-tonic dance music. Here the first half is in the pattern
of Tristitia, associated with Aquarius – a much more edgy experience with those
three tyniadau opening it, and a more dramatic narrative overall - a move from
Aquarius to Leo rather than just two statements of Leo.
So I recommend this sort of approach. It allows for a faster understanding of the

metres of the cerdd dant pieces than can be gained otherwise, and their metres
are an extremely important feature of them of course.
There’s lots online nowadays about the geomantic sequences.
You’ll notice that the symbols they use are dots – two dots side-by-side for what
should be read as cerdd dant ‘0’ and one dot for cerdd dant ‘I’. I wonder if it is
entirely coincidental that in both forms of notation one designator is a symbol
with width and the other is without width. Is that a manifestation of female and
male archetypes or might there be some historical connection after all? A big
question, which I expect will remain open.
RHYTHM
Dec 20, 2016
That’s good that you’ve brought up the point that Dolmetsch played the
ornaments on the beat. Of course it’s such a crucially important issue musically.
There are many many features that distinguish my interpretation from the earlier
ones, but as far as immediate impact on the ear is concerned the single biggest
difference of all by far is my placement of the short damped notes beginning
before the beat, before the lower-part chords. This makes an absolutely huge
difference to the music produced. Before I brought up the point and explained
some of the evidence for it to Bill Taylor in session at a conference in 1995, it
used to be that everyone had always played them on the beat. But the point had
been first made by Robert Dowd in his unpublished and neglected 1950 thesis,
and I quoted from Dowd at the conference, who very succinctly put forward his
view: to play them on the beat is to “invite disaster”. I think that might even be
something of an understatement! and subsequently all the musicians who were
present have adopted the change. I have set out the case in detail in a chapter
on ‘The Placement of Accent’ in my 1998 dissertation on Rhythm, pp. 33-51.
There’s no need for me to go through all that again here, but I’d be pleased to
discuss any matters arising from it, including what I describe (p. 44) as the
discomfort that arises “over the now rather bizarre fact that the great majority of
interpreters have been decided that the plethiadau should be begun on the beat”.
Perhaps left until well after Christmas though.
Seasonal greetings to all, in these most troubled and troubling of times. The
music has so much serenity in it, I feel it must be a force for the good.
REPERTORY
Sep 22, 2019
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The figure of 500 to 600 compositions in circulation at any one time: it’s a very
rough guesstimate, arising out of the variance between the lists. The list in
Panton 56:70 (see Miles p. 630) in particular doesn’t closely mimic the items
found in other lists. The impression I have is that each pencerdd would keep a
register of the pieces he and some of his neighbouring penceirddiaid had been
taught and that these would fall short of the totality of their bardic province
(talaith), given that there were multiple penceirddiaid in each province. And there
were three provinces. Most records seem to originate from North Wales, and the
Caerwys eisteddfodau attendees were from Gwynedd and the northern half of
Powys (Powys Fadog) only. Caerwys is fairly central to both. Nevertheless the
tradition in the South, which had been as strong as that of the North, by Caerwys
1523 was either in sharp decline or had recently extinguished. But Panton 56:70
includes at least one item from the South, so it may be that the disparities
between the lists are indeed a reflection of geography as I’m suggesting. The
other factor behind the disparities could be period: some lists may have
originated much earlier than others.
A similar situation, more marked, occurs in the lists of measures. I would very
much like to know if those not included in the twenty-four – that is, the great
majority of the measures - originated before or after the canon of twenty-four
was devised, or if they were drawn from a region remote to Gwynedd. All these
issues have yet to attract the deep attention of scholars of Welsh history.
Sep 23, 2019
Yes, your website has a lot of detail of tunelists … Altogether there is a great
quantity of manuscripts involved. Bethan Miles’s thesis is, I think, almost
exhaustive and everything she has is collated there. David Klausner has also
accessed the documents and presented leading examples to illustrate the sort of
detail they contain. The amount of recording that the scribes managed to do of
musical material is truly astonishing, an indication of how important they believed
the cerdd dant and cerdd dafod traditions to be. What we don’t have, however, is
clear explanations made for the benefit of outsiders from other cultures about the
inner workings of these arts. That is because, in spite of calls from humanists to
share and divulge things more widely, the poets and musicians weren’t persuaded
that that was the right thing to do. All the time, then, we are dealing with
material which wasn’t written for the likes of us.
Y DDIGAN Y DROELL
Apr 15, 2015
Neither version [i.e. proposed readings of this piece] can be ruled out on the
grounds that it's simply not musically credible, so to find which is the more likely
we have to look closely into the issue of beats intervening between two chords in
the bass in general in the manuscript. Very often there are very good grounds for
inferring the existence of intervening beats. The most obvious case is where there
is, somewhere in a piece, too many notes in the treble to be accommodated
without there having been intervening beats at that place. Then once you supply
the intervening beats there and refer to the measure of the piece you can fill in
the intervening beats elsewhere in the piece, to make up the number of beats per
digit the measure requires in that piece. A less obvious case would be where the
same process is prompted in a piece which does not itself have too many notes in
the treble anywhere but which has a melodic formula in common with a piece
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which does.
Putting this process into effect most commonly gives 4 beats per digit or bar,
which is the number the passage in the Dosbarth about 4 cyweirdant gwan
making 1 cyweirdant cadarn leads us to expect. But sometimes it's 2, and
sometimes it's 6.
Coming back to this particular little piece, Y Ddigan y Droell, it has no formula in
common with other pieces, so no intervening beat is prompted from other pieces.
Neither does it have within it any example of too many notes - they can all be
accommodated without needing to add intervening beats. And without them, the
piece gives 6-beat bars - within the range we find elsewhere.
A problem with not following this but instead adding unprompted intervening
beats is simply: when do you call it a day? Why stop at just one intervening beat
and not two or three? The choice between one, two or three becomes arbitrary,
and that's not a comfortable position to adopt.
We should hope that following the process I've described here would make more
sense of the piece than adopting unprompted intervening beats does, and indeed
I think that's true. It gives a 3/2 hornpipe. With one intervening beat between
each chord it doesn't, and it's hard to find any analogues of what you do get. It
has something of the flavour of a ballad but it isn't a ballad. It's pretty much on
its own. The hornpipe reading has a lot in its favour. Hornpipes in all time
signatures were like cerdd dant in being built on the double tonic, in measures
and in similar rhythmic patterns.
The piece is important because from its extreme shortness it looks like a piece of
folk music, and troell in the title - spinning wheel or spinning whorl - reinforces
that impression, in that it might be related to a labour song. It's helpful to have
an apparent example of folk music in the manuscript, because of course folk
music didn't die out when the formal cerdd dant did, so there's a tentative link
here with traditions that made it through to the modern era.
Apr 15, 2015
Not 'erddigan' but 'y ddigan'. We don't know that it denoted a particular
compositional form. On p. 109 the titles beginning 'y ddigan' are mixed up with
ones beginning 'cainc', which suggests that they were similar if not identical in
form.
Yes, that's a good way of putting the harmony of this piece - lush. The overall
effect is similar to that of modern triadic harmony. So similar it would be hard to
believe it could have been mere coincidence.
The dynamic quality of the harmony is another indication of Y Ddigan y Droell as

a dance-like piece; that is, one with no beats intervening between the chords.
Played that way, it all has forward momentum. It drives itself along.
There's no indication it had variations, but it's not directed to be repeated either.
Apr 15, 2015
No more [y ddigan or erddigan titles] in the cerdd dant title lists. I've collected
quite a few notices of it, including this one which might appeal to you … :
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Ac erddigan gwir ddeugwell

Na mawl yr uchgorwel Gell.
Apr 15, 2015
And here [in Y Ddigan y Droell] maybe we can hear an imitation of the repetitive
clickety-clack of the treadle in those last four repetitive beats at the end of each
section of the piece.
Apr 16, 2015
Yes … . There are some others too [i.e. erddigan titles in sources other than cerdd
dant ones].
By the time you get to about the 1740s and antiquarian interest in the
manuscript has taken off, it can't be assumed that what people report that
appears to relate to it is authentic. It may have been that 'erddigan' titles were
newly attached to various tunes because that term appears in the manuscript and
therefore offers a stamp of antiquity for them.
On the other hand, if it was a folk-music term in the first place, there's no
particular reason to suppose that it would have become obsolete by the 1740s in
the way in which the 'gosteg', 'profiad' and 'cwlwm' terms had.
Apr 17, 2015
It's not that Parry or Jones would have been likely to have composed these
pieces, just they could have been very happy to slap an ap Huw-type title on
them.
2/4 and 6/8 turn up too [in these erddigan pieces, in addition to 3/4 and 4/4).
The best book explaining the range of Welsh dance music is Phyllis Kinney's,
which I think you've got.
Sep 11, 2018
Yes, let’s have some more discussion about the terms for pieces, mysterious as
they generally are. ‘Y ddigan’ is the term used on p. 57 and p. 109 in the
manuscript, in Robert’s hand. If taken at face value it implies a feminine noun
unknown from other early sources, probably with the derivation cân with the
intensive prefix di-. Perhaps it is a mishearing (a substantial one) of ‘erddigan’,
and if that’s the case then Robert or whoever first misheard it wasn’t used to the
term and didn’t understand its full meaning, which would be an interesting thing.
The term used by Edward Jones in the 18th century for the piece Digan y Pibydd
Coch is faithful to Robert’s term.
‘Erddigan’ was in use early on, and its derivation is given in the Geiriadur
Prifysgol Cymru as cân with the two intensive prefixes di- and er-. Hard to pin
down then, if it related commonly to instrumental or vocal music or both.
If anyone has any new thoughts to offer on what might have been used as
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accompaniment other than the cainc form I’m sure we’d all be very interested.
The fact that the digan titles on p. 109 are listed together with cainc titles but no
other form, rather as they also come together on p. 57, suggests strongly that
the digan form was an alternative to the cainc one as accompaniment to the
voice.
Sep 12, 2018
That’s true, that Y Ddigan y Droell is more substantial than the cainc pieces – it is
much more sophisticated in the way it explores what the cerdd dant harmonic
system has to offer. But I suppose we can’t generalise from just the one example
of digan that we have. If we had two we could.
The outstanding fact about the little cainc pieces and the digan piece in the
manuscript is that nowhere in them is there any hint whatsoever of a ballad tune.
When folk musicians began to play song airs on their instruments in addition to
dance tunes, and as they began to afford harps, a new tradition was born: the
one which Patrick MacDonald described in his collection of Highland Vocal Airs
1784 in which harpers would take vocal airs and expand them. They would
attempt “to adorn them with graces and variations or to produce what were called
good sets of them”. Insofar as that was a purely instrumental tradition, the
enriching with graces and the creating of variations would have been driven by a
need to compensate for the absence of the sung verses, to create an instrumental
form which was the equal of the song air in terms of interest. But by having the
song as its starting point that is an instrumental tradition which was an outgrowth
of the great Western European popular song tradition, fundamentally so very
different from cerdd dant and utterly familiar and comprehensible to us today.
That's a big part of what makes the music in the manuscript so exciting and
valuable - it is such an enormous and radical addition to what was previously
thought to have been the compass of music. It takes some digesting, to even
grasp the scale of what is involved.
Sep 13, 2018
Thinking more deeply about the meaning of ‘y droell’ as the wheel or, more
literally, the turn thing (y dro-ell), I don’t see it now as relating to the spindle
whorl or the spinning wheel because the harp seems incongruous in the spinning
setting and because the piece’s regular rhythm isn’t needed to coordinate
spinning actions – it would interfere with them. I now think of it as a dance piece,
for a circle dance, because in Breton ‘an dro’ – the turn – is used to signify the
Breton circle dance. And because cerdd dant is more strongly linked in style to
double-tonic dance music than to anything else (piobaireachd comes next) I don’t
have any problem over the harp sometimes having being used for dance early on
in Wales. A collective circle dance is necessarily much more sedate than, say, a
reel or a jig so the harp being softer than the pipes and the crwth doesn’t rule it
out. And sections of differing lengths in a tune, as they are here, are in various
traditions sometimes an indication of a dance piece, one with rather complex
steps.
I might not be right but I think this will turn out to be my best shot at it.
Sep 13, 2018
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I’d call it folk music, because digan doesn’t turn up in the Statute requirements
for the gwŷr wrth gerdd dant – the instrumentalists. And it’s so very tiny of
course.
I can imagine Y Ddigan y Droell having a role in the less formal engagements of
the gwŷr wrth gerdd dafod: the gwylmabsantiau and the twmpath meetings on
Sundays and on Holy Days, where instead of a pre-arranged visitation on clera to
a patron’s house they would perform outdoors for the general public, probably
mainly in their local area rather than whilst circuiting. This would have made up
the great bulk of their performing time, dwarfing the time they spent on
presenting new poems to patrons. It’s a shame that scholars always seem to
concentrate on the performing of the new poems because these less formal gigs
must have been incredibly important to everyone.
Outdoor circle dancing I suggest then, for Y Ddigan y Droell, as a small item in a
much larger program of cerdd dafod, probably mainly in free metres.
Sep 14, 2018
Yes, its lines are of uneven length, those of the two cainc pieces are even.
I think I can detect a folk music component in those outdoor twmpath gatherings
of the public at old hillforts and mottes. The key description of these outdoor
gatherings when they were still in their heyday is from about 1572-1598:
“Upon the sondaies and hollidaies the multitude of all sortes of men woomen and
childerne of everie parishe doe vse to meete in sondrie places either one some
hill or one the side of some mountaine where theire harpers and crowthers singe
them songs of the doeings of theire Auncestors …”
There are some tunes mentioned in poems which never appear in the tune lists of
the classical cerdd dant tradition, such as Caniad Adar Llwch Gwin and Ychen
Bannog. Both titles refer to folk tales about mythological beasts and the latter has
a hillfort association, published in 1699: the old crwth player of Llandrillo, Dafydd
Rowland “used every Easter Sunday in the afternoon to go with the parish
youngsters to the top of Craig Ddinan to share out the white oxen. Then he would
play the tune called Ychen Bannog and all the other old tunes, which died out
with him”. Craig Ddinan will be the hillfort known today as Craig yr Ychain near
Llandrillo-yn-Edernion. Both these tunes are mentioned as early as the 15th
century, by Lewis Glyn Cothi, so this Craig Ddinan account of the waning of a
tradition relates to an old tradition of folk music that had been contemporary with
the classical cerdd dant one.
Just how much, if any, of this original instrumental folk tradition was able to be
picked up by the collectors of the 18th century such as Edward Jones is unclear.
Here’s a link to aerial photos of Craig yr Ychain:

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/306564/details/craig-yr-ychaincraig-yr-
ychencraig-yr-uchain
It’s a dramatic image, to imagine such places filled with everyone on Sunday
afternoons after church to celebrate their culture as late as the 16th century.
Perhaps the climate was milder.
Sep 15, 2018
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Apart from the eponymous ‘an dro’ of the circle dance in Brittany the structure of
Y Ddigan y Droell is well suited to dance. It has this distinctive feature: most of
each line is melodically composed of a simple motif repeated stepwise and so has
melodic movement but the tags at the end of each line are made of drummings
with no stepwise movement, and that pairing encourages first moving steps and
then stepping on the spot, so for a circle dance that would be a division between
first stepping sideways and then stepping on the spot.
There is a circle dance known from Skye and Eigg: An Dannsa Mòr, and that has
division between vocal solo and choral response in the manner work songs tend
to have. Anyone know its steps?
Nov 8, 2018
I’ve turned up the steps now of that circle dance from Skye and Eigg: An Dannsa
Mòr, along with its music. They are in J. F. Flett & T. M. Flett, ‘Some Hebridean
Folk Dances’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society Vol 7, No. 2
(Dec., 1953), pp. 112-127. The ‘wheel’ aspect of circle or ring dances which is
reflected in the Breton name for them, an dro, which suggests that purpose for Y
Ddigan y Droell in the manuscript, is commented on in the article. If you
remember me calling attention to those repetitive drummings at the end of each
line in Y Ddigan y Droell, a rather similar phenomenon occurs in part of the music
for An Dannsa Mòr. The authors of the article report that their informant on Eigg
remarks: “the steady monotonous rhythm of the second part is perhaps
suggestive of the sound of the mill-wheel” and add that the ‘chorus’ figure of the
dance – its turning part - is itself suggestive of a mill-wheel.
I do suppose, then, from its title and from its structure, that Y Ddigan y Droell
was used for dancing to the harp. Any more thoughts on this?
Nov 9, 2018
There’s a mention by the Welsh poet Dafydd Bach ap Madawg Wladaidd, Sypyn
Cyfeiliog (fl. 1340-1390), of "great joy on the slippery floor", accompanied by the
crwth. In Ireland it seems the first reference to the harp in connection with dance
is from Dublin in 1519: John Harper and others “on holydays resorted, to learn to
harp and to dance at the said justice’s place”. The earliest in Gaelic Scotland I’ve
come across has been from 1691, a possibly fanciful account in Robert Kirk’s The
Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies: “For wee have seen some poore
beggars of them, chattering their teeth for cold, that how soon they saw the fire
and heard the harp, leapt throw the house like goats and satyrs.”
It would be nice to hear something on this topic from the many illustrious figures
here on the list who are from the field of harping in Gaelic culture.
Sep 18, 2018
Yes, I imagine they [the pieces with ‘y ddigan’ in their titles] may have come later
than each of the other forms, but they might have been around for a very long
time and just not have been included in the formal classical repertoire because
they were folksy, or, at least, if they were like the one we have, because they
were extremely short. The earliest reference to erddigan is by Dafydd ap Gwilym,
so if they came late it wasn't very late you see.
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Sep 20, 2018
[Re Erddigan Tro’r Tant] Both John Parry’s 1781 version and Edward Jones’s 1784
longer version are motivic double-tonic melodies in suite form, including a 6/8
jig-like section. I illustrated the commonalities between some of my translations
of the music in the manuscript and the double-tonic dance music of the British
Isles from the modern era in my dissertation on Rhythm pp. 95-108 (including
my translation of Y Ddigan y Droell, p. 97), and drew the conclusion that the
double-tonic folk tradition must have overlapped in time with the cerdd dant one,
pp. 115-121. There must have been continuity in the folk tradition then, through
from the medieval period to the modern era. So this piece, like many others in
folk tradition, will contain elements that were brought forward from the Middle
Ages, most notably the double tonic itself.
Joan Rimmer says of Jones’s piece (‘Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relicks
of the Welsh Bards, 1784: A Re-Assessment’, The Galpin Society Journal Vol. 39,
Sep. (London, 1986), pp. 77-96):
“The process of ‘antiquising’ is clearly visible here. Of the 84-bar piece titled
Erddigan tro’r tant / Awake, harmonious strings, it is noted ‘Probably to this
animated music the Welsh Odes were sung’. Its repetitive rhythms and trumpet-
like melodic idioms, however, suggest a processional function. Its structure is
unique in this collection and may well embody some old Welsh prescribed
methods.”
But both versions have very substantial differences from the style of Y Ddigan y
Droell: they are longer, they change time signature, they don’t share a time
signature with Y Ddigan y Droell, they don’t have cerdd dant-style basses, they
sustain note values and so share none of their rhythmic motifs with Y Ddigan y
Droell. If the title Erddigan Tro’r Tant was genuinely antique and not ‘antiquising’
by Parry or his informant, it’s hard to see what, if anything, would have led to the
term erddigan as an indication of a musical form. So perhaps it had been a term
related to function, such as dance.
Parry and Jones say nothing about who or where their sources were, so I hope
you’re aware … of just how little they are to be relied upon. They were desperate,
as was Edward Bunting in Ireland, to sell the music they had access to as the
remnants of the ancient classical harp music, because the loss of that bit deep in
those times of antiquarian, nationalist romanticism.
THE PROFIADAU
Jul 4, 2015
So far it’s a mystery, what the profiadau were for exactly. Initially you’d think
perhaps they grew out of very short tuning preludes, like Highland pipers used to
play to check and settle in the tuning before starting a piobaireachd piece proper.
But the profiadau are long and all run into the same piece, so that doesn’t fit.
Unless that piece is used in the manuscript as just one example of how the
profiadau could preface any piece. But then there is the pwnc - the fairly short
piece that was played after every profiad. So each profiad seems to be a
programme, consisting of the profiad proper, then the piece they all have in
common, then the pwnc. And because the piece they all have in common isn’t
complete in the manuscript, we don’t know how long it was. But it strikes me as
170
being rather like a hymn tune, and I think the set nature of the programme as a
whole implies an association with some ritual or other. So perhaps a profiad had
some liturgical role in the Mass.
Alternatively, with the poems, it’s clear that some start with a prayer, some end
with one, and some are on religious subjects throughout. Perhaps a harpist’s
programme had to be structured similarly, with formulaic components appearing
at particular points, and perhaps for religious reasons.
The profiadau are dominated by big chords - wide ones or very full ones. The
pwnc has seven-note chords (which settles the question of whether or not the
manuscript was written for the crwth with its six strings by the way). Certainly
what was being expressed here was grand and profound. And yet there are
dramatic, puzzling changes in mood - sometimes within the profiad proper,
always between that and the Mixolydian ‘hymn’ piece, and then between that and
the Dorian pwnc, which is a very serious piece of music indeed.
I’d be very surprised if Carolan wasn’t reflecting a baroque context in his

Elevation but was continuing a native tradition. Although stepwise motion seems
to be his main feature here, and that does turn up in the profiadau - in Profiad y
Botwm as I’m sure you’re picking up on … and more strongly in Profiad Cyffredin
and particularly Profiad yr Eos Brido. It would be nice to know if that was a
feature of any other music for the Elevation.
Although it can be frustrating having these unsolved mysteries about the original
context of some of the pieces in the manuscript, I think we shouldn’t lose sight of
the fact that ultimately, whatever their contextual understanding, people were
confronted with this music, with its Suchness, and they treasured it. To some
extent they too must also have experienced it as mysterious. And Caniad Hun
Wenllian, for example, I’m sure was constructed so as to be mysterious. …
Mar 26, 2019
Yes …, I think generally your observations on the profiadau are correct. As

regards your question … on whether they were preludes or test pieces, a part of
the thinking behind playing preludes, a part of their justification in the modern
era, is to test the accuracy of the tuning. ‘Gosteg’ has been translated as ‘prelude’
but that will be because of the gloss to Gosteg yr Halen, that that piece was used
as a prelude to dining.
As we can see in the manuscript the profiadau were indeed used as preludes, to
the hymn-like piece that they all precede. So the profiadau were interchangeable
with one another, despite them being so very different from one another. That’s
intriguing. Equally intriguing is the fact that they were all used to introduce this
one piece. We might think that the ‘hymn’ piece was chosen just as a single
illustration of a principle of generally using a prelude for any piece were it not for
the fact that the ‘hymn’ piece is so very different from all the others in the
manuscript and that it was regarded as an integral part of any profiad, as the
pwnc ar ôl pob profiad, a designation for the last section to be played after every
profiad, makes clear. …
Mar 27, 2019
The GPC cites two examples from early dictionaries of ‘profiad’ in a musical
context being translated as ‘præludium’: by Syr Thomas Wiliems 1604-7 and John
171
Davies 1632. And given that the profiadau in the manuscript do indeed form
preludes to the ‘hymn’ piece, the issue isn’t in doubt. …
Mar 29, 2019
Yes, Feaghan Geleash carries the sense of the prelude as a testing, a tasting, a
trying, a proving of the tuning. Keith Sanger cites Sean Donnelly as explaining
the origin of the term as a scribal use meaning to try out a newly-cut pen:
https://www.wirestrungharp.com/music/lost_chords.html.
O’Hampsey’s understanding of such things, that the caoinans used, say, at the
turn of the 18th century, to have their corresponding preludes contrasts with the
use of preludes in the manuscript where all the preludes were prefacing the same
single ‘hymn’ piece. In Scottish piping when preludes were played I have the
impression that a piper might preface any piece with the single prelude he was
using at the time. So three different applications of the prelude concept then.
Joseph MacDonald wrote: “In their Fantasia’s or Voluntary Pieces they don’t
observe the Ground so strictly” on which Roderick Cannon comments:
“Fantasia could denote a piece which was literally extempore, “a piece of

instrumental music that one performs as one composes it” … but a more usual
definition was (and still is) a piece of music which has the appearance of being
spontaneous – “a kind of air, wherein the composer … has all the freedom and
liberty allowed him … that can reasonably be desired” (1724, cited OED).
Voluntary has the same meaning, with perhaps more emphasis on the
extempore, and with reference especially to a relatively informal piece played
before the main work.” Roderick D. Cannon, ed., Joseph MacDonald’s Compleat
Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe (c. 1760) (Glasgow, 1994), p. 75, n. 38.3.
THE GOSTEGION
Jul 22, 2015
… The gostegion are very interesting. I think I can explain why the term ‘gosteg’
became attached to these pieces. The person responsible for the announcing of
the guests must have been the gostegwr - the court silentiary. One meaning of
‘gosteg’ is proclamation, as in the proclamation of marriage banns, which will
have arisen because of the called-for need for silence (the primary meaning of
gosteg) for proclamations. In general court proceedings the gostegwr was the
one to call for silence, literally the ‘silence man’. He would call for attention
(“gostegwch”) and strike his staff of office against a pillar of the hall. At banquets
he must have been the one to announce the names and titles of the guests as
they entered the hall in turn. Whilst they were announced, made their entrance,
were greeted, were guided to their seats, washed their hands and were seated,
the appropriate music played on. It would not have needed to demand a great
deal of attention being paid to it. I’d hesitate to call them background music, but
I can well imagine these pieces accompanying activity and not being the main
focus of attention. They use a lot of repetition, for instance, and they are
structured in a very regular and consistent way.
… If anyone thinks this all seems too over-grand and too extravagant to be
realistic, it needs to be kept in mind that during the 13th century the total
travelling retinue of the princes of Gwynedd eventually grew to number 400
people - its arrival was dreaded!
172
THE CAINC COMPOSITIONAL FORM
Oct 16, 2015
Yes, I’m sure that’s right … , that sometimes solo instrumental pieces were
worked up out of short pieces. Short pieces existed in the form of the cainc, such
as we have in Robert’s manuscript with Cainc Ruffudd ab Adda ap Dafydd and
Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd. This form was used for accompanying the poetry, cerdd
dafod. And there are a handful of extended pieces to be found in the catalogues
with titles that suggest they were inspired by, and perhaps incorporated, pieces
in the short cainc form:
Cwlwm ar Gainc y Gwyddel

Caniad ar Gainc Cochwlyn
Caniad Crych ar Gainc Ofydd
Caniad ar Gainc Dafydd ap Gwilym
Caniad ar Gainc Jonet
Caniad ar Gainc Nest ferch Dafydd Fongam
Caniad ar Gainc F’redudd Ddu
Caniad ar Gainc Rys ap Cawrda
Caniad ar Gainc Syr Gruffydd Llwyd
Caniad ar Gainc Hawddfyd
Caniad ar Gainc Sioned
Caniad ar Gainc Eiddigyn
Caniad ar Gainc Ruffudd
Caniad ar Gainc Siwsanna
None of these are in Robert’s manuscript, so it’s not possible to confirm if the
relationship led to the familiar form of ‘air-with-variations’, nor with a concept of
a series of improvisations on a ground. The pieces that are in the manuscript
don’t resemble improvisations on a ground and they don’t much resemble the
‘divisions on a ground’ of renaissance music either.
Oct 18, 2015
Yes, good point. The caniadau, clymau and gostegion of course contained
ceinciau plural, and so when a cainc singular existed, perhaps there was
contained in that an implicit invitation to work up an extended piece out of it, as
was done with the pieces I’ve just listed. Still, each of the ceinciau involved in
that list must have pre-existed as a known stand-alone piece, along with the prif
geinciau and the two short ones in the manuscript, none of which ever appear as
extended pieces in the catalogues.
We know that the prif geinciau were played by the vocalists as accompaniment to
their delivery of poetry, and the other ceinciau have titles which are consistent
with that, thus we have ones named after vocalists: Dafydd Broffwyd, Gruffudd
ab Adda ap Dafydd, Ofydd, Dafydd ap Gwilym. The other six names involved I
and others haven’t been able to confirm as vocalists.
The two short ones in the manuscript consist of a single cainc, so I presume the
others were the same and that that was what vocalisation required. Instrumental
music required series of them, and I presume it was that usage, in that different
context, that led to the term ‘cainc’ - a branch, one amongst many on a tree?
173
Oct 21, 2015
Correction - I was forgetting that Caniad Crych ar Gainc Ofydd is in the

manuscript. It’s there under the title Y Caniad Crych ar y Bragodgywair, as Paul
Whittaker has spotted from the metre. The question then becomes what can it
tell us about the cainc as a compositional form for accompaniment as opposed to
a component of an extended solo piece. I’ve long puzzled over the related
question of what can it tell us about accompaniment.
As regards the first question, since each section of the piece is so very long, none
of them resemble the two short cainc pieces in the manuscript. It may well be,
then, that the working-up of a cainc into a caniad involved a lot more than just
adding variations. This makes identifying any actual incorporation of an original
cainc that may be in the caniad somewhere really difficult. I haven’t drawn any
conclusion on that, but the extraordinary fact of the inclusion of section 8 in the
piece has prompted me to consider that as a pointer to the style of
accompaniment to vocal performance that was produced on the lyre, which I’ve
found it suits in practice. The situation is complicated by the fact that the Ofydd
of the title is the Latin love poet Ovid and so the piece had archaic associations.
See my translation of the piece in the appendix to my dissertation on Rhythm
1998 and my discussion of its structure in my article on Melodic Formulas in
Welsh Music History 1999 p. 220.
I think the complexity of all this means that a caniad is a long way away from
being simply an air with variations. Composition in cerdd dant could be a very
involved, complex and mysterious business. As I say, it was the province of the
athro, the professor of music, the top of the tree.
THE CLYMAU CYTGERDD
Oct 16, 2015
The function of the clymau cytgerdd is one of the remaining great puzzles about
the repertory. The clymau aren’t built on the air-with-variations form, since
there’s no initial air there in the first place if you know what I mean. Plus the
sections are made more out of substitutions of notes and motifs than they are out
of divisions of them. Still, I do think the word ‘difr’ comes from or relates to the
Latin for division, so perhaps the cerdd dant use, despite being rather different
from the renaissance one, is related to it. Perhaps one use evolved out of the
other, early on, and later they diverged. And perhaps, even, the clymau cytgerdd
in practice used note-division more than is supplied in the manuscript.
I’ve written about the possible accompaniment function of the clymau cytgerdd in
my dissertations on Verse pp. 6-7, 10, 101-2 and Metre pp. 86-7; and about difr
in Metre p. 15. However, I’m not sure that the clymau cytgerdd were, as you
suggest, ever performed, for an audience. I’m coming increasingly to develop the
proposition that they were compositional aids [see my post of Oct 19, 2015].
CANIAD PIBAU MORFYDD
Feb 10, 2018
… Yes, the harmonies are often amazing. This piece along with some others puts
me very much in mind of what Matt Seattle had to say about the harmony of
174
some of the Dixon hornpipes:
"Those are more like the chords in John Coltrane's music than the sort floor-
singers use. In 1733 they were off the planet. ... This is wild magic. Even today."
Feb 11, 2018
There is an ambiguity on how that column - 92.2.2 [in Caniad Pibau Morfydd] -
should be read. Do you think that it might be that the top note in the bass should
be read as B and not A? The loop of B is in a finer nib than the rest of the chord,
suggesting that the B overwrites the A, and also the whole chord with a B but not
the A is repeated five columns later at 92.2.7. There is another ambiguity in the
preceding line, at 92.1.17 where the A has been overwritten by B, the little G has
been squeezed in in a finer nib and the D in the next column seems to have been
added too – it is small, in a finer nib and lacks the hook that D elsewhere on the
page has.
The ambiguity that these two chords share in is highly unusual in the manuscript
and it must be significant that they occur so very close to each other. When I try
to reconstruct the sequence of what happened scribally, this suggests itself to
me. Firstly, 92.1.17 was written, with C-A in the bass, along with 92.2.2 with C-
G-A in the bass along with the expansion on D in the next column, and along with
92.2.7 as it stands. Then later - probably much later because of the change of nib
- on inspection the inconsistency between 92.2.2 and 92.2.7 as they then stood
presented itself and prompted the correction at 92.2.2 of A to B. So far so good,
but I believe the same line of thinking was also applied, erroneously, to 92.1.17.
There is a precedent elsewhere in the ms. for these later additions in a finer nib -
the 'bis' in Robert’s hand at the end of 38.4 - so he did check things through and
make revisions. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were correct though. …
CWLWM ALBAN
Aug 17, 2018
Thanks … . Yes, it’s very interesting from the point of view of Wales, and also
important in the understanding of early music in Scotland and Northumbria.
I don’t agree with the claims that have been made that the word ‘alban’ in the
Welsh tune titles and measure titles signifies Scotland, the Kingdom of Alba, by
the way. The word order is wrong, so, say, Alban Henri is one example, and if it
meant Henry the Scot it should be that way round. The same problem in Irish:
‘alban’ could be read as the genitive of nominative ‘Alba’ and the genitive could
be adjectival but it should follow the noun I think, not precede it.
Alban is an important designation because there are in total quite a few such
titles, of measures and pieces in the documents. One curious fact is that the
‘alban’ pieces are all clymau, not caniadau. Obviously this has some bearing on
one of the great questions that remain about the repertory: what does the
distinction between caniad and cwlwm signify?
The words that follow ‘alban’ are: Bensin, Benverth/Ben Porth, Cilmaen,
Drychgerdd, Drychgant, Dylan, Dyrn, Elgam/Aelgam, Volfyn/Foelvyn, Galldorin,
Grini, Hefedr/Hyfedr, Henri, Hwlcyn, Hyddir, Hyfaidd, Hyfaidd Hir, Mawr i wrnerth,
Maenan, Rodri, Rutwr/Rodir, Rhydderch, Saethmelach.
175
Aug 18, 2018
I’m pretty confident we can dismiss Iolo’s introduction of the term ‘alban’ for the
four equinoctal and solstitial points of the year. There is no related precedent
recorded in the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, and anyway many ‘facts’ he came up
with which are dismissed as invention do have an earlier ‘seed’ which he then
imaginatively expanded or transformed. Yr Alban being situated in the North may
have been his prompt here.
If there had been definitively four different types of alban in the cerdd dant
documents, or eight or twelve of them, that might have prompted Iolo to
associate them with the calendar, but in the list I gave there are about twenty-
three and no doubt there were others, so I don’t think that cerdd dant served as
his prompt.
… Provençal ‘alba’ has the same problems of case ending and word order as Alba
the kingdom has.
I still think it just might be to do with an order of white-robed monks which are
known by other names normally, such as the Cistercians. I feel it is to do with
some class or other of person, you see.
It is an extraordinary thing that so much vocabulary in the cerdd dant tradition

has not been carried forward, that such things as alban are so difficult for us to
penetrate today, and that the discontinuity in Welsh tradition is so marked. It's
only been 400 years - that's not long at all in the great scheme of things.
Aug 19, 2018
Yes … I think that St. Alban’s feast day being 22nd June would have been the
seed that sparked Iolo’s imagination. There was a dedication to St. Alban added
in the 12th century at a church near Caerleon, which was very much in Iolo’s
territory. In his time there was a strand of thought, probably a wrong one, that
Alban had been martyred there and not at Verulanium, and that idea would have
appealed to Iolo greatly. See https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=K-Wue6_tG-
oC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=st+alban+dedication+%22usk%22&source=bl&ots
=_qGXKOL6BW&sig=dfX1UF37AL_ozCZcLauF5MdNFHc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUK
EwiQuafT2vjcAhWERMAKHauUB_8Q6AEwB3oECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=st%20alb
an%20dedication%20%22usk%22&f=false
Caerleon is the only early dedication to Alban in Wales, and so I doubt that the
saint would account for all those cerdd dant alban designations.
Jun 21, 2019
… today is the summer solstice and I think back to how brilliant that was that you
spotted the connection between it as St. Alban’s feast day and Iolo Morganwg’s
naming of the equinoxes and solstices as ‘alban’ this and that.
Aug 19, 2018
176
Thinking more about the word order, there is one title of a piece which lacks a
following name: Cwlwm Alban Mawr i Wrnerth (The Great Cwlwm Alban to the
Almighty?). And it could well be that those alban titles which refer to measures
originated as titles of clymau in those measures and in the process of becoming
the titles of measures lost the initial ‘cwlwm’. In which case we have a standard
pairing of noun followed by adjective: cwlwm alban. So perhaps a Scottish
cwlwm, or, following through on a Provençal theme, a morning or daybreak
cwlwm. Scottish is more likely.
So, Cwlwm Alban Henri: the Scottish Cwlwm of Henry?
Now Henry is a name introduced into the British Isles not until the Normans. And
I wonder if the fact that here it is Henri and not Harri gives an opportunity to
narrow down the period we’re looking at further?
See if you can get your friend to look into these points …
Hyfaidd is an anciently-established personal name …. There is a Hyfaidd Hir –

Hyfaidd the Tall – commemorated in the Gododdin. By the way, the measure
Alban Hyfaidd Hir does not refer to him but to the fact that that measure is longer
than Alban Hyfaidd: it is prefaced by an extra four digits.
Aug 20, 2018
… I now believe that a cwlwm alban was a subclass of cwlwm that was associated
with Alba the kingdom. That the lists of 24 ‘canonic’ measures include Alban
Hyfaidd also known as Alban Rhydderch suggests that the alban designation did
not begin in the Late Middle Ages. Now there are five other alban measures:
Benporth, Hyfaidd Hir, Elgam, Saethmelach and Galldorin, of which Elgam and
Saethmelach appear under other names in the canon of 24, as Cor Dia Tutlach
and Carsi, and the pattern of Galldorin appears in repeated form as Tutur Bach in
the canon of 24. It is, then, as if there was a canon of alban measures which
overlapped quite a lot with the ‘24’ canon. And given what Gerald had to say
about Scotland’s reputation as superior to those of Ireland and Wales, perhaps
the ‘Glendalough’ canon of 24 was an amalgam of not just Irish and Welsh
measures but Scottish also. Can it be that the cwlwm alban pieces were imported
into Wales from Scotland? In some lists a group of them is bunched together as if
they were thought of as a set although generally they appear in the lists
sporadically scattered amongst other titles. Looking closely into it I count about
seventeen of them: a significant wadge then. Many of the names are obscure, but
generally they seem to have a Welsh ring to them. There seems to be nothing
unusual about their measures or their numbers of ceinciau where those are
recorded.
I wonder if there could be some reason to associate these pieces with Alba other
than them being an import from that kingdom. I can get a sense from the lists of
pieces and measures that different and overlapping repertoires, either from
different periods or from different regions or from both were gathered together in
these collections, but it would seem odd if this many pieces could have migrated
from Alba – separated as Eastern and Mid-Scotland was from Wales by
Strathclyde and Cumbria which region would not in Wales have attracted the
term 'Alban' I think.
Aug 20, 2018
177
… The main difficulty with thinking these pieces are imports is that the alban
names often have a Welsh flavour. If we take the measure Alban Rhydderch,
Rhydderch is very much a Welsh name form, and a fairly common one in the
medieval period. In Alba we might expect Ruairi. In the British Strathclyde royal
dynasty there was a Rhydderch ap Dyfnwal in the late 10th century, just before
Strathclyde was conquered by Alba. But if these alban pieces were taken in from
Strathclyde you wouldn’t expect them to bear an Alban designation even though
they may have come from what technically had become part of Alba.
But perhaps they were pieces of Welsh origin but were early examples of a
compositional style of cwlwm that originated in Alba, or perhaps the cwlwm itself
developed there. I think those are the most likely explanations of the associations
with Alba. What do you think?
VERSE
THE PERFORMING OF CERDD DAFOD
Dec 11, 2018
In response to the last part of your post … I'll email you a copy of my 'Bardic
Rhythm' article from Studia Celtica. It details the rhythmic consequences of my
application of the rhythms I deduced that lie in the manuscript to the Welsh,
Irish, Old Norse and Germanic alliterative verse forms. Initially, that exercise –
the application - had to be done in order to test from a source external to the
manuscript the veracity of what could be deduced from the internal evidence of
the manuscript, as part of my work on the manuscript. I have been absolutely
committed to the ethical principle of not putting before the public an
interpretation of the manuscript that lacked that external verification, given that a
means of external verification was available. I most strongly reject any idea that
because we are dealing with music we should be expected to accept poor
standards in method, or no method at all, and that performers in the historical
field have no responsibility for the authenticity or otherwise of what they present
to the public. That is all something I feel most strongly about. So I was never
prepared to put the harp music that I had before the public until I was satisfied
after having sufficiently consulted other specialists in the verse forms that the
rhythms passed that test. It took years to reach that point. The other thing that
became apparent was that there was a match with some of the rhythms of some
instrumental folk music from the British Isles, in other words the classical
tradition of harp music was not unrelated to the substratum of folk music. If it
appeared that it had been unrelated that would have been a cause for concern or
hesitation in bringing the harp music to the public, as far as I’m concerned.
So it may seem to some like pedantry for its own sake but presenting my work on
rhythm is complex and I’ve written it up divided into three very separate works,
reflecting the logical flow of the order in which the various operations had to be
done and the temporal order in which I actually did them, each operation
separated by decade or so which emphasizes the importance of their separation.
The works are:-
1) my dissertation on ‘Rhythm’, itself founded on my penetrating the full meaning
and metrical significance of the tablature symbols and their fingerings etc.,
having learnt the whole manuscript on the harp and having played it through
every which way that can be imagined.
2) my dissertation on ‘Verse’ which was the offering-up of the harp rhythms to
the Welsh strict-metre poetry texts, i.e. the external test.
3) my article ‘Bardic Rhythm’ which was the presenting of the results of the test
178
and of the ramifications of that for the performing of the alliterative verse in the
other languages.
There’s also an audio illustration of the rhythms in practice, using the most
minimal form that the accompaniment to Welsh verse could have taken, and
that’s chordal block-and-strum on the lyre, with, assuming the vocal was pitched,
the most minimal melodic vocal possible, at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFSWSlZHPmI. To appreciate it you need to
listen carefully to the cynghanedd and to how the rhythm of the syllables closely
resembles those of the spoken language but especially how that throws out the
cynghanedd to the ear and how it brings out the amazing syncopations against
the beat that the cynghanedd creates in that rhythm. Think of it as a totally
unfamiliar form, one of highly-syncopated vocal percussion, not as a form of song
please. The lyre I’m playing is one of Michael’s Sutton Hoo ones.
Nov 30, 2015
No … , the list I posted [on Oct 16, 2015] of cainc titles that had been worked up
into extended pieces including Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd [later on Nov 30, 2015:
Correction: I meant not Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd but Cainc Dafydd ap Gwilym.
Sorry!] were not drawn from a late folk music repertoire but from the catalogues
of the cerdd dant tradition. Please reread my post of Oct 16, 2015. It’s these
pieces that I referred to again a couple of days ago when I outlined the sources
which inform us about the ‘cainc’ form.
On the pitch aspects of the vocal performance the cainc accompanied, can I
mention again my chapter on this in my 1995 writing, pp. 103-133, which
includes a bibliography on that subject? If I’m right about it having been a chant
on just two notes, then Iolo Morganwg even as late as the late 18th century
might still have encountered a survival of that in North Wales which could have
been transferred from cerdd dafod to penillion singing when he refers to ‘the
same dull chant’ and ‘a tolerable drone’ and ‘which has in it something grand’.
Here’s an example of my two-note approach, sung by Gwilym Morus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFSWSlZHPmI
You appreciate that the musicality here lies in the rhythmic syncopation of the
cynganeddion and of the endrhymes, such that melody - so important in our
culture - isn’t necessary. Indeed, melody in the sense of rhythmic consistency
from line-to-line or from verse-to-verse isn’t appropriate and can’t be applied
here because each line is rhythmically unique. Putting it simply, it was a rhythmic
art, not a melodic one. It may have been musically pitched when it was
accompanied, but datgeiniaeth was not the singing of songs. I believe that
explains why no song tunes have ever turned up in conjunction with the strict-
metre poems. ‘Tunes’ of just one or two or three notes? - not worth writing down.
There might be a parallel to be drawn with the dance music when that was
accompanied on the bass viol etc., if we think of the harp cainc as acting in a
melodic role as did the treble part of the dance music and the vocal part as acting
in a harmonic ground role as did the bass part of the dance music [see my post of
Oct 27, 2015 above re the playing of dance music in consort]. Note that the
patter-singing and the calling of steps in Appalachian old-time dancing is drone-
like in intonation, contrasting with the dance tune. I love this one:
If you wanna get to Heaven, let me tell you how to do it

Just grease your feet with a little mutton suet.
Slide right out of the devil's hand
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And ooze over to the Promised Land.

Take it easy …
Go greasy.
CANU CYWYDD PEDWAR
Aug 28, 2017
Thinking now about … vertical tetrads in the music’s harmony, I’d like to try to
head off any confusion with other groups of four things that might develop. They
might well connect with the concept of pedrylef which I introduced a while back
but the other four-fold thing that was around was cywydd pedwar: a four-
cywydd, and I don’t think that had anything to do with the tetrad. “Canu cywydd
pedwar, ac acennu” was one of the 24 campau – feats or achievements – that the
accomplished gentleman was expected to be able to do. “Canu cywydd gan
dant”:- to perform a cywydd with stringed accompaniment – was another. The
two appear on first impression to be rather similar, and have left scholars
wondering if cywydd pedwar was a different animal from the plain cywydd
referred to in the latter. Various explanations have been attempted since the 18 th
century. Edward Jones claimed fancifully that it was evidence of singing in four-
part harmony, others that it must have been singing to a tune of four lines; but
amongst the many thousands of cywyddau for which the texts have survived, no
grouping of four lines or four couplets or four anything emerges as significant.
I think the true explanation is that canu cywydd pedwar, ac acennu meant to
compose an example of a cywydd containing all four types of cynghanedd: groes,
draws, lusg and sain, and to accent them correctly. In the field of cerdd dafod,
‘canu’ was more often used in the sense of composing a poem than in the sense
of performing one.
I don’t expect that here ‘pedwar’ indicated any four-part polyphony or any four-
lined tunes, or that it had any connection with tetrads, or with the four cynnwys
dannau. It gives us no extra insight into whether a cywydd was sung to a tune or
not, only into the importance of its correct accentuation, governed as that was by
cynghanedd, for which see my article on Bardic Rhythm.
Aug 30, 2017
Not quite, … - ‘ac acennu’ means ‘and to accent (it)’ i.e. a cywydd pedwar. Note
the indefinite article there.
Every line of a cywydd had to contain one of the four types of cynghanedd. That’s
what made the cywydd canu caeth – a strict metre form. All the timing and
accenting of everything in a line was governed by the type of cynghanedd it had,
whether the line was delivered across three or four musical beats, that sort of
thing. Generally, especially early on, the taste was for the cynghanedd to be
drawn from an assortment of types to provide variety in performance. But later
the taste changed to having more regularity, so sometimes a cywydd would not
contain all four types. So a cywydd pedwar is very comprehensible as one that
displays all four and demonstrates the gentleman’s competence in using them.
These gentlemen were those often wealthy enough to commission poets to

compose on their behalf request poems addressed to their friends. They needed
horsehair-strung harps to accompany themselves when singing a cywydd,
whether they were professional poets or not, and so it is that there are quite a
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few poems requesting such harps, generally not for professional use. Maybe they
and other family members performed for family and friends. They are probably
the origin of the term datgeiniad dyledog, noble reciter, the model for the
professional poets as performers, who were sometimes drawn from a lower class.
Very occasionally a visiting professional poet might present a new poem to a

gentleman, for a large fee. But generally visiting poets would just perform
existing poems for a small fee, either from the gentleman’s family stock of them
or, as I suspect, from a national stock of narrative poems in the free metres (that
is, without cynghanedd), particularly the traethodl metre, suitable for all
occasions. They have not survived in Welsh, unlike the Fenian lays in Irish, but I
expect they are those that inspired and gave rise to the Breton lais in other
languages.
Basically, such was the importance of cynghanedd that narrative poems without it
were not preserved. A big shame.
EXPRESSION
THE THREE TYPES OF MUSICAL ETHOS
Feb 22, 2019
In case any of us are tempted to think possessively about the Irish evidence of
the threefold division of string music according to its function in terms of
psychological affect as if that had been a feature unique to early Irish music, I
should point out just how very widespread that most practical way of classifying
music once was. Firstly, and I don’t think the connection has been noticed before,
the same threefold classification was presented by the Ancient Greek writers on
music: Aristides Quintilianus, Cleonides and Manuel Bryennius. The terms they
used were diastaltic (elevating), systaltic (depressing) and hesychastic
(soothing), which, from their descriptions of each, respectively match the Irish
terms geantraí, goltraí and suantraí. Thus, to take suantraí for example, its
correspondent the hesychastic ethos is associated with quietude and suits
measured, symmetrical rhythms (Aristides) and is explained as accompanying
tranquillity of the soul and a free and peaceful condition (Cleonides). For further
detail see Jon Solomon, ‘The Diastaltic Ethos’, Classical Philology, vol. 76, no. 2
(Apr., 1981), pp. 93-100.
Secondly, that the threefold scheme was not restricted to Ireland is also
demonstrated by the following 13th-century account of the 10th-century Mashriqi
lutenist and theorist al-Farabi, set in Damascus:
“Having tuned it (his lute), he began to play and cast all the company into a fit of
laughter. He then undid the strings and, having tuned it in another manner, he
began to play and drew tears from their eyes. Mounting it a third time, in a
different key [or mode or tuning?], he played and sent them all to sleep, even the
door-keepers, on which he took the opportunity of retiring and left them all in
that state.” (H. MacGuckin de Slane: Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary, III,
p. 309), quoted by Peter Crossley-Holland, ‘Telyn Teirtu’, (Bangor, 1997) p. 19).
Thirdly, Peter Crossley-Holland in his book ‘Telyn Teirtu’: Myth and Magic in
Medieval Wales, pp. 7-19, finds a Welsh relative of the threefold scheme in a folk
tale credited as having been in currency in the 18th century and which contains
some medieval elements. Here the sounds of a magical harper were interpreted
by the folk as three types of prognostications categorised according to in which
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season they were heard: in summer they foretokened a wedding in the district;
but if heard in spring or autumn a funeral might be expected; heard in winter
they indicated a storm and severe weather, accompanied by sickness and death.
The correspondence with suantraí is not exact here, as Peter points out, but
winter is of course a time for taking shelter, for healing and for sleep.
Also, it has been suggested (Emily B Lyle: '"King Orpheus" and the Harmony of
the Seasons' in The Ballad Image, ed. James Porter (Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 20-
29) that the threefold division is to be found in the following lines of the Scottish
ballad 'King Orpheus'
First he played the notes of noy, (grief)

Then he played the notes of joy,
And then he played the gaber reel.
That might a made a sick heart heal.
The term 'gaber' is obscure, but 'reel' suggests joyful music, so it might be that
only two expressive modes - sorrow and joy - are being referred to here.
However, suantraí is strongly associated with healing, and it is the most common
sequence of the Irish sources: goltraí - geantraí - suantraí, that seems to be used
again here. A note at the end of the earliest copy of the text says that “harpers in
Britain heard this marvel, and made a lay thereof, which they called 'Lay Orfeo’”,
(quoted in Francis Collinson, The Traditional and National Music of Scotland
(London, 1966), p. 258).
Feb 23, 2019
… Yes, the threefold classification of psychological affect was very widespread. In

terms of music we today tend basically to think in terms of two: happy and sad,
related to major and minor scales and chords, so the threefold system seems
rather unfamiliar. But in medieval cultures, in the inevitable compromise between
precision and practicability, it was customary to commonly think in terms of
three, four or five broad qualities of experience rather than two. Perhaps the field
of application which was most central was not music but medicine, and the one in
which the divisions were most firmly rooted was the impact of the seasons.
Conceptually, and therefore probably historically, the threefold system is a
precursor of the fourfold system. The division of the year into seasons falls into a
developmental pattern, with an original emphasis on the distinction between
summer and winter in hunting and gathering economies and in pastoral
economies which waned as the two points of instability lying between these -
spring and autumn - became more significant with the development of
agriculture. The monsoon countries, notably India and China, have needed to
develop a fivefold system of medicine and aesthetics to accommodate their five-
season year.
It is in the East, principally in the Indian subcontinent and in Tibet, that the
threefold division has survived in a flourishing condition as a fundamental
component of traditional medicine, in the tridosha - the three humours: wind
(vata), bile (pitta) and phlegm (kapha). Some wider psychological insight into the
threefold categories of early Irish string music can be extracted from the tridosha
by comparing the concept of sanguine music (Irish: geantraí) with pitta,
melancholic (Irish: goltraí) with vata, and phlegmatic (Irish: suantraí) with
kapha.
But in the medieval West the fourfold division was in use – the four
temperaments, cardinal humours, seasons and elements. The Irish threefold
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division in respect of music will have been more ancient. A fourfold division of
music does eventually emerge in an account by the Scottish fiddler William
Thomson:
“Music, in general, was divided by Macrimmon the piper, principal of the musical
college in the Isle of Skye, into four kinds: music for love, music for sorrow,
music for war, and music for meat.” (Thomas Newte, Prospects and Observations
on a Tour in England and Scotland (London, 1791), p. 163).
This classification can be compared with the early Irish classification such that
suantraí: for love; goltraí: for sorrow; geantraí: for meat, with music for war
being the additional category teased out probably mainly from the former
geantraí field. In the Maghreb, attributed to the ninth-century lutenist and
theorist Ziryab who was educated in Baghdad and was active in Spain, a
musicotherapeutic tradition (still practised in Fes) was developed within the
Andalusian tradition, in which the repertory was classified according to the four
divisions of traditional Western medicine, enabling music to be used for both
diagnosis and treatment. Presumably something similar surrounded the division
that the MacCrimmons were aware of. Certainly there was a defined ‘war’ aspect
to string music in Wales and Ireland.
So, to sum up, a depth of understanding of the threefold division of music can be
gained through an awareness of the tridosha of ayurveda and the same in respect
of the fourfold division of music through an awareness of the European and Arabic
traditional system of medicine that originated in the thinking of Hippocrates and
Galen. My point is that both, but particularly the latter, have a strong bearing on
the issue of variety of expression in the music of the manuscript. Thankfully, it's
not that we have to be shooting in the dark here!
Sep 14, 2019
Yes, that’s right … the references to the three strains are mythic and romantic.
Nevertheless, in the historical period harpers did perform in the appropriate
contexts for each of them: at memorial services (goltraí), at feasts (geantraí) and
in private bedchambers and for votive offerings before altars (suantraí). The
same purposes and modes of expression are also evidenced by the texts of bardic
poems which harpers accompanied. The key points here about the early
references are the clear separation and distinctions that existed between the
three strains, and the power of the string players’ music to bring about the
appropriate effect on the listeners. So I’m sure that in reality the vocalists and
string players would have been minded to emulate the ancient tales and that the
compositions they performed would have been designed with that in mind.
Remember that once you have full vertical harmony, as they did, it is possible to
‘hard-wire’ emotional tone into the chords of a composition.
What’s most exciting about this for us is that music specifically designed for going
to sleep to died out when sufficient numbers of people ceased to exist to maintain
the genre, those able to afford to retain a personal musician. The Scottish writer
George Buchanan described in 1582 this use of harpers, so exotic, luxurious and
unfamiliar for us today: “for this kind of men were accustomed to spend the night
in the chambers of the nobles to lull them to sleep, or entertain them when lying
awake, an usage which is still observed by the ancient Scots in all the British
isles”.
Sep 23, 2019
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“Functional musicians as opposed to entertainers” – yes, that’s exactly it – that’s

very well put indeed. Live string music was thoroughly integrated into life and its
rituals, well beyond the modern concept of the concert. For example, today a
sorrowful item may be included in a concert as an artwork per se and that is
really an act of theatre, in the sense that we pretend something has happened to
warrant the sorrow. Back then sorrowful items would have been commonly
prompted by actual real loss. It’s a fundamental difference: music prompted by
reality and music prompted by theatre, one step removed from reality. See my
posts on all the contexts for the three strains from earlier this year.
But in answer to your question about applause, the reception at feasts would be
very like the modern concert, the main items of festive, celebratory music and
poetry being attended to in silence and followed by applause. Such things were
not open to the public but the bardic performers would also sing and play for the
public in the open air at festivals.
As regards judgement, the formal presentation of a new poem or a new

composition should have been before not just the patron and his entourage but
before at least one judge, a person of high standing with the experience to judge
the worth of such productions, such as a pencerdd. The implication is that the
general audience should not be relied upon for judgement. That rather puts us in
our place!
MEDITATIVE MUSIC: SUANTRAĺ
Jan 1, 2019
… And here are some nice thoughts to share from an old article by Tony Conran:
‘Music and my life as a poet’:
“Finally, I think, despite every incitement to move and struggle and dramatise, it
is that feeling of a “still point in a turning world” that still totally grips me. …
Perhaps the music which comes nearest to the heart of it all is the classical music
of the Highland pipes, the ceol mor, the Pibroch. It is the most introverted and
defiant music I know. The piper wraps it round himself, like a great plaid. …
Ordinary words – stately, dignified, lively, beautiful – don’t seem to apply.”
He then went on to speak in the same vein about such cerdd dant as he had
heard at that point (Osian Ellis’s 1969 recording of his first reading of Caniad San
Silin): “It has, to my ears, something of the uncompromising nature of pibroch,
an otherness and a stillness that controls relatively simple technical resources
with the surety of a high art.” (Welsh Music, vol. 5, no. 6, 1976, pp. 35-6).
Jan 5, 2019
“…The piper wraps it round himself, like a great plaid…” Tony’s image was well-
chosen. Piobaireachd can demand total immersion and provide total shelter. If
anyone doubts the truth of that statement then try getting to know the long
version of Ceann na Drochaide Bige, The End of the Little Bridge, recorded by
Allan MacDonald on ‘Dastirum’ (Siubhal, 2007). No longer than 11 minutes it is
fiendishly complex in the demands it makes on the memory and in consequence
it's highly rewarding when penetrated.
The same principles apply in cerdd dant: to penetrate a weighty piece, to get to
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know it so as to be able to reproduce it as a player or to have the satisfaction of

being able to predict its course as a listener, without being thrown, without falling
into any traps, you need to immerse yourself in it each time it’s in progress. And
that remains the case even after you’ve learnt it, with the more difficult pieces. A
folk tune is sort of learnt as a gestalt, in one gulp as it were, but in cerdd dant it’s
different. Either there’s no incremental logic between sections of the piece and
they have to be learnt by a sort of rote learning or where there is sequential logic
to the development between sections the logic needs to be first detected and
comprehended then memorised. The detection is often made deliberately difficult
by the smallness of the difference between one section and the next: that
principle of near-sameness I‘ve talked about here before.
The professionals had shortcuts available to them – verbal instructions and all the
vocabulary for them (like the rubrics in the ms.); the audiences had a tougher
challenge, to penetrate by ear all the subtle twists and turns and peculiarities. It
all has the sense of what Gerald said, that the greater part of their art seems to
lie in veiling it.
I have the conviction that really stretching feats of memory were held as virtually
sacred. That would be a relic, surely, of preliterate society, where I imagine
memory was held sacred (in India I imagine that learning and recalling the
Rigveda is still a sacred act?). And that fascination with memory has survived
through to today in an unbroken tradition, in Scotland in piobaireachd. Amazing.
And the contrast between that ancient ethos and the virtuosity ethos of the
modern era could not be greater!
Jan 11, 2019
Yes, that’s a very good point … : the diwedd part gives the player and the
engaged listener a breather from intense concentration. And I wonder if those
pieces where the diwedd remains unchanged throughout a piece are those more
likely to have been soothing in intent, representing the function of medieval
string music described by the Irish term suantraí. Caniad San Silin gives the
strong impression of that intention and it’s one of the pieces that has a diwedd
that stays constant. There again, Caniad Hun Wenllian doesn’t maintain a single
section ending throughout despite the ‘hun’ (‘sleep’) in the title. But perhaps it is
a lament, that is, goltraí. It’s a very mysterious piece altogether. The other piece
in the repertory lists with ‘hun’ in its title is Caniad Hun y Brenin Lawgoch which
refers to Owain Lawgoch the 14th century claimant to the throne of Wales. The
fact that he and various Gwenllians of the same royal family came to sad ends
which were much regretted in Wales prompts me to think that these pieces just
might have been memorial laments rather than sleep pieces. But the more literal
interpretation is that they were sleep pieces.
I think it’s terribly important for us to try to identify the correct emotional affect
that each of the pieces in the manuscript was designed to induce, for fear of
modern renditions being simply wrong in their expression. I’ve puzzled over every
piece as of course you do when you play them, trying to find out which
expressive mode was appropriate for each piece, working out as many arguments
as I can for and against each mode. In the case of Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof
I was able to conclude there were two modes included: first goltraí and later
geantraí, so it can be complex.
Jan 11, 2019
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Yes, and that [that ‘hun’ and ‘huno’ are used today now as an euphemism for
death] was the case in the Middle Ages too, as in ‘hir hun Faelgwn’. That’s why I
think the ‘hun’ pieces may be memorial laments composed after the deaths of
their dedicatees. Owain Lawgoch (c.1330-1378), a descendant of Llywelyn ab
Iorwerth, was raised in Surrey and afterwards served in the armies of the King of
France. He was assassinated in France by an agent of the English Crown, which
was seriously threatened by the prospect of Owain invading Wales with a French
army and with native support. In consequence Owain occupies a central place in
darogan (prophetic) poetry, alongside Arthur, in which he is looked to as the
future saviour of Wales. The legend is that he lies sleeping in a cave near Carreg
Cennen, awaiting the summons to return. It may be then that the sleep of Owain
referred to in the cerdd title is this condition, to which attaches all the sorrow and
disappointment surrounding his death, rather than to his bedchamber music.
Caniad Hun Wenllian will refer to one or another of the Gwenllians of the royal
families of Wales, and again a disappointment or sorrow attaches to each of
them. The most probable dedicatee is that daughter of Gruffudd ap Cynan who
married Gruffudd ap Rhys of Deheubarth, most probable because there are pieces
in the repertory lists bearing the names of her father, her father-in-law, and the
unusual name 'Suwsana' - the name of one of her sisters. This Gwenllian was
slain in battle against the Normans near Kidwelly in 1136, and the legend was
that only her decapitated body was afterwards found on the battlefield; until her
head is reunited with the body her spirit wanders the field, unable to sleep. Note
that Owain Lawgoch had his throat slit. It occurs to me that whatever the beliefs
were that surrounded the Iron Age and sub-Roman Celtic custom of decapitating
one’s defeated enemies and putting the heads on display, they seem to re-
emerge here.
This Gwenllian’s daughter, the wife of Ednyfed Fychan, was also named
Gwenllian; she lost one of her brothers as well as her mother in the battle.
Another ill-fated Gwenllian was the only child of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and Elinor,
who died giving birth to her; this Gwenllian became the last surviving member of
the senior line of the House of Gwynedd before her childless death in an English
nunnery. Another Gwenllian was daughter to Owain Glyndwr. Each of these
Gwenllians was associated with the sorrow of the loss of independence of the
Welsh kingdoms, and their sleep might well have been interpreted within the
bardic tradition as a metaphor for its unhappy politics, along the same lines as
the sleep of Owain Lawgoch.
If indeed Caniad Hun Wenllian begins as goltraí, which feels to me very possible,
perhaps towards its end it has become suantraí, finally bringing merciful sleep to
her restless spirit?
Jan 21, 2019
Here’s a list of the pieces that I think are those most likely to have been designed
to be soothing and meditative, the pieces that invoke most strongly the sense of
otherness and stillness that Tony Conran spoke of, the sense of a ‘still point in a
turning world’, suited for playing in the lord’s chamber - the ystafell - and the
chapel. Harp music used for going to sleep to and for sleeping to was a reality, for
that was the custom of medieval lords, to have a harper playing for them late at
night and, I imagine, whenever they or a member of their family or retinue had a
fever. Also, in the time of the princes the heir-apparent and his squires all slept in
the hall with the fire stoked-up for the night. Gerald remarked on the general
practice of people sleeping overnight on rush palliasses on the floor of the hall, so
you can imagine there being a place for soothing music at the end of the evening
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there as well as in the chapel and the chamber. So those are the contexts that I
believe these pieces should be understood as belonging to, contexts which have
nothing in common with the concept of the concert that we have today.
Caniad y Wefl
Caniad Tro Tant
Caniad San Silin
Caniad Hun Wenllian
Caniad Llywelyn Delynior
I’d be very interested in opinions on these assignments. There are puzzles. The
title Caniad Ystafell refers to the chamber yet it is manifestly sorrowful rather
than soothing. In the time of the princes ‘ystafell’ in relation to the royal court
referred to a separate building from that of the hall. It was the sleeping-quarters
and private space of the royal family, comprising several rooms. In one reference
the Bishop of Lincoln’s harper had his chamber next to the Bishop’s chamber. In
smaller courts the ystafell was a single room adjacent to the hall. Now, given that
the hall was for eating in, is the ystafell the space where a corpse would be laid
out during the wake?
Jan 27, 2019
There’s a lot more to be said about the contexts suitable for the suantraí-type
music of those pieces I’ve listed. I’ve mentioned after-dark playing in the
bedchamber and in the banqueting hall by the resident harpers that were
retained by noblemen and prelates, and its use in healing and also playing in
chapels. It’s understood that secular musicians – and single individual harpers in
particular – used to play before shrines as an act of veneration. See: Richard
Rastall, ‘Secular Musicians in Late Medieval England’, (PhD thesis, Manchester,
1968), Ch. 3: ‘Minstrelsy and its Relations to the Church’, online at
http://www.townwaits.org.uk/richardrastall/richard_rastall_12chapter3.pdf
This custom will account for the large number of religious titles in the cerdd dant
repertory. I imagine it would have been frequent at each of the local chapels of
the musician, and would have been expected on the gwylmabsant, the feast day
of its saint, and perhaps through the night vigils that were held on the eve of the
gwylmabsant and of the three main annual festivals. Centres of pilgrimage such
as Treffynnon (Holywell) would have attracted musicians on pilgrimage from
further afield, and in the repertory is Caniad Gwenfrewi – the patron saint of
Treffynnon. There is also Caniad Iago, and we know of harpers and crythors
playing before the altar of St. James at Santiago de Compostela. Devotional
playing has no place in the Statute because it was unpaid and needed no
regulation but its importance must have been great. To pious harpists it may well
have been the most important playing that they did.
And think about the scale of what’s involved here. For example, on Anglesey
there used to be about a hundred chapels – that is, parish churches and chapels
of ease, each with its dedication and saint’s day.
So we’d do well not to become too fixated on the image of the harper playing to
entertain at banquets in the hall. That’s the ancestor of our modern concert but
the range of cerdd dant went far deeper and could be far more intimate and far
more personal than that. Knowing about these meditative contexts and functions
makes it possible to understand and appreciate these peaceful pieces, reaching as
they do far beyond the range of any other music we know of into the realm of
otherness and stillness. They refresh the parts other musics cannot reach!
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Jan 28, 2019
That’s really helpful information … [that before the modern age there was a
period of wakefulness and activity for an hour or two at about 11 or 12 pm]. I
hadn’t realised. I’ve read that medieval court gates were open in summer from 5
am to 10 pm and in winter from 7 am to 9 pm. Lunch, the main meal of the day,
was in what we would call mid-morning, and I expect that then or a little later
would be the time that important banquets would be held, to avoid day-guests
having to travel at night.
With there being an awake period in the long winters’ nights perhaps the harpist
would do a really long session of soothing music in the hall where the collective
sleeping took place, the fire still burning and giving a tiny bit of light. I can also
imagine the same happening on summer’s nights beside a fire outdoors when the
retinue were on campaign.
Jan 28, 2019
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right … . When viewed as meditations these

minimalist, soothing sorts of pieces are likely to bring stillness of mind more
easily to the player than to the listener because the player’s mind has to remain
alert to the moment to be able to continue playing, whilst the listener’s mind is
tempted to disengage, to drift off into the busyness of the imagination because
the music is so very minimalist. That’s a good thing in a sleep context of course
but not so good in a reverential context. There’s a big difference between doing a
meditative activity such as Tai Chi and just watching it.
Yes, metal strings indeed. Without metal strings every bar of this music flags;
with metal strings as you know the sound just floats through from one chord to
the next, even when the tempo is slow for these soothing pieces. And the floating
effect of the long sustain of metal strings is the greater when the attack is very
gentle and relaxed for the soft playing of soothing pieces. The voice of the metal-
strung harp can be brought down almost to a whisper when needed, by relaxing
the joints of the fingers, and that relaxing helps with the meditative effect on the
player.
Feb 2, 2019
Gerald does describe an uncomfortable restlessness during the night in the hall of
the court or of the Welsh family:
“A fire is kept burning all night at their feet, just as it has done all day, and they
get some warmth from the people sleeping next to them. When their underneath
side begins to ache through the hardness of the bed and their uppermost side is
frozen stiff with cold, they get up and sit by the fire, which soon warms them up
and soothes away their aches and pains. Then they go back to bed again, turning
over on their other side if they feel like it, so that a different part is frozen and
another side bruised by the hard bed.” (trans. Lewis Thorpe: Gerald of Wales
(London, 1978), p. 237).
With sleep in the hall so hard to come by any soothing harp music must have
been welcome although Gerald only mentions harp music being played for guests
until nightfall; that is, before dinner:
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“Guests who arrive early in the day are entertained until nightfall by girls who
play to them on the harp. In every house there are young women just waiting to
play for you, and there is certainly no lack of harps. Here are two things worth
remembering: the Irish are the most jealous people on earth, but the Welsh do
not seem to know what jealousy is; and in every Welsh court or family the
menfolk consider playing on the harp to be the greatest of all accomplishments.”
(Thorpe, p. 236).
This disparity between Welsh and Irish custom is interesting. Gerald’s experience
of Welsh harp music seems to centre on that provided by young women
throughout the day rather than during the feast. Might it have been that relaxing,
soothing music, suantraí, was more appropriate for entertaining travellers during
the day than festive music, geantraí, was? If so then a slower, gentler tempo of
suantraí might explain Gerald’s remark on harping styles, that the ‘British’ style
was ‘deliberate and solemn’ whereas the Irish was ‘quick and lively’.
The Statute is concerned with the male professions of cerdd dant and cerdd dafod
but Gerald’s account reveals a very different perspective: that most music on
strings in Wales (if not in Ireland as well) would have been made by non-
professionals, and particularly by women. There were some renowned female
strict-metre poets and the ability to perform cerdd dafod with strings was very
widespread amongst non-professionals so it was not that the professionals kept
the skills of these things to themselves, they were shared within families and
amongst friends and the skills would have been passed down through the
generations. For a helpful discussion on the great importance of women in cerdd
dant see Shahnaz Mosam, ‘Women Harpers in 12th century Wales’, 2018, here.
Feb 2, 2019
Yes … that’s what I’m thinking, that the difference in context may explain the
curious difference Gerald perceived in style. In the Description of Wales he’s
describing the domestic customs and habits of the Welsh people as a whole,
which he was intimately familiar with. In the Topography of Ireland he would be
drawing on his experience in Ireland as he accompanied Prince John, in a foreign
country which had only recently been invaded, so it would have been a highly
militaristic context, involving formal dining surrounding occasions of State. The
Irish lords would surely roll out the carpet and have professional harpists playing
music appropriate for feasting, both when acting as hosts and when sending over
harpists to honour the Normans as I imagine they did, the harpists filling a
diplomatic role and perhaps acting as emissaries and spies. It was a much
narrower and more formal context from which Gerald would have taken his
impressions.
Feb 2, 2019
And we know that suantraí was a major division of string music in Ireland. It
must have been at least a bit slow-paced and certainly not lively, so it must be
that Gerald wasn’t particularly exposed to it and in consequence his impressions
weren’t representative of the whole range of expression and style that existed
there.
In a way it seems paradoxical to recover music as relaxed and as luxurious as

this from an age where life was generally extremely insecure if not actually
‘nasty, brutish and short’. But that insecurity would have fuelled the drive to
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create such a deep sense of sanctuary as is to be found in this music and

particularly in the soothing pieces. One more condition would have been required
for the evolution of an effective, specialised branch of music dedicated to bringing
peace to the mind: the critical mass of closely-related patrons and musicians
sufficient to develop and maintain the effective compositional and performance
style required. The density, in geographical terms, of patrons and professional
musicians was extraordinarily high in the British Isles, and to them we need to
add the music-making of non-professionals: the patrons themselves, their family
members and particularly the womenfolk. After the Reformation that critical mass
was lost as power and wealth became increasingly centralised in capital cities
such as London, all at a great distance from one another, and that will be how it
came about that there has been no counterpart to suantraí in the secular
instrumental music of the modern age.
So I believe that what is most important of all in this music for us today is the
depth of its meditative aspects, especially in the soothing pieces. A still point in a
turning world.
Jul 4, 2015
… So, with Caniad San Silin, an example of a saintly association, were people
thinking of it uppermost as prayer, or as praise of God or as meditation? Perhaps
it doesn’t matter much which, because it communicates its sweet, intimate,
humane and serene nature anyway, and so works its magic.
There’s that story of the string player who played to Brénainn, and the saint’s
response: “Take a blessing, student, and may you get Heaven for your playing”.
Feb 17, 2019
Up until about 1500 we’re looking at almost no stone buildings at all in Wales
apart from the castles, so timber-framed buildings. Halls were open to the thatch
and had an aperture for the smoke to escape through rather than a stone
chimney, so there would be a lot of soot around the upper reaches. There may
often have been textile wall-hangings, and sleeping palliasses (like futons)
stacked up against the walls. Performers would face the high table which was
always on a dais with a cloth canopy over and behind it (to keep the soot off). So
it would have been an extremely non-reflective, warm acoustic environment: in
fact the exact opposite of the cold and hollow ambience that modern sound
engineers always strive to create whenever medieval music is involved!
As regards the bass you’ve mentioned, suantraí was characterized by relatively

high pitch as shown by its association with the least dense string material: iron,
as here:
A string of iron, a string of noble bronze,

And a string of entire silver.
The names of the not-heavy strings
Were Suantorrglés; Geantorrglés the great;
Goltarrglés was the other string,
Which sends all men to crying;
('The Dialogue of the Old Men' (‘Scathach's cruit’), trans. O'Curry iii, pp. 223-4.)
The ‘cruit’ referred to here, because it has three strings, is likely to be that
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stopped instrument normally termed 'tiompan', which invariably is detailed as

three-stringed.
So the general pitch of any piece, or part of a piece, in the manuscript is one of
the key factors that I’ve been able to use in assigning expressive modes to the
music. Or, to put it another way, the relatively high pitch of, for example, Caniad
Llywelyn Delynior, is one of its characteristics that causes it to be inherently
soothing, that is, when it's played on a metal-strung harp not on any other sort,
and particularly not on a bray harp because of the staccato effect of the brays at
the high end. The section on ‘Expression’ in my 1995 synopsis of my work on the
music, p. 18, gives the idea of the role of pitch in all this.
With the amazing opportunity that we have now for listening to music in private,
anywhere, through first the transistor radio then the Walkman, the mobile etc.,
composers have been working on developing intimate styles of music to satisfy
the market for soothing and for healing but without realizing that all this has been
worked out before, long ago. And the principles here, such as high-works-for-
soothing in a context of long sustain, can be trusted because they all stood the
test of time!
Sep 22, 2019
Good luck with the concert then. One point – the soothing music was actually
played to people who were going to sleep or who were already sleeping, either in
the bedchamber of the patron or in the communal sleeping area of the hall for his
retinue. No-one had to drive home later!
MUSIC FOR SORROW: GOLTRAĺ
March 4, 2019
I’ll move on to music for sorrow and its context. In the cerdd dafod corpus there
are laments for the loss of hegemony, the loss of patronage, the loss of love, and
there are some poems of unrequited love, but the romance of sorrow that was so
popular in Anglo-Norman culture and on the Continent, the ethos of ‘courtly love’,
never became dominant in medieval Wales. The great majority of sorrowful
poems are marwnadau: formal poetic elegies. It's very fortunate for our purposes
that quite commonly the titles of pieces in the cerdd dant repertory contain the
designation 'marwnad' or 'barnad', as for instance Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof
in the ms. Many of the marwnadau of cerdd dant are to musicians, and here we
may presume that it was normal for one or two colleagues of the deceased,
especially if they were related to him, to produce a cerdd, a piece, in
commemoration. Some marwnadau are to the patrons of musicians, and here
perhaps the composers felt not only moved to produce a cerdd but were
motivated by obligation or commission.
Presumably the cerdd dant marwnadau were used in the same way as the cerdd
dafod ones, about the composing and performance of which a little is known. A
memorial ceremony was held one month after the burial to receive and judge that
prized work of art the vocal marwnad:
“This epitaph of the dead they were to have in readinesse that day moneth that
the buriall was, against which day the chiefest of the family and kindred of the
deceased would be present, and the chiefest gentlemen of the countrey would be
assembled together to heare and judge of the same, in whose hearinge the same
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epitaph must be openly, and with a loud and cleare voice, recited … mournfully in
manner of bemoaninge.” (George Harry Owen, rector of Tregroes in
Pembrokeshire 1584-1613, quoted in E. D. Jones: 'Well-spring of True Nobility',
'Presidential Address', Archaeologia Cambrensis, CXII (1963), pp. 4-5, and Huw
M. Edwards: 'Dwyn Marwnadau Adref', Llên Cymru, 23 (2000), p. 21).
Beauford gives a little more information in respect of the custom in Wales and
Ireland:
“In ancient times, after the interment, the favourite bards of the family, seated
on the grave or sepulchre, performed the Connthal or Elegy; which they repeated
every new and full moon, for the first three months, and afterwards generally
once every year, for persons of distinction.”
The formal structuring and scheduling here is that of the chantry mass and they
will have had the same purpose: to assist the soul of the deceased in a passage
from Purgatory to eternal rest in Heaven. The cerdd dafod marwnadau would
customarily end with a short prayer to that effect. The Reformation in England
and Wales suppressed the commemorative rituals: trentals, masses, dirges and
prayers for the dead. Thus by 1570 in Beaumaris here even an incident of the
singing of psalms and the lighting of candles over a corpse was punished.
It would be a great mistake, then, to think of sorrowful pieces of cerdd dant as

designed to introduce artistic contrast and gravity into a programme of
entertainment, as happens with sorrowfulness in the modern concept of a
concert. Sorrowful items might have sometimes been played at feasts to be
admired as works of art per se but that would not have been the primary purpose
for which they were designed.
Mar 6, 2019
I do wonder if each section of an instrumental marwnad would have been

followed by keening, because there are indications from Ireland of keening
interludes having taken place after each stanza of the vocal epitaph at the vigil
prior to the funeral. Beauford describes, or speculates, how at a vigil that it would
have been through alternation that a pair of bardic vocalists with harp
accompaniment would have been integrated with hired keeners, some leading a
group of mourners at the head of the corpse and others those at the feet:
“The bards and croteries had before prepared the funeral Caoinan. The chief bard
of the head chorus began, by singing the first stanza in a low doleful tone, which
was softly accompanied by the harp; at the conclusion, the foot semi-chorus
began the lamentation or Ullaloo, from the final note of the preceding stanza, in
which they were answered by the head semi-chorus; then both united in one
general chorus. The chorus of the first stanza being ended, the chief bard of the
foot semi-chorus began the second Gol or lamentation, in which he was answered
by that of the head; and then, as before, both united in the general full chorus.
Thus alternately were the song and choruses performed during the night.”
(William Beauford, ‘Caoinan: or some Account of the Antient Irish Lamentations’,
Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 4 (Dublin, 1790), pp. 43-44).
Beauford distinguishes between the ‘caoinan’ described above and the ‘connthal’
or ‘elegy’ composed for later commemorations, otherwise known as the bardic
marbhna, the equivalent of the Welsh vocal marwnad: “The elegy was more
regular than the ‘keenan’, both in respect to its poetical composition and
concluding cadence.” Nevertheless, there is some indication that each stanza of
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the marbhna was followed by a kind of choral refrain or cry in vocables

resembling the cry, the gol, of the keening women but simpler in its music and
much shorter. (Breandán Ó Madagáin, ‘Irish Vocal Music of Lament and Syllabic
Verse’, The Celtic Consciousness, ed. Robert O’Driscoll (Toronto, 1981), pp. 321-
6). If this was so for the Welsh vocal and instrumental marwnad forms as well,
then their music would have been designed to elicit expressions of sorrow from
the congregation which would at the least have been brief gestures towards the
full catharsis of the vigil, the funeral procession and the interment. The section
endings of an instrumental marwnad would be the obvious points for the musician
to pause and for a cry to commence.
Mar 7, 2019
Thanks … . That’s all very interesting. Bunting’s ‘Cooee en Devenish’, ‘Cumha an

De-Bhean Si’, from Dominic O’Donnell does seem to mimic the rapid ululating of
the keening, the gol, very closely doesn’t it? And he reports O’Hampsey as saying
that in times long past “the harpers were accustomed to play the ancient
caoinans or lamentations, with their corresponding preludes.” Some of the other
gol music collected is also not direct from the women mourners but from
instrumental imitations of it on the pipes, such that Walker sourced from Gore
Ousley and Petrie from Frank Keane, and sections of the descriptive pieces The
Fox Chase, Máirseáil Alasdruim and The Battle of Aughrim in the piping repertory
today mimic the keening of the gol.
The first evidence of vestigial keening interludes within the marbhna is from the
singing of a farmer Phil Gleeson collected by Joyce in 1851: ”To the note D at the
end of the air he chanted, in a monotone, a sort of cronaun consisting simply of
the continued repetition of the two vowel sounds, ee-oo ee-oo ee-oo, etc., which
was prolonged ad libitum: the change from ee to oo being made at intervals of
about a crotchet. Occasionally he ended the cronaun by suddenly sliding his voice
up to the third, fifth or octave – a common practice in laments, nurse-tunes,
plough whistles etc.” (quoted by Ó Madagáin, p. 322).
The second evidence concerns Marbhna Mhic Fhinghin Duibh, collected in the
early 20th century from two sources. Each stanza of one version is followed by
the simple chanting of chorus words: seo-tho binn, binn, binn, and the other
version was reportedly once sung with a “long wail” following the last note (on
the seventh) of the air and also sung with an “upward sob, not musically notable,
on the last note”. Ó Madagáin comments in respect of these interpolations (p.
324) that they presumably represent: “some kind of vocable chorus in which, in
former times, the assembled company would join, just as they did in the gol after
each stanza of the keen”.
So keening might well be relevant to the marwnad pieces in the manuscript.
Any thoughts on Hardiman and Conran and those two stories they tell about
harpers … ?
Mar 10, 2019
Parts of the manuscript which I’ve come to believe express sorrow are:
Caniad Ystafell
Caniad Llywelyn ab Ifan ab y Gof
Caniad Suwsana
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Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof, sections i-v
The title of Caniad Ystafell is puzzling. The epithet ‘marwnad’ is not applied to it
despite its sparse and minor character. Perhaps it relates to the ‘Stafell
Gynddylan’ englynion in Canu Heledd which lament the ruination of the royal
court of Powys at Pengwern in the 7th century, or, by association with that
sentiment, to some other destruction of a royal court or to the final loss of all of
them in the Edwardian conquest.
Caniad Llywelyn ab Ifan ab y Gof and Caniad Suwsana are probably those pieces
with the same titles with the addition of the marwnad designation that appear in
other sources.
Caniad Cynrhig Bencerdd presents to me as a joyful piece in spite of the fact that
it shares with ‘Caniad Marwnad/Barnad Cynrhig Bencerdd’ in repertory lists its
number of ceinciau and its measure. Perhaps when the deceased was a musician
it would prompt a tribute that celebrated his musicality. That seems to be the
case with the latter part of Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof, from section VI
onwards.
Mar 13, 2019
And then there are the profiadau. They raise so many questions.
Why do they all run into the same hymn-like piece?

How much of that piece is not notated in the ms.?
Why are they all followed by the pwnc ar ôl pob profiad?
Why is the profiad genre not included in the repertoire of the gwŷr wrth gerdd
dant in the Statute?
Why is there so much contrast between them?
Why do they switch between modalities so frequently?
Why are they so unhomogeneous?
That last feature makes it difficult to assign expressive modes to them, to read
what’s being communicated. Even the pwnc, so short as it is, displays an
extraordinary contrast: those massive, intense minor chords followed by the
sweet but thin closing section. So the whole set is markedly, curiously and
dramatically episodic. All the profiadau, the ‘hymn’ and the pwnc have always
seemed to me to be absolutely packed with deeply profound significance, apart,
that is, from the opening three sections of Profiad Cyffredin. That opens with that
stepwise scalar exercise with octave doubling: in fact just the sort of thing you’d
expect of a warm-up prelude. It necessarily is not locked into a strong sense of
tonality and so has no strong emotional identity. That’s an unusual thing in cerdd
dant and in traditional music generally.
But I’m struck by the same in most of Cooee En Devenish: stepwise exploration
of the scale with mainly only parallel harmony. So I wonder whether that piece
can give insight into the performance context for the profiadau: lamentation. It
seems to me to be designed to frame an insert of a vocal gol with its ululating
semiquavers, leading into one with the semiquavers at the end of section 2 and
out of it again with the semiquavers of the ascending stream at the start of
section 3. And the only other stylistic resonance I’ve noticed between cerdd dant
and Gaelic material is the ‘hymn’ section of the profiadau.
The ‘hymn’ is unlike an ululating gol, but perhaps it served as the accompaniment
to one, or perhaps to the singing of the psalms of lamentation?
194
On those interpretations the profiadau become read as instrumental salutations to

the deceased, not necessarily sorrowful, followed by the ‘hymn’ section as the
lamentation, that climaxing in the drama of the first part of the pwnc and then
finally the last part of the pwnc as a gentle postlude.
That’s not the only interpretation that occurs to me to account for the ‘set’ or
‘suite’ nature of the profiadau with their abrupt episodes of contrast but it is
supported by the ‘set’ nature of the caoinan, for example this 19th century
account (by W. K. Sullivan): “He first recounted his [the deceased farmer’s]
genealogy, eulogised the spotless honour of his family, described in the tones of a
sweet lullaby his childhood and boyhood, then changing the air suddenly, he
spoke of his wrestling and hurling, his skill at ploughing, his horsemanship, his
prowess at a fight in a fair, his wooing and marriage, and ended by suddenly
bursting into a loud piercing, but exquisitely beautiful wail, which was again and
again taken up by the bystanders.”
I’d welcome any suggestions on the nature of the profiadau and their expression.
Mar 26, 2019
… Because of the rhythmic texture of the ‘hymn’ piece is hymn-like I suspect it

was used to accompany song, song which was perhaps in unison with the treble
part. But perhaps I’m merely projecting modern practice where it doesn’t belong.
It’s hard to conceive of a Wales without its hymn singing!
If there was a vocal air in unison with the treble line, I imagine it may, as I’ve
said before, have been used for the psalms of lamentation, because that was one
very profound and highly ritualistic application for music. Unlike Ireland and
Scotland, I’m not aware of any records of an ululating gol tradition in late
medieval Wales, only of the singing of psalms over the corpse.
Perhaps a better guide to late medieval lamenting than the ‘cwyn’ and ‘cwynfan’
tunes you mention …, because its lyrics are Catholic, is the beautiful tune of Myn
Mair, which was reportedly used for the vigil the night before the interment and
for which its lyrics are indeed appropriate. But it’s a tune in the ballad-type style
and so it doen’t resemble any of the cerdd dant in the manuscript. It doesn’t have
the grandiose formality of the ‘hymn’ piece. Lewis Morris describes the survival on
Anglesey of the vigil and its music into his time: “The singing of psalms if they
can or else fall to singing of carols which are ancient songs containing Reflections
upon Death & Immortality of ye Soul”.
FESTIVE MUSIC: GEANTRAĺ
Apr 3, 2019
On to festive music …
To set festive performing into context, at its core there will have been
performances in the hall of the patron hosting the feast which approached the
modern concept of the concert recital, listened to in silence and received with
applause. That was the case in Ireland:
“Their noble men, and noblemens tenants, now and then make a set feast, which
they call coshering, whereto flock all their retainers, who they name followers,
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their rithmours, their bards, their harpers that feed them with musicke: and when
the harper twangeth or singeth a song, all the companie must be whist, or else
he chafeth like a cutpursse, by reason his harmonie is not had in better praise.” (
Rafael Holinshed in 1577).
“For their verses are taken up with a general applause, and usually sung at all the
feasts and meetings, by certain other persons, whose proper function that is, who
also receive for the same great reward, and reputation amongst them.” (Edmund
Spenser in 1596).
So did they actually eat in silence? I suggest not, and that there was background
music for at least the main part of the meal. The gostegion are particularly
suitable for background: none of the gostegion exhibit the complexity that is
usual amongst the caniadau and the profiadau. The gostegion are easy listening;
they do not require close attention in order to be appreciated.
There’s a poem by Edward Maelor from the close of the 16th century where he
complains that due to the decline in patronage and in performers he has to go
without supper. A poet presenting his poem would expect to eat as an honoured
guest whilst his datgeiniad, ideally accompanied by a string player, would perform
his poem but here the poet was now evidently on his own and so had to perform
during dinner as well as after. He was a crythor so I imagine him filling the role of
the instrumentalist, perhaps playing background gostegion during supper, before
performing poetry with crwth accompaniment after it.
There’s a reference by Lewys Glyn Cothi to the patron Hopcyn ap Siôn who would
himself perform poetry to his harp accompaniment for his guests once dinner was
finished. This, surely, indicates the ritual use in the Welsh Laws of the telyn of the
king, of the nobleman or baron (gwrda, uchelwr or breyr), of the maer or of the
canghellor, that he might perform at this point in the feast. The essential social
transaction of such a feast is that the host honours his guests with his generosity
and is appreciated by them, so that all the parties are bound together and the
courtly high status of their collective heritage is maintained. The music is both
part of the display of luxurious generosity and part of the expression of the
appreciation of that generosity. In those senses the context was somewhat
different from the modern public concert recital. The music needed to be highly
dignified in its general style, for nothing less would have been in accord with the
power of all its courtly, aristocratic, regal and saintly associations.
The professional instrumentalist relied on attending feasts for the greater part of
his income, and even when he was accompanied by a professional vocalist he
would not have allowed his status to be eclipsed by any professional or amateur
vocalist. As we know from the Statute, folk musicians were excluded from the
eisteddfod so this music would have been differentiated from folk music in the
minds of all concerned by some concept of 'classicism'. Indeed, most of the
criteria we associate today with a 'classical' or 'high-art' or 'formal' music were
present here: the elevated social strata involved, the assessment and grading of
the professional musicians, the stipulations and regulations regarding everything
from payment to personal conduct and appearance, the appeal to antique canons
of pieces, the existence of a warranted music theory, historical accounts of the
instruments, musicians and music, discrimination against common performers,
and the large-scale conception of many compositions using elaborate, long cycles
(in this case by the harmonic measures, not the long rhythmic cycles used
elsewhere in early classical music). Even the adornment, emblazonry and general
decoration of instruments implies high artistic aspirations. As this was essentially
a pastoral and monastic culture and not really an agrarian and urban one, it is
principally to performed music and not to architecture and the like that we must
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look in order to try to experience this culture's capacity for artistic excellence.
Such a music is not going to have lacked dignity and power, even when it was put
to the purpose of creating joy at the feast.
Apr 4, 2019
Here are the parts of the manuscript which I believe were played with a dignified,
joyful expression, analogous to the geantraí of Gaelic string music and the ‘music
for meat’ of MacCrimmon:
Gosteg Dafydd Athro

Gosteg yr Halen
Yr Osteg Fawr
Y Clymau Cytgerdd excepting 24.5.1-24.7.15, 29.1.13-29.2.6 (martial)
Caniad y Gwyn Bibydd
Caniad Cydwgan
Caniad Bach ar y Gogywair
Caniad Cynrhig Bencerdd
Y Ddigan y Droell
Cainc Ruffudd ab Adda ap Dafydd
Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd
Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof sections vi-xvii
Y Caniad Crych ar y Bragod Gywair excepting section viii: 80.5.5-81.1.8 (martial)
Caniad Pibau Morfydd
I suspect that some pieces could have served more than one type of context and
been given more than one expression according to context, for example Gosteg
Dafydd Athro has a somewhat martial flavour, and Caniad Pibau Morfydd also.
Changes of rhythmic and harmonic flavour are generally abrupt, for example the
sudden contrast between section iv and v of Caniad Llywelyn ab Ifan ab y Gof.
Before that point the flavour is not intensely sorrowful so perhaps it
commemorates the musicality of Llywelyn as a composer of martial and joyful
material in general, before the sudden dramatic plunge into deep sorrow at the
opening of section v. It carries a sense that his life was flourishing and then was
cut short very suddenly and unexpectedly?
Note that the aggressive war-like passage in section viii of Y Caniad Crych which
has a completely abrupt onset is masterfully eased out of by the passage at
81.1.4-81.1.8 and led back into joyfulness and playfulness. Section ix is
extremely playful. The tyniad bridge passage that leads each profiad into the
hymn-like piece, as at 58.3.18-58.4.3, is another example of sophisticated
modulation. The abruptness of changes of flavour we find generally may have
been a matter of deliberate choice then, rather than something the composers
were forced into through some lack of understanding of how to create bridge
passages between moods and modes. If it was so, it must have been that they
relished the drama of contrast that abrupt changes create.
Another possibility regarding changes of flavour is that there may sometimes

have been a smooth transition, a gradation, between expressive modes within a
piece, such that Caniad Cynrhig Bencerdd may have begun as sorrowful and
moved gently towards joyfulness as it progressed.
There’s a lot of variety in the music from the manuscript, once the matter of
expression is introduced. The whole matter of correct expressive interpretation
here is of course debatable, as it always is with music!
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MUSIC FOR WAR
Mar 27, 2019
… The real mystery here [with the profiadau] is the significance of the whole suite
form of prelude, ‘hymn’ piece and pwnc, and particularly as the form was not
amongst the examination requirements per the Statute for the gwŷr wrth gerdd
dant.
The funereal explanation I’ve already explored is one possibility, and I’ve
suggested too that the suite had some liturgical role in Mass. I’ll now go on to
present another possible explanation I entertain.
We know that Siôn Eos and an ‘athro grythor’ played profiadau so they did form
part of the repertory of the gwŷr wrth gerdd dant. Nevertheless, Siôn Dafydd
Rhys’s Grammar places them amongst the rudimentary elements of cerdd dant
that the datgeiniad (in the sense of the vocalist of cerdd dafod) had to know, so
that brings us into the vocal sphere. Prominent amongst such figures was the
bardd teulu, the retained vocalist whose original function was as a member of the
war-band. And that calls to mind Lewys Glyn Cothi’s reference to the profiadau of
William the Conqueror and the image of Taillefer at Hastings. Might it be that the
profiadau were martial, music for war? That would explain why the Statute
ignored them, because of course it would have been extremely undiplomatic to
call attention to them in the Tudor period.
There was some tendency for the term bardd teulu to be supplanted by the more
domestic term bardd ystafell but the Welsh Laws indicate that bardd teulu to a
court was a military office. He would participate in the fighting on campaign and
on cattle raids, which, incidentally, included legally sanctioned raids that exacted
compensation on behalf of injured third parties. The Laws provide:
“He is entitled to a cow or ox from the plunder which the bodyguard takes in a
strange country, after the king has had his third; and it is right for him, when
they share out the plunder, to sing Unbeniaeth Prydain (The Sovereignty of
Britain) to them.”
There we have the suggestion, then, that if the profiadau were indeed martial
that the ‘hymn’-like section of the profiadau would have been the harp
accompaniment to Unbeniaeth Prydain and other such material, used to incite and
to celebrate military action. I hold that the profiadau are stirring and that the first
part of the pwnc is so intense and aggressive as to be difficult to account for
otherwise than as battle-related. Also the profiadau are demanding to play and so
can be interpreted as essayings, through which the harpist leads and inspires by
example.
To set military action into some sense of the context of its scale, I think the
highest post-Conquest figure of Welsh troops on campaign is 10,900 at the Battle
of Falkirk in 1298. So the teuluwyr as musical performers had a really important
role to play in the encouragement of morale, thus:
“ … theire harpers and crowthers singe them songs of the doeings of theire
Auncestors, namelie, of theire warrs againste the kings of this realme and the
English nac’on”.
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Mar 28, 2019
Yes, preludes are test pieces. They can be thought of as having as their raison
d’être the purpose of testing the tuning, proving the tuning, hence no doubt the
Welsh term ‘profiad’ here. The fact that some of them use several modes
confirms that.
That vocalists would play preludes on the harp is indicated by some of the Breton
lays and by the Laneham Letter re 1575 I’ve talked about before:
“Appearing then afresh, in his full formality, with a lovely look; after three lowly
courtesies, cleared his voice with a hem and reach, and spat out withal; wiped his
lips with the hollow of his napkin; tempered a string or two with his wrest, and
after a little warbling on his harp for a prelude, came forth with a solemn song,
warranted for story out of king Arthur’s acts”.
It may well be, then, that the ‘hymn’ section of the profiadau in the manuscript is
the instrumental accompaniment to vocal pieces, and to ones about the warfare
that heros such as Arthur were famed for. It’s one quite strong possibility.
I do think it most likely that the profiadau were given a warlike expression, along
with the very curious crychiad passage of section VIII of Y Caniad Crych ar y
Bragod Gywair at 80.5.5-81.1.4. It is extremely aggressive. Just that passage
alone gives me reason to believe that a warlike, martial ethos existed within
cerdd dant alongside the other three: sorrowful, joyful and soothing. I do think,
then, that expression in cerdd dant had the four dimensions of the MacCrimmon
division of music rather than the three of the Irish system. In cerdd dafod, the
daroganwyr brud poems illustrate martial sentiment, as does Dafydd Llwyd’s Awdl
i Ddewi for a good example.
Mar 29, 2019
… The nightingale was used figuratively for sweet vocal and instrumental music,
and so common was that that when the pwnc or subject was chosen for a test of
poets’ capacity to compose exemplary englynion in honour of the Caerwys 1567/8
eisteddfod the nightingale was chosen.
The title Profiad yr Eos is an argument for reading the profiadau suite form as an
elegiac form rather than as a martial form, but perhaps as you say … it was a
product of [the harper] Siôn Eos, who would be respectfully referred to as ‘Yr
Eos’: the nightingale. …
EXPRESSION IN THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS
Apr 8, 2019
Here is a table of keywords relating to The Four Temperaments and their

associations:
Temperament: Choleric, Sanguine Melancholic Phlegmatic

bilious
Season: spring summer autumn winter
Element: Air Fire Earth Water
Emotions: anger, joy, sorrow, calm, quietness,
frustration, hopefulness, sadness, withdrawal,
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peevishness, courage nervousness depression,

agitation coolness, apathy
Organ: Liver Heart Spleen Brain
Climate: warm, dry, hot, moist cold, dry cold, wet
windy
Movement: hyperactive active, easy slow, feeble dull, sluggish
Colour: yellow red black white
Complexion: pale, ruddy purple, chalky
yellowish blackish
Sleeping inadequate normal insomnia excessive
pattern:
Body type: muscular muscular skeletal, fat, flabby, limp
frail
Body build: thin broad weak frame, broad
stooped
shoulders
Pulse rate: rapid, normal, slow, slow,
80-100 bpm 70-80 bpm 60-70 bpm 60-70 bpm
Pulse quality: strong, long, short, gentle,
taut large small, subtle smooth
Voice quality: shouting, laughing, weeping, soft, soothing,
loud overexcited, whining, disconnected
husky groaning,
moaning
These categories are conceived to be in dynamic relationship, as are the seasons.

Thus in time a choleric spirit is perceived to naturally give way to a sanguinary
spirit, as spring gives way to summer, and so forth. Also, as summer is the
antithesis of winter, so a joyful experience is perceived to be the antidote for an
excess of phlegmatism; as spring is the antithesis of autumn so an expression of
anger or embarking on a new activity is perceived to be the antidote to too much
sorrow, and so forth. It is on this simple yet profound basis that it is possible to
use the appropriate types of music as therapeutic tools, as in Graeco-Arabic
Unani medicine.
That gives just a very brief introduction, but I hope that here I’ve said just
enough about of the technicalities for it to be appreciated that the medieval
division of music in the British Isles, as elsewhere, would not have been only a
simple, casual means of broadly classifying music according to its function but
would have been rooted in a technically elaborate cosmology.
Apr 10, 2019
… The main focus was on music as a tool for manipulating the psychological state
of the audience, to realize the affect appropriate to the context, such as
joyfulness at the feast, the sanguine temperament, rather than on music as a
platform for the self-expression of the performer. With this music, all of it in
measure, the heart-beat is the foundation, so the tempo is all-important. In
renaissance music, also measured, the pulse governed by the concept of tactus
was the basis of tempo, where the tactus was a regular pulse of about 60 beats
per minute, one per minim, one per second, maintained no matter what the time
signature. In cerdd dant where the contrast in note density between different
time signatures does not exist, to realize the affects it must have been that the
tactus was varied, and that brings us to the differentiation between the pulse
rates characteristic of The Four Temperaments. The sanguine temperament, for
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example, has, unsurprisingly, a faster resting heart rate than the melancholic and
the phlegmatic, and its tactus would have needed to be faster to be effective.
The goltraí pieces and the profiadau have dramatic changes in rhythmic and
harmonic texture so they would have benefitted from all sorts of dynamics but
generally the geantraí and suantraí pieces in the manuscript are each remarkably
homogeneous in their rhythmic and harmonic texture, and that is in sympathy
with their purposes so I believe they would have had a fairly steady tactus
throughout. There is always a slight natural tendency for performers to speed up
during a piece, which suits geantraí but would interfere with suantraí, which I
believe would have been held steady because that is most effective. In general
there’s a lack of indicators in the geantraí and suantraí pieces that they would
have had expressive dynamics applied to them. The minimalism in the suantraí
pieces would have needed to be fully embraced in order for them to have had
their obviously hypnotic intention working fully, but remember that the dragon-
pair of cyweirdant and tyniad involves the already built-in dynamic contrast in
intonational timbre which oscillates quite rapidly through every piece, so the
minimalism is not at all as extreme as it might first appear. An important part of
the hypnotic, somnabulant purpose of suantraí must surely have been that the
player would play as softly as the context could allow, and would have gently led
the audience into greater and greater softness as time progressed. But note in
Caniad Hun Wenllian the marked increase in harmonic texture for the last two
sections, which may well have called for greater volume. For geantraí it is obvious
that the attack would have been the opposite, that the volume would have been
high, perhaps increasingly so, and perhaps the short notes would have tended in
places, if anything, to be just a little clipped to add that touch of sprightliness.
And note that the Clymau have, very precociously, what appear to be very like
extended ad lib cadenzas at 23.2.19-26, 23.4.21-28, 23.6.21-27 etc. So some
flexibility in tempo may have been appropriate. For example the minor second
between E and F in the treble at 20.1.7-10 I read as humorous so perhaps it
would have benefitted from being drawn out a little for emphasis.
I have no doubt whatsoever that it is the soothing pieces which present the
greatest challenge to the modern concert performer: to get the finger joints
relaxed enough to produce the depths of softness, and also to enter into the right
psychological approach: to surrender to the material, which is to take the
‘performer’ out of the equation and to become the witness. Less is more!
Apr 11, 2019
… The consistent early music tactus at 60 is relatively slow. Looking now at

Bunting’s tempos they reveal a wide variety in tactus between pieces, but
stretching downwards from 60. But his material never has a comparable rhythmic
texture to the distinctive, sparse rhythmic texture of cerdd dant, so it’s not really
appropriate to try to draw really meaningful comparisons here.
Andrew Lawrence-King’s various writings online on tactus are very helpful.
Apr 12, 2019
I think it would be a mistake to try to identify a single tactus value for any piece
because it would make sense if the context of any rendition had dictated its
tactus. A performer has to carry the listeners with him/her, so for example in the
case of the soothing pieces it would be no good thinking: ok, I’ll just play
extremely slowly. To be as effective as possible he/she must have judged from
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the context where the listeners were actually at, and then pitched the tactus a
little slower than their existing collective heart-rate, and then for a second piece,
if there was one, a little slower still. And so on, leading people deeper and
deeper. As regards the joyful pieces there’s an upper limit. A tactus above about
85 and there’s no opportunity left to clip the semiquavers, so no opportunity to
add any extra spring. Above 95 and there’s a danger of falling out of the time
signature altogether, losing the 2:1 relationship between quaver and semiquaver.
The fact that the sorrowful pieces and the profiadau are episodic implies that they
are unlikely to have each had a constant tactus. And their inherently dramatic
nature implies they were treated with dramatic expression. As regards phrasing,
it may well have been that their ascending parts were played a little faster than
their descending parts, and that their cadences slowed a little. For example, we
know the descending cadence formed by the ‘Balinderry’ motif found in Caniad
Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof, as at 71.6.4.7, had a particularly significant association
with lamenting internationally, so it would have benefitted from being drawn out
for emphasis. The fact that that cadence is developed in sections ii and iii
reinforces that conclusion. Examples that most surely require dramatic emphasis,
especially through really strong attack, are in the openings of sections iv and v,
on those chords B-flat-F-E resolving down to D and G-G-E resolving down to D.
The openings of sections v and vi of Caniad Suwsana have a similarly startling
character.
Changes in harmonic texture probably indicate changes in attack. The strongest

texture in the whole manuscript is that of the seven-note chords of the Pwnc at
56.1.13-16: highly dramatic and so worthy of maximum attack. But quite a lot of
the harmonic texture of the sorrowful pieces is three- or two-note: thin, chilly and
bleak. I think it would have been a mistake if those qualities were ever
understated through those passages being played softly. The same logic applies
to many of the thin harmonies in the profiadau such as the whole of Profiad yr
Eos up to 59.6.10, including particularly the biting snaps within its plethiad y bys
bach movements which call for strong attack.
Aside from slow and varied tactus, I find the phrasing in the sorrowful pieces is
most effective as lugubrious when played with a lot of shade applied to many of
the semiquavers, especially through dragging out those that introduce passages
and whole sections. I believe the capacity to judge those durations effectively
would have been the mark of a good and experienced performer. There are some
places even in joyful pieces where dragging semiquavers would have been
helpful, as in the conclusion to Caniad y Gwyn Bibydd in its wind-down at
37.6.10-12. Today that final C semiquaver could so easily rob time from the note
before, so perhaps a fledgling rubato was already in existence.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the closest relative to cerdd dant is the
double-tonic dance music, which traditionally has not carried expressive
dynamics. Both are really a million miles away from the genre of the French
ballade and the slow air.
Apr 21, 2019
Bunting's metronome values differ slightly from his pendulum ones then. Gosh.
I’ve only looked at the tactus values of Bunting’s tempos in Armstrong and one or
two other pieces, so it would be interesting to get a more detailed perspective on
Bunting, and Petrie and Joyce too.
202
There are great differences between the fairly uniform rhythmic texture of the
homophony of cerdd dant, the varied rhythmic texture of that of renaissance and
baroque music and the varied rhythmic texture of Bunting’s non-homophonic
material, so I expect that each would have had a different relationship to tactus.
Do read Andrew Lawrence-King’s helpful explanations of how to convert tempo to
tactus … as Bunting was expressing tempo in the modern manner not in the early
manner of tactus.
REVIEW
THE REVIVAL OF THE MUSIC
May 9, 2006
Yes, I did indeed do transcriptions. Transcriptions of some pieces are included

within my dissertations, to illustrate various technical points. The remainder I use
only for teaching. Some excerpts will be published in forthcoming books.
These dissertations are amongst the holdings of the Centre for Advanced Welsh
Music Studies (CAWMS) within the University of Wales, Bangor, and presently
consist of: The Robert ap Huw Manuscript: An Exploration of its Possible
Solutions:- Synopsis 1995 (27 pages); Tuning 2000 (114 pages); Technique 1996
(152 pages); Metre 1998 (189 pages); Rhythm 1998 (187 pages); Verse 1995
(155 pages).
Oct 18, 2005
And how much work has gone into these arrangements of the pieces from the
manuscript? It has taken a huge amount of work to discover the musical meaning
of the symbols in the manuscript. I worked very hard on them myself from 1972
on, but my work was just part of a large research effort … which had been going
on for 250 years. In the 1970s research began to accelerate, but it wasn’t until
1991 that it finally became possible to create what ought to be really accurate
scores of each piece. In fact the total amount of work involved will have been far
greater than the composing of the pieces would have taken in the first place!
How do you feel about the way the music has been received? I’m delighted that
people enjoy it as much as they do. All the effort would have been worth it even
if the music had turned out not to be this gorgeous, because it’s so important to
try to find out what it felt like to be alive so long ago, and music is perhaps the
best way of doing that. But it’s fascinating to discover that people’s tastes and
sensitivities now are not so very different from how they used to be. I think it’s
particularly interesting that early Christianity appears to have had such a humane
aspect, when the popular perception now is that medieval life and culture was
pretty harsh. How wonderful for us to salvage something so sweet and precious
out of the awfulness of history! I’ve been playing these pieces for many years, for
myself and for quite small audiences, but it’s wonderful now for me to hear them
on radio and TV, reaching a much wider audience.
And what do you feel are the priorities now? Let’s make the most of what we
have. There are many hours of music in the manuscript, but they are like a drop
in the ocean compared with what has been lost, so what we have has to
represent and symbolize all that lost music and sentiment. So it needs to be
listened to and played with the greatest of respect. Obviously, it takes time for
people to get to grips with any type of music which is entirely new to them, but
203
this is our heritage. Society needs to reunite with its past by enjoying playing and
listening to this extraordinary, wonderful music again.
THE TYPESET COPIES OF THE ROBERT AP HUW MANUSCRIPT
May 10, 2006
… the neatened-up version of the tablature you've just called for already exists
and has been twice published, in 1807 and 1870. But again, if you read the
literature you'll find out why it's unwise to use such things.
May 15, 2006
No, I'm afraid not [they’re not easily available] … . Copies are much sought after.
The first edition: 'The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales', Owen Jones, Edward
Williams, William Owen Pughe (London, 1807), Vol. III, pp. 465-624. The second
edition (re-typeset and slightly more compact): 'The Myvyrian Archaiology of
Wales', 2nd edn., Owen Jones, Edward Williams, William Owen Pughe (Denbigh,
1870), pp. 1089-1204.
They are not attempts at transcription but typescripted copies of the tablature. In
consequence they have not required revision as understanding of the symbols has
gradually advanced - i.e. they are not at all out-of-date. These massive labours of
love have been tremendously popular and have undoubtedly saved the
manuscript from being worn out by generation after generation of scholar
musicians, until the pressure was eased by the first publication of a small
edition of a photographic facsimile in 1936.
The problems include: typographical errors (a fairly low incidence), the inevitable
graphic distorting of the original by the neatening-up process in order to make
the text more readable, and (as with facsimiles) the failure to transmit all the
subtle information that the original document has to offer (like colour).
Because of their huge public impact, they are historiographic documents every bit
as essential as the manuscript itself.
A PROPOSED SUMMARY OF CONTRIBUTIONS
Jan 14, 2014
Very interesting suggestion … [that we compile a timeline showing the

contributions of all known scholars, performers, and performer/scholars to the
understanding of the material]. There are a lot of topics involved, and there have
been a lot of contributions on each topic. It hopefully simplifies things that a lot of
the chronology can be picked up from the literature reviews I did, which were
ordered chronologically, for my dissertations on technique (p. 5) and rhythm (p.
7). Those reviews were part of my setting of everything from my own work into
the context of prior contributions, as is standard in research. I hope I've managed
to explain where and why I've endorsed suggestions and conclusions which had
been previously published and also, equally importantly, where and why I
haven't.
204
I must mention that Paul Whittaker has been keeping abreast of things whilst he
has been completing his book, referred to here:
http://www.bangor.ac.uk/music/staff/paul_whittaker.php.en
so I don't think there's a need to duplicate what he's doing, but I'm sure a time-
ordered broad outline on the forum of the major contributions would be very
helpful in the meantime, and of course any new info which people can offer.
And it would be good if you could put Lowri Sprung's survey up [`The Robert ap
Huw Manuscript: a short survey’, Folk Harp Journal n. 80 (Summer 1993), p. 60].
Just my thoughts.
THE RELATIONSHIP OF CERDD DANT TO PIOBAIREACHD
Apr 11, 2016
Cerdd dant has even more ramifications for the understanding of piobaireachd
than it does for early folk music. It’s the phrasing of piobaireachd that’s its main
area of uncertainty, especially in its introductory cadences – those descending
runs of ornamental notes which mark out piobaireachd as particularly unusual –
and in the strange figures known as the echoing beats, the double echoes, the
shakes or na crathaidhnean (na crahinin as Joseph MacDonald spelt it when he
supplied their name in about 1760). If you look here at the ground of Tumilin
O’Counichan / Brian O’Duff’s Lament:
http://www.ceolsean.net/content/GlenIris/Book02/Book02%2027.pdf
it is made up mainly of echoing beats, on, as it happens here, just two melody
notes: B and A. The essence of each echoing beat is a melody note divided into
three, as dotted quaver, semiquaver, crotchet: the ratio 3:1:4, and then here (all
shown with tails up) it is dressed with an introductory cadence and has two
gracenotes to cut the melody note into three. It is a highly idiomatic formula,
especially when used as densely as here, but cerdd dant, and cerdd dant alone,
has a closely related formula: the very common one I classified as Close Vc in my
1999 article on Formulas.
Look to Caniad Tro Tant for examples as dense as in this piobaireachd. The
opening (p. 67 in the ms.) has twelve of them in succession, on the notes F and
D. The essence of the formula is identical to the echoing beat formula: a melody
note divided into three in the ratio 3:1:4. The two gracenotes that piping needs
to cut it into three aren’t needed of course because on the harp the nail sounds
the note three times. The difference is in the introduction to the formula: just one
short introductory note played before the beat, along with another before the
third strike of the melody note.
Those are the two points where piobaireachd has great historical inconsistencies
and uncertainties regarding the timing and the accenting within the echoing beat.
Now because in cerdd dant the formula is much more rudimentary it shows the
basis of the whole formula in conception, wherever it may have originated (that
may well have been in vocal keening since it is associated particularly with
laments). It provides the foundation for understanding each and every
manifestation of the formula in piobaireachd history, along with the same for the
entire range of the introductory cadences which are so very widespread in
piobaireachd.
And I’m sure it’s a particularly deep and ancient motif. I chose Brian O’Duff as the
example for many reasons. It was noted as ‘an Irish tune’ (by MacLeod of Gesto),
is vaguely related to Brian Boru’s March and was styled A Lament for King Brian
205
of Old (by Simon Fraser). It contains a very rare open crunluath section, whereby
the ornamental components are tied in to the melody note as they are in cerdd
dant rather than fixed in relation to the drone as is normal in piobaireachd. Its
particularly intricate but common metre is made out of the pattern of the cerdd
dant metre Chwerwyn Corgan [‘bitter chant’]: II00I0II0I00I0II prefaced by its
inverse: 00II0I00I0II0I00.
We’re deep in the heart of a pan-Insular classical tradition of music here with this
motif. I’m not aware of there being a counterpart to it in folk music. Can anyone
track one down? It’s often used as a makeweight, filling up a metrical cycle where
the melody doesn’t quite reach, rather than as the bread-and-butter of a piece.
Apr 13, 2016
Frans in his article brought out well one of the fundamental differences between
piobaireachd and cerdd dant: the point I made the other day that piobaireachd
has its standard figures fixed in relation to the pipe drone whilst those of cerdd
dant are free to move in pitch. On the harp with its wide range and chordal
alternation that variability is to be expected, whereas on the pipes the narrow
range of nine notes and the drone bass rather forces one into fixed figures. That
limited range is one of the reasons why I consider the nine-stringed cruit as a
possible candidate for the original evolution of the standard figures of
piobaireachd. Harp-style variability in piobaireachd figures is extremely rare
indeed, and examples have greatly interested Frans, Roderick Cannon and
myself, largely because they point up just how far removed from a fully-explicit
double tonic piobaireachd otherwise is, where the principle of the drone trumps
the double-tonic alternation in the standard figures. Brian O’Duff’s Lament – not
in its ground but in a later section – has some rare examples of flexible figures.
The Finger Lock is another piece that does. It might be that such things are relics
of an earlier general piping style or they might be examples of individual pipers
straining to move the tradition forward. Either way, it’s possible that an influence
from harp music was at work here. Both the pieces I mention here are rich in
echoing beats.
Apr 14, 2016
Frans’ papers were passed by Roderick to Barnaby, who will be sorting them and
making them accessible. Roderick’s own papers will have gone now to the Library
at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye. Both scholars were exceptionally dedicated, astute
and productive, so there will be a huge amount of immensely valuable material,
much of it digital.
Frans and I talked through the subject of the origins of piobaireachd. He was
aware of the scale of the differences between piobaireachd and cerdd dant and I
know he took care in the WMH article not to commit himself to a view of a harp
origin. He was of a very properly scholarly disposition and always took care to
leave questions open wherever there was room for doubt. We once talked
through the small hours about early piobaireachd styles – I was asking him
mainly whether he thought there had ever been a single style. He said he had
had periods of thinking that that might have been so and also periods when not.
That fundamental question was an open one for him, and that’s very valuable to
know.
Underlying that issue is perhaps the most fundamental difference between cerdd
dant and bardic poetry on the one hand and piobaireachd on the other: that the
206
bardic string musicians and poets were regulated; the piobaireachd pipers – as
far as we know – weren’t. In the period for which we have records then, pipers
were operating in a very different culture indeed from the bardic musicians and
poets. Because pipers didn’t customarily circuit, regulation wasn’t needed since
their patrons already knew their worth and didn’t need any guarantee of
standards. That leads to a very different musical culture – one much more
recognizable to us today than the medieval bardic culture is. That’s a big part of
what makes cerdd dant so valuable - it's ancestral yet from a very different time.
Apr 15, 2016
Yes, Simon Fraser in Australia occupies an important part in the scope of the
diverse styles and arguments about which way of playing piobaireachd is earlier
and therefore more faithful to the composers. His account of the origin of the
MacCrimmons has been given little credence. …
VOCAL LAMENTING
May 17, 2016
It is interesting that this single example of folk polyphony collected from Ireland
[’Tis Pretty to be in Ballinderry] is from Co. Down, in what has been for long an
English-speaking part of Ireland. Downshire was one of five or so colonies around
the Irish Sea originally set up by the Norman overlords, who settled English
agricultural labourers to till the soil, perhaps drawn mainly from Devon and
Somerset. The other English settlements were the Northern part of the Pale and
Forth and Bargy in Ireland, and South Pembrokeshire and the Southern Gower
peninsula in Wales. In Forth and Bargy the West Country dialect of English with
some Chaucerian features, known as Yola, survived long enough to be recorded
and discussed by modern writers. Ireland was linguistically divided into three
types of zone with sharply-differentiated borders: the native Irish, the West
Country dialect of English (largely or exclusively monoglot) and the languages of
the polyglot mercantile coastal towns.
I’m not sure, then, that ’Tis Pretty to be in Ballinderry tells us anything about
native Irish or Welsh culture … . So perhaps Bunting’s association of the Gaelic
term ‘crónan’ with it should be queried? Alternatively, perhaps the term had been
long applied to any bass part, including those in non-native polyphonic styles
such as this.
But there are others here who know very much more about Bunting’s material
and that period than I do, and I’m happy to defer to them.
May 17, 2016
… Yes, I take your point about the narrow harmonies in places. But they are of
short duration apart from the major seconds between B-flat and C in bar 5 and
between C and D in bar 7. I hope that isn't a consequence of the two parts being,
unusually, in the same range and of the burden being clumsily added, or having
been moved up a fifth or an octave, from where such a thing would normally
belong.
What do you think?
207
May 18, 2016
There is a close relative to the Ballinderry burden amongst the records of Irish
lamenting. Joyce’s (1873) example of the gol (he grew up in Co. Limerick) has as
its core motif the descending sequence E-flat, D, C, C, with slightly different note
durations and carrying slightly different vocables of the ‘och-och-one’ series on
each appearance. It spans a minor third, whilst the Ballinderry motif spans a
major third, and that’s the key difference between the two. It is, then, as if the
folk of Down and Antrim had borrowed this Gaelic minor motif and applied it to
this popular monophonic English-language ballad in the major mode, with the
result that we have this curious macaronic two-part piece – an awkward blend of
two different musical cultures. The doominess of descending sequences to my
mind doesn’t seem to sit naturally with the major flavour of Ballinderry. The riff in
Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused – that’s a different matter!
Significantly, the same sequence as Joyce’s turns up in Bunting’s (1840) example

of keening from Armagh, this time in a double-tonic context, where the phrase
concluded by the sequence is repeated shifted down a second. And the note
values here are even as they are in Ballinderry. Petrie (1855) collected a keen
from Co. Clare where the descending sequence of three notes spanning a minor
third also forms the codas, this time at a lower pitch and with the first two notes
each cut into three by staccato.
In defence of Ballinderry, a run-down on three adjacent notes spanning a major

third is to be found at line endings in Beauford’s caoinan (p. 46 of his Essay) and,
ornamented, in the same and in his marbhna (p. 53) and in Walker’s suite of
mourning pieces.
But, unlike Ballinderry, all these other pieces are monophonic.
May 18, 2016
Excellent … – yet another one! [a crónan terminating in B, A, G, G collected from

Connemara by Sandvik, reported in 1927]. I’m finding this exciting, to realise
that there’s so much commonality across all these different sources. I hadn’t
noticed before. There’s no doubt then that this motif was deeply and widely
embedded in the genuine practice of mourning. Hilary Morris explains how the
pieces of musical evidence were fitted together in practice, at
http://inquiry.uark.edu/issues/v05/2004a04.pdf
And Aidan O’Donnell is very good on the ceremonial aspects, at

http://athirdfloorproduction.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Keening-some-
sources-and-etymology-2013.pdf
What I now notice is how the motif is often used as the end to a longer phrase,
where the opening to the phrase varies greatly from source to source and from
the motif itself. So you might want to pursue your narrow harmony thesis by
superimposing on top of these openings the motif itself and looking into the
harmonies that result. In other words, perhaps the repetition in Ballinderry of the
motif had once been the practice generally in actual funereal keening, so that you
would have had two parts in the opening and unison in the close of the phrase. In
turn that might give insight into the possible harmonies used if there had been
any heterophony going on at the same time, if, as seems likely, the reality was
multiple independent voices. It should be possible for us then to get a sense of a
‘wash’, a harmonic texture, and compare that to that of the Long Tunes for the
208
Psalms, and to the ornamentation used in sean-nós. To move reconstruction

forward to closer to past reality perhaps.
As you know I can’t dive into that right now myself, but you might like to?
May 19, 2016
I’m on a learning curve here too.
This certainly isn’t off-topic, since the ‘Ballinderry crónan’ motif is also to be
found, in its major form and in its repeating form, in our old friend we were just
discussing – Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd. The top line of the first nine columns, as long
as you don’t (and I don't) read them in triple time as Edward Jones did, is the
same repeating motif at a similar pitch level but with the last two of the four
notes tied.
It might be a coincidence though, because of the way in which the Irish vocal
motif commonly forms a cadence. However, if the vocal delivery to which the
Cainc supplied an accompaniment was performed in alternatim with the harp, and
that’s a viable possibility, the motif could have formed a cadence here.
May 20, 2016
Just to put the relationship of the [‘och-one’] motif to Cainc Dafydd Broffwyd into
perspective, that major form of the motif, repeated, with the last two notes tied -
all that is there in the opening of Three Blind Mice. I guess that's a reminder that
such a simple and short motif will inevitably turn up all over the place, without
that signifying a great deal. Still, I believe all the Irish keening examples are
historically linked to one another and to what we find in Ballinderry. The major
third manifestation strikes me as odd, but there it is.
May 20, 2016
Yes, the [‘och-one’] motif with ornamentation is present in piobaireachd, but on a

quick search through it is extremely rare indeed. One version of Sir James
MacDonald of the Isles’ Lament contains it, pitched at D C B B. It is clothed in the
ornaments that you would expect it to have in an urlar:- introduced with a
standard cadence E, a throw on the C and the two Bs broken by a G. It sits there
rather uncomfortably, in that a closing cadence on B is not regular piobaireachd
practice, so in the urlar it is followed by a single drumming on low A. Lord Lovat’s
Lament has the motif C B A with similar ornamentation but without a second
sounding of the A. The variations of The Gathering of the MacNabs has the motif
at line endings, pitched at C B A A. Lord MacDonald’s Lament has it within the
variations: E D C C. The Finger Lock has the motif as its major component but
with the notes doubled: thus B B A A G G G G.
The motif appears to be the inspiration for the whole scheme of the urlar of The
Desperate Battle, in which each line is the same except that the first ends on C,
the next on B and the last two on A.
This is, taken altogether, actually a very small haul.
Summing up so far then, we have vocal lamenting commonly using the ‘och-one’
motif but that hardly being taken up at all in pipe and harp laments, and (as I
209
drew attention to recently) we have pipe and harp laments absolutely saturated
with echoing beats which haven’t yet been detected at all in vocal laments. The
lack of crossover between vocal and instrumental laments here is remarkable.
Fascinating as this is, I’ll have to leave this there for now, I’m afraid. I very much
hope others can do more searching for these two formulas.
Jun 28, 2016
Picking up again on the piobaireachd The Desperate Battle with its line endings C,
B, A, A, I think there’s even more significance to that sequence than its
relationship to the ‘och-one’ crónan motif. It relates to the set of warning signals
reported by the piper Simon Fraser in 1912. These he claimed were applied to
tunes where the last two bars of the ground are each made up of an echoing beat
on low A followed by a simple strike on low A. In order to warn of approaching
danger of a raid, any piper becoming aware of it could surreptitiously alert others
by playing such a tune but substituting for the simple strike on low A a taorluath
throw on one of the notes C, B or low A, according to whether the danger was
“miles away”, “nearer” or “very close” respectively. It follows, then, that the
sequence of the varied line endings C, B, low A, low A in The Desperate Battle,
each of which is preceded by a grip on low G rather than just a simple strike,
carries the meaning of danger ever nearing. It is suitable, then, for signifying,
and as being designed for, the advance, the march or the challenge, to the onset
of battle.
The piece is unique amongst piobaireachdan in that the ground (along with its
thumb variation) does not relate to the variations which follow, so the piece can
be said to be in ‘suite’ form. This is important because the same is the case with
the extended, descriptive pieces in folk piping tradition which contain a section
that relates to the march into battle: Máirseáil Alasdruim and The Battle of
Aughrim in Ireland, and the very widespread The Fox Chase is similar.
The signalling tradition here might seem fanciful to us today but actually they
reckon the Gauls at the Battle of Alesia were defeated by Caesar only because
they lacked a signalling system to co-ordinate their forces inside and outside of
the Roman siege lines.
And if all this significance can be attached to the four-note crónan motif, we have
to wonder at what the meanings and associations were of the great number of
melodic formulas in cerdd dant which turn up there in piece after piece. The motif
in the lament Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof at phrase endings in its first section
(at 71.6.5-7 and following) is the ‘och-one’ crónan motif, in its minor form with
the last two notes tied: C B-flat A, dressed with linking notes, accompanied by its
double-tonic shifted echo: D C B-flat, the major form (at 71.6.12-14 and
following). But for most of the cerdd dant motifs, we’ll never know their
associations. They will be ever mysterious.
Jul 1, 2016
Yes, it’s terribly interesting, isn’t it? [the above about The Desperate Battle]
The story you tell relates to another piece: The Piper’s Warning to his Master or
MacDonald’s Warning, one of the ‘warning’ tunes. It was a piper who raised the
alarm: see the commentary at the end of the article at
210
https://www.pipesdrums.com/wp-
content/docengines/A51191C54453471192974BB509421138.pdf
The Desperate Battle isn’t known as a warning tune. But my reading of its
significance has a little more support, from Henry Whyte (aka Fionn), who wrote
of it: “It will be observed that he has arranged the music to represent the order
of battle, beginning with the ‘Challenge’”. He gives a note to the urlar and the
thumb variation: ”Before the Battle. The Challenge.” and for the remainder:
“After the Battle. The moans of the wounded.” although George Moss attributed
these variations as having simply come from another piece: Port Mairi or Port a
Chrunluath.
The same sort of concept as the C B A A descent at line endings in The Desperate
Battle underlies the A G F F descent at phrase endings in Gosteg yr Halen. Same
sort of idea.
Oct 21, 2016
Thank you very much for this [further examples of the crónan motif] … . This
should be of great interest to all who have an interest in the early traditional
music of any of the countries involved. With the addition of the Hungarian
examples you’ve found, it’s a really impressive collection. I suppose that when we
come down to what must be just about the deepest level of music making –
communal lamenting – we shouldn’t be surprised to find geographically
widespread analogues. It’s like the principle of the lowest common denominator –
the deeper you can go, the wider the commonality?
I think it’s right to view the laments with the crónan motif as, at the core, a
variety of chant distinguished from the main body of chant by the use of
cadences in which the descent is stepwise instead of the more abrupt fall to the
final, often of a fourth, that chant generally has. In addition to the feeling that
conveys of the mourners spirits sinking, it conjures up an image of the coffin
being slowly, gently, lowered into the grave, or of the grave gradually being filled
with earth? Of the spirit of the departed descending down into the Underworld?
Oct 24, 2016
Great stuff.
A point to bear in mind as you go is the accentuation. I'd say the crónan
examples tend to invite stress on the first and third notes. That's certainly the
case in Caniad Marwnad Ifan ab y Gof.
211

Peter Greenhill: Discussions On The Music of The Robert Ap Huw Manuscript

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Peter Greenhill: Discussions On The Music of The Robert Ap Huw Manuscript

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DISCUSSIONS ON THE MUSIC OF THE ROBERT

EXCERPTS FROM ONLINE DISCUSSIONS

Public attention to medieval Northern European music has been overshadowed by

I am very grateful to the many contributors to the discussions which have

Monasticism and string-playing

The clymau cytgerdd

THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY AND PRECISION IN THE TRANSLATION OF THE

This is a really important issue, which needs to be answered by the records.

“A professor of string music should compose clymau and caniadau himself

… And there is a great difference between composers and recitalists,

something which he (the composer) composed before, because he who

Seemingly in ignorance of such passages, an entire doctoral thesis was once

The 'bible' on the historical documents relating to music in Wales is David

May 13, 2016

Oct 19, 2015

That intriguing statement is amplified by this account by Henry Whyte in a 1907

As it happens, an understanding of the clymau cytgerdd in relation to composition

Sep 14, 2019

Sep 22, 2019

Nov 10, 2016

Nov 10, 2016

composition in the cerdd dant idiom would be a real test of a composer’s

Nov 10, 2016

ERRORS IN THE MANUSCRIPT

THE COMPETENCE OF MODERN SCHOLARS OF CERDD DANT

Jan 10, 2014

Jan 11, 2014

Jan 13, 2014

I made my wire-strung [harp] in 76-77.

Jan 29, 2018

Henry Lewis, Musica: British Museum Additional Manuscript 14905, facsimile

Claire Polin, ‘Observations on the ap Huw Manuscript’, Music and Letters, 60

Claire Polin, The ap Huw Manuscript (Henryville, 1982), pp. 35-45.

Sep 24, 2019

There shouldn’t, according to mainstream music history, be accompaniment that

Sep 26, 2019

Sep 26, 2019

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CERDD DANT AND FOLK MUSIC

May 10, 2014

Hooray for folk music!

Oct 10, 2015

Oct 11, 2015

The dance in a folk-music context shouldn’t be confused with the formation

“They kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary,

That’s more like it!

Nov 10, 2018

Nov 11, 2018

Thanks … Those links are helpful.

Nov 12, 2018

Nov 13, 2018

BEAUFORD’S IRISH TABLATURE

Feb 29, 2016

Anyway, I believe it continues to await the attentions of specialists in Irish

Feb 29, 2016

Certainly, it would be a mistake for us to underestimate the huge strength of the

I think Beauford's tablature should be viewed in the context of a debacle which

THE IOLO MORGANWG MANUSCRIPT

Sep 21, 2018

Good point … . There’s certainly reason to doubt the authenticity of the

Sep 22, 2018

By the way, I have a massive amount of admiration for Rhys Jones as a

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MANUSCRIPT

Oct 18, 2005