Demystifying the Celts

Abstract

Even as recently as ten years ago, a reviewer of historically informed performance of Celtic musics would have been hard put to find anything of relevance or of adequate standards of scholarship. Then as now, the market is full of what is advertised as 'Celtic music', but invariably in modern dress, designed by wishful thinking. But at last there are encouraging signs of a breakthrough to something more solid, reliable and enquiring. Through conscientious examination of surviving source materials, realistic assessment of historical evidence and a readiness to engage in open debate about many unresolved (and perhaps insoluble) questions, performers are now emerging who are more disciplined, intellectually well trained, and more openly willing to account for what may have once existed, without inventing and embroidering the story as they go. It is for such qualities of care and accountability that these five recordings have been selected for discussion here. In Two worlds of the Welsh harp (Dorian DOR-90260, rec 1997), William Taylor explores the distinctive repertories of the ap Huw Manuscript (British Library, Add. Ms. 14905-written down in 1613 but representing compositions of the 14th and 15th centuries), and the more selfconsciously antiquarian collection of Edward Jones, Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards (1784-1825). The manuscript compiled by Robert ap Huw (c.15801665), harper at the English court of James I, is the oldest extant European manuscript of harp music. Without needing to refer to the accompanying notes one can quickly discern which of the two worlds is being demonstrated. The older materials are powerful and rather more cerebral instrumental pieces with a concentration on form and variation, several of them accompanied by the relentless tread of the familiar oon1 ground in designated combinations, whereas items from the Jones collection emphasize melody and tunefulness. Taylor makes use of three instruments-a copy of a 12th-century romanesque cithara anglica for Kaniad San Silin / Caniad of St Silin (believed to be a medieval song in honour of the saint), and copies of two bray harps (15thcentury with 24 strings; 16th-century with 29 strings) for the rest of the ap Huw and for the Jones items. He has provided excellent notes in the accompanying booklet, with helpful explanations of terminology from ap Huw and other Welsh treatises, and with clear diagrams of the harps and the bray fittings. He also makes the all-important point that the 'Welshness' of this music comes from the playing style rather than the repertories in the case of the Jones material. And by the same token, neither are the harps themselves Welsh in origin or design; rather, they represent pan-European late-medieval and Renaissance instruments, underlining a theme discussed elsewhere in this issue, namely, that origin and invention of individual elements are not the defining criteria of cultural characteristics: it is rather their combined use in particular contexts which accords them identity and meaning in a given time and place. Crossroads of the Celts: medieval music of Ireland, Brittany, Scotland and Wales (Dorian DOR-93177, rec 1998) by Altramar Medieval Music Ensemble is an equally impressive achievement in terms of source-material research and a convincing performance result. The repertories they have chosen for this, the first of their triad of Celtic programmes, are a mixture of sacred and secular items from all of the Celtic regions, though for the greater part derived from the particularly rich variety of available Irish sources.