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School of Music

Celebrating with the Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies

Image of the book coverThe Centre has enjoyed a particularly active period during the last two months. Sally Harper’s long-awaited study Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources was published by Ashgate on 1 May. Addressing both sacred and secular music in medieval and modern Wales, it consolidates and extends much of the scholarly work coordinated by the Centre in recent years. Details can be viewed here.

 

April also saw the celebratory launch in Aberystwyth of the Centre’s fully bilingual volume Studies in Welsh Music: Bearers of Song, a tribute to two giants of Welsh culture, Phyllis Kinney and Meredydd Evans. Edited by Sally Harper and Wyn Thomas and published by the University of Wales Press, the book contains eight articles on various aspects of song in Wales, ranging from the collecting of traditional folk songs through nineteenth-century hymnody to the elusive practice of canu cywydd pedwar. See here for further details.

Image of Meredydd Evans and Sally HarperMeredydd Evans and Sally Harper also collaborated with the harpists William Taylor and Bethan Bryn in early April for a presentation entitled ‘The Sound-World of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, held at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. This was specially devised to complement the launch of the new electronic edition of Dafydd’s poetry, and a recording of the performance and associated essay may be found at DafyddapGwilym.net.

The Centre will host another launch for Bearers of Song in the presence of Merêd and Phyllis on 23 June as part of its four-day conference ‘Discovering Welsh Music’, while the next issue of its journal, Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru is scheduled to appear in the autumn.

Read the story about Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney's remarkable contribution to Welsh traditional music that appeared in April.