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School of Music

Profile of Dr Sally Harper

Name:

Dr Sally Harper

Position:

Senior Lecturer in Music

Email:

Location:

Music Annexe, College Road

Phone:

01248 382126

Background

Born near Dudley in the West Midlands, Sally Harper is a graduate of Birmingham University and completed her doctorate in 1989 at Oxford (Magdalen and Brasenose colleges). Following a brief period in academic administration at the University of Warwick, she began teaching at Bangor in 1991 and subsequently discovered a passion for Wales, its culture, and its language. She became Director of the Centre of Advanced Welsh Music Studies (CAWMS) in 2002 and also edits the bilingual journal Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2006.

The main focus of Sally's research is shaped by her dual role as Director of CAWMS and editor of its journal. She works to promote the study of Welsh music and music in Wales in the widest sense, to raise its profile, and to seek dialogue with those working in other areas of regional musicology and in Welsh and Celtic studies at a general level. Her specific area of expertise within this broad framework is one that has previously attracted little serious scholarly attention – the music of Wales before 1650, with particular emphasis on its wider cultural context.

This area is also complemented by a long-standing interest in music and Christian liturgy, and its articulation in various institutions. Her doctoral thesis (published in 1993) was an examination of special liturgical observance in English Benedictine houses before the Reformation, with particular reference to the formation of the Office of the Dead and the Office of All Saints, and to specific devotions honouring the Virgin Mary or local saints. She has also explored features of the pre-Reformation liturgies of the Scottish and Irish churches, and (at the opposite end of the spectrum) music for the contemporary church, with particular reference to inclusive worship.

Sally Harper is co-director of the Bangor Pontifical Project, and part of the core research team for the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society project, ‘The experience of worship in late medieval cathedral and parish church’. She has also contributed to the web-based AHRC dafyddapgwilym.net project, and led a related AHRC research project on the performance of medieval vernacular verse in Wales, Ireland and Scotland).

 

Teaching

(courses in both English and Welsh)

  • Various Areas of Music History before 1650
  • Music in the Christian Church
  • Arts Administration
  • Music in the Community

Responsibilities

  • Deputy Head of School
  • Director of the Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies

Research Interests

  • Music in Wales, with particular emphasis on music and culture in medieval and early modern Wales
  • Medieval liturgy and religious institutions
  • Music for the contemporary liturgy

Main publications

Authored Books

  • Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007).
  • Medieval English Benedictine Liturgy: Studies in the Formation, Structure and Content of the Monastic Votive Office, c.950-1540 (Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities), New York and London, Garland Publishing Inc, 1993.

Edited Books

  • [With Wyn Thomas] Welsh Music Studies: Bearers of Song (Essays in Honour of Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney) / Astudiaethau Cerddoriaeth Cymru: Cynheiliaid y Gân (Traethodau i anrhydeddu Meredydd Evans a Phyllis Kinney) (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2007).
  • Music in the Scottish Church up to 1603: Studies and Essays based on the papers of the late Isobel Woods Preece (Glasgow, Musica Scotica, 2000).
  • Robert ap Huw Studies / Astudiaethau Robert ap Huw (Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru vol. 3) (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1999).

Recent Articles (selected)

  • 'Traces of Lost Late Medieval Offices? The Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae, et Hiberniae of John of Tynemouth [fl.1350]', Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography, ed. Emma Hornby and David Maw (Boydell and Brewer , 2010)
  • ‘"Songes of the doeinges of theire Auncestors": English and Welsh Music Traditions’, Medieval English Literary Culture and the Welsh Nation, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages Series, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, 2008).
  • ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym, poet and musician’ / ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym, Bardd a Cherddor’ (April, 2007) http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net
  • ‘Cerddoriaeth yn Llyfr Lloffion Phillip Powell o Aberhonddu (c.1630–35)’/  ‘Music in the Commonplace Book of Phillip Powell of Brecon (c.1630–35)’, Welsh Music Studies: Bearers of Song (Essays in Honour of Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney), ed. Sally Harper and Wyn Thomas (Cardiff, 2007), (Cymraeg: 117–33; English: 134–44).
  • ‘An Elizabethan Tune List from Lleweni Hall, North Wales’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 38 (2005), 1–66.
  • ‘“A Dittie to the tune of Welsh Sydannen”: a Welsh image of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 201–28.
  • ‘Tunes for a Welsh Psalter: Edmwnd Prys’s Llyfr y Salmau’, Studia Celtica, 37 (2003), 221–67.
     

Other selected articles

  •  ‘“Musicke bye Voice and Instrument”: Patrons and Players in Late Medieval and Early Modern Wales’ (Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2007).
  • ‘Instrumental Music in Medieval Wales’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 4 (2004), 20–42.
  • ‘Popish Plots to kill the Queen: an Eighteenth-century Revival of the Elizabethan Ballad of Sidanen’, Journal of the National Library of Wales, 33 (2004), 221–40.
  • ‘Datblygiad cerdd dant yng Nghymru yn yr Oesoedd Canol’ [The development of Cerdd Dant in Wales in the Middle Ages’], Cof Cenedl, 19 (2004), 1–35.
  • Music in the Welsh Household c.1580-1620’, The Welsh History Review, 21 (2003), 621–45.
  • ‘A Musical Christmas at Lleweni Hall, Denbighshire, in the Elizabethan Era’, New Welsh Review (2002), 45−52.
  • ‘Issues in dating the repertory of Cerdd Dant’, Studia Celtica 35 (2001), 325–40.
  • ‘So how many Irishmen went to Glyn Achlach? Early accounts of the formation of cerdd dant’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 42 (Winter, 2001), 1–25.
  • ‘The Robert ap Huw Manuscript and the Canon of Sixteenth-Century Welsh Harp Music’ (130–61; Welsh version 162–82), Robert ap Huw Studies, ed. Sally Harper (1999).
  • ‘The Bangor Pontifical: A Pontifical of the Use of Salisbury’, Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru 2 (1997), 65–99; Welsh version 100−25.

In the press or forthcoming

  • ‘And all in accordance with Sarum Use.  Revisiting the mediaeval liturgical pattern of St Davids’, Revisiting St Davids, ed. Jonathan Wooding (Logaston Press, 2007)
  •  ‘Hymns and devotional songs in medieval Wales’ and ‘Carol: Early Welsh’, The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, ed. J. R. Watson (London, Canterbury Press, forthcoming, 2007).

Short articles on music in the contemporary church

  • ‘Singing God’s praises in the Rainbow Nation: church music in the new South Africa’, Church Music Quarterly (June, 2003), 9–12.
  • ‘Seeing the face of Christ in others: the work of the National Network of Pastoral Musicians’, Church Music Quarterly (December, 2002), 21–2.
  • ‘A music birthed from silence: meeting Margaret Rizza’, Church Music Quarterly (September, 2002).
  • ‘Enemies of Apathy: Music from the Iona Community II’, Church Music Quarterly (December, 2001), 14–16.
  • ‘The church needs new songs because the world changes: Music from the Iona Community I’, Church Music Quarterly (September, 2001), 8–13.

Radio and Television Broadcasts

  • ‘Defodau Dewi Sant’ (1-hour programme for S4C, 1 March 2007, presented by Sally Harper with the Alamire Consort, dir. David Skinner; produced by Green Bay Studios).
  • BBC Radio 3 Early Music Show, hosted by Katherine Bott. ‘Made in Wales’ (11 Nov 2005); ‘An Elizabethan Christmas at Lleweni Hall’ (1 January 2006).