Musical life in nineteenth-century Wales was characterised by the active dissemination of ideas through the publishing of original Welsh music and musical journals. The latter in particular sought to educate as well as to inform, at a time when formal musical education at college or conservatoire was not available. The growth of musical education in Wales was greatly assisted by the emergence of tonic sol-fa as a popular medium, which in turn supported the growth of congregational and choral singing. The chapter discusses the significance of these developments and the extent to which they fostered a Welsh musical tradition. The first part of the chapter considers the relationship between religion, music and education by examining a range of landmark publications, including Cyfaill mewn Llogell (1797). The second part examines the influence of the tonic sol-fa notation system and its popularity in Wales, considering how educational and religious aims coalesced with technological developments to embed the system in the popular musical culture of Welsh communities. It also considers the reasons why some musicians viewed the system negatively and saw it as limiting the progress of Welsh musical practice. The chapter concludes with a survey of music publishing and sales in Wales in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The chapter examines the relationships between music, sport and Welsh identity. Focusing on the national rugby union and football teams, it explores the ways in which performances of ‘Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ by players and supporters have contributed to a cohesive sense of national identity. Examples range from its first recorded use prior to the rugby team’s famous victory over the New Zealand All Blacks in 1905 to its part in the Football Association of Wales’s efforts to galvanise supporters during the team’s successful Euro 2016 campaign. It also considers the adoption of popular hymns such as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ and ‘Calon Lân’ by supporters, investigating the extent to which affiliation to the national team takes on a spiritual quality. Drawing on the contributions of popular Welsh artists such as Max Boyce, the chapter also assesses the self-referential nature of connections between musicality and sporting pride in corporate expressions of national identity. It considers the ways in which language, religious practice and social structures encouraged and maintained a culture of massed patriotic singing, and how this has been reimagined and perpetuated in the twenty-first century through a combination of institutional support, technological developments and the influence of social media.

Like most countries around the world, Wales saw a flowering of popular music in the 1960s. Following the ubiquitous contemporary Anglo-American model, the popular music that emerged in Wales during that decade signalled a number of cultural shifts, both musical and linguistic. This chapter surveys the roots and developments of Anglophone and Welsh-language popular musics from the 1960s into the twenty-first century, focusing on shared traditions, political engagement, the attitudes of the ‘official’ institutions of both Welsh- and English-language culture (including the eisteddfod, the chapel and the media), and the impact of Welsh devolution; and revealing Wales’s contributions to fifty years of global musical dialogue. It considers the careers of several Welsh stars who ‘crossed over’ into the Anglo-American mainstream, including Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, and the rise of the bands of the so-called ‘Cool Cymru’ era - prominent among them Catatonia, Super Furry Animals, Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics. These bands achieved a new level of sophistication and cultural importance for Welsh pop, the clearest signal of which was the release of Super Furry Animals’ internationally acclaimed album Mwng (2000), a collection of songs sung entirely in the Welsh language. Post-devolution Wales has offered a greatly enriched cultural environment and infrastructure for pop music that has ensured the mainstream success of a new generation of Welsh artists such as Gwenno.

This chapter is shorter than the others and takes the form of a postscript devoted to the state and organisation of music in Wales at the time of the book’s publication. It is shaped around the coincidental but simultaneous occurrence of two key historical moments: the devolution of many segments of administrative authority from the UK government to Wales and the establishment of a Welsh Parliament (Y Senedd), and the ubiquitous adoption of digitisation in the service of cultural communication and creativity. This latter development was not, of course, a uniquely Welsh phenomenon, but in Wales, because of the country’s geography and bilingualism, it had an especially important impact. Digitisation facilitated the ambition of Wales’s devolved governments to express the country’s cultural distinctiveness within the UK and globally. Devolution had the ancillary effect of elevating the importance of the creative industries, including those devoted to or including music. Additionally, the legal framework that underlined devolution led to an increased protection of the Welsh language and consequently the music cultures which had flourished within it. The chapter deals with the consequences for Welsh music of two decades of devolution and its impact on traditional and the modern agencies and institutions concerned with Welsh music: music education, performance, the curation of Welsh historical materials and the associated scholarship.

The large body of surviving poetry and prose from medieval Wales contains many references to the performance and practice of music, to musical instruments and to the reception of musical events by both noble and urban audiences. The medieval Welsh word for music, cerdd, also signifies ‘craft’, ‘song’, ‘poetry’ or ‘musical instrument’, indicating the close links between music, poetry and the craft of making instruments. It also indicates that both music and poetry were regarded as a type of professional craft, moderated by their own particular standards and hierarchies. The commonest entertainments offered at the courts of the nobility in medieval Wales were poetry, storytelling and music, and these three arts were closely intertwined. Well-known examples include the poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1325–60) to his beloved as she plays the harp, while other references can be found in the prose tales of the Mabinogion. However, the private entertainments of the nobility and gentry were not the only occasions for the performance of music; travelling minstrels also performed in the streets of towns and at local fairs. This chapter examines a range of such references to music, performers and instruments in medieval Welsh literature, looking at the different kinds of entertainers, their professional hierarchies, the patronage of nobility and gentry and the popular entertainments characteristic of urban culture.

This chapter looks at the contribution of a group of remarkable women to the collection and performance of Welsh traditional song in the early part of the twentieth century. Despite the publication of Maria Jane Williams’s Ancient National Airs of Gwent & Morganwg in 1844, the study of indigenous music in Wales did not flourish until the Welsh Folk-Song Society was established in 1906. Under the direction of John Lloyd Williams, Lecturer in Botany at the University College of North Wales (Bangor), the organisation inspired the collection, classification, performance and analysis of traditional songs. His efforts gave rise to the first revival of traditional music in Wales, but none of this would have been possible without the collaboration of a group of women, of whom the most prominent were Mary Davies, Ruth Herbert Lewis, Annie Ellis, Lucie Barbier, Grace Gwyneddon Davies, Jennie Williams and Dora Herbert Jones. They were pioneers in the collection and performance of Welsh traditional song, setting new standards in ethnographic field work and disseminating their discoveries through their publications, lectures and recitals.

This chapter charts the growth of music in Wales from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century and examines the way the infrastructure for professional music making grew, especially in the period after 1945. It examines the role played by the Welsh Arts Council (later the Arts Council of Wales), the BBC, the National Eisteddfod, the Llangollen International Eisteddfod, musical education (especially the university sector), the Guild for the Promotion of Welsh Music along with Welsh National Opera, Music Theatre Wales, and other bodies such as music clubs and festivals. The careers of composers who followed Joseph Parry, regarded as Wales’s greatest composer, are considered, including the role played by the many whose work was intertwined with the institutions that supported Welsh music. These relationships can be seen in the careers of composers such as Alun Hoddinott, William Mathias, David Harries and latterly Karl Jenkins. The chapter also considers the work of a group of composers who were important in their time but have been largely obscured by historians, including David Vaughn Thomas and Morfydd Owen. The important role they played is noted, as is the development of concert halls and other venues, such as the St David’s Hall in Cardiff and the Wales Millennium Centre.

The dominant genre of secular music in medieval Wales was cerdd dant (literally ‘string craft’), a highly distinctive repertory played on the harp or crwth. Its delivery relied on highly trained professional instrumentalists, who worked in close partnership with Welsh strict-metre poets: both crafts were an intrinsic part of Welsh medieval ‘high culture’, linked to an exclusive bardic order. Though largely transmitted orally, some thirty items from the repertory were entabulated by the Anglesey harper Robert ap Huw c.1613. Cerdd dant largely retained its status until the 1560s, when the fashion for acquiring an English education gradually brought about a sea change in musical taste, effected by the importation of English tunes, texts, instruments and books. Some of the Welsh nobility nevertheless retained a loyalty to the practitioners of the traditional bardic crafts well into the seventeenth century, resulting in a mixed economy in some households, where vernacular music and poetry might rub shoulders with the latest English-style entertainments.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a revival of interest in Welsh language and culture, and the chapter addresses this as it was reflected in music. The period saw flourishing activity from scholars and musicians in collecting, publishing and performing Welsh ‘traditional’ music, supported by newly formed Welsh and London-Welsh cultural societies. A number of important publications sought to capture Welsh music and present it to a wider public - particularly a fashionable London public - notably, Blind Parry’s Antient British Music (1742) and Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784); while a more direct reflection of the Welsh oral tradition is found in the work of collectors such as Iolo Morganwg, John Jenkins ‘Ifor Ceri’ and Maria Jane Williams. Amidst this activity, two apparently contradictory but in fact related ideas were being pursued, sometimes simultaneously: an idea of the place of music in the deep antiquity of Welsh culture, and an idea of music as an expression of Welsh identity in modern Britain.