Music in medieval and early modern Wales has long remained a closed book for all but a small band of dedicated specialists. Musicologists without a good knowledge of the Welsh language have been unable to gain access to many of the secondary as well as primary sources, whilst the paucity of original materials in conventional notation, inevitable in a culture where oral tradition has persisted far longer than in many other modern European countries, has proved a further stumbling block. As Sally Harper notes in her introduction (p. 1), the prejudiced assumption that much of the material is ‘obscure and mediocre by comparison with other musical repertories’ has also been a hindrance. Moreover, much of the published work in this field has been rather scattered, appearing either in the form of journal articles or in volumes of essays on particular themes where musicologists might not think to look. Sally Harper's own recent article on the interface between Welsh and English musical traditions is a case in point.Footnote ¹ This volume thus fills a major gap by providing an accessible English-medium guide to the often disparate sources from which a clearer view of musical traditions in Wales can be pieced together.

And disparate those sources certainly are. Information has had to be gleaned from administrative, legal and ecclesiastical records, from chronicles, from contemporary literary sources, manuscripts of later antiquarians, correspondence and so on. The volume is divided into three main sections – the first two focusing on secular and liturgical music respectively, and the third discussing the evolution of music in Wales in the aftermath of the 1536 Act of Union, whose imposition of English language and laws had such far-reaching implications for Welsh culture in the widest sense. Each section is prefaced by a map locating the main places referred to in the chapters that follow.

The first section, on secular musical traditions in the earlier period, may well prove to be both the most enlightening and the most difficult for non-Welsh readers, as the history of Welsh music cannot be divorced from that of poetry and the bardic order. The first chapters give an overview of the social, musical and literary circumstances, as well as a discussion of instruments and performers, before outlining the available sources for the history and theory of cerdd dant (music played on harp or crwth). These preliminaries provide the setting for a detailed account of the content and tablature of perhaps the single most important, and most enigmatic, source, the famous manuscript of Robert ap Huw. Over the years both practitioners and theorists have proposed various interpretations of the pieces it preserves, and this chapter provides useful references to recordings as well as written studies. Despite the manuscript's late date – it was copied in the early seventeenth century, when the bardic system was in fairly rapid decline – and its use of a tablature that probably emerged no earlier than the third quarter of the sixteenth century, it undoubtedly preserves material of far earlier origin: the intabulated pieces seem to be associated with musicians and poets active before 1500.

To those with little prior knowledge of Welsh cultural history, especially the bardic tradition and its very particular relationship with music and performance, much in this first section will be unfamiliar, not least the terminology. For those finding it difficult to keep in mind the definitions of cerdd dant and cerdd dafod (Welsh strict-metre poetry), let alone the musical genres or the distinction between different grades of poet and performer or various types of harp, a separate glossary of Welsh terms with brief definitions and cross-references to more detailed explanations in the text would have been a valuable addition; a guide to pronunciation is already included.

Musicologists from outside Wales will be on more familiar ground in the second section, devoted to the Latin liturgy and the history of church music in Wales up to the Reformation. Again this section's opening chapters provide a general introduction, outlining the life of the Welsh Church and its institutions, from the native clas foundations to the introduction (or imposition) of Anglo-Norman models following first the Norman and later the Edwardian Conquest of Wales (not always clearly distinguished here), which led eventually to the widespread adoption of Sarum Use, albeit with significant local variations. In this context, some discussion of boundaries might have been useful for those not familiar with the linguistic geography, which was no respecter of formal diocesan and political frontiers. This important point is sometimes implicit but never fully addressed, yet not all readers might be aware, for example, that a number of parishes in Shropshire and Herefordshire had substantial Welsh-speaking populations and were important loci for Welsh poets and their patrons as well as manuscript ownership and production; on the other hand, parts of eastern Wales, such as Radnorshire, came under the control of Hereford's consistory court, whilst some parishes west of Offa's Dyke had significant English populations.

Of the very limited number of surviving liturgical manuscripts, a substantial proportion may be of English origin in whole or part, but made for use in Wales or within Welsh communities. Two major manuscript sources of the fourteenth century discussed in detail here are typical in this respect. The original provenance of the Penpont Antiphonal is debatable but probably English, whilst all the evidence points to the Bangor Pontifical or Pontifical of Bishop Anian being produced in an English scriptorium, most probably in East Anglia. A welcome addition to this section is the more detailed handlist of liturgical manuscripts of Welsh provenance or used in Wales (or in Welsh-speaking parishes outside the political border), which is provided in an appendix and also includes early printed books and books for private devotion.

The third and final section bears the rather confusing title ‘Welsh Music in an English Context’, which at first sight suggests Welsh music translated to England, whereas in fact it deals with the converse. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, aspiring gentry families increasingly looked to England for educational opportunities and careers, adopting English cultural practices as part of the same package. Here again it might be useful to add that the Welsh gentry were not all based within the Welsh border. A classic example is the Owen family of Brogyntyn (later anglice Porkington), whose main seat was in Shropshire but who had extensive lands in the north Wales counties, and was simultaneously active in Welsh cultural life and English political and military life in the Tudor period. Contemporary sources, especially from the border counties where English influences were earliest and greatest, reveal the extent to which English music and musical fashions were borrowed by wealthy and influential Welsh families during the early modern period. This phenomenon, for rather different reasons, of course, was paralleled in the practices of an increasingly anglicised Church, despite the officially sanctioned translation into Welsh of both Prayer Book and Bible, published in 1567 and 1588 respectively. In both secular and ecclesiastical settings the result was a unique hybrid musical culture, where imported traditions and materials were often adapted in transition and thus came to bear the clear imprint of native Welsh traditions. Particularly interesting is the case of the metrical Psalms of Edmwnd Prys, first published in 1621, which steered a careful but not always easy course between Welsh and English metrical and musical models.

Since the book covers both secular and sacred music from such a long period, a brief concluding chapter might have been helpful to draw together the different themes and perhaps hint at the implications of the developments outlined here for music in Wales after 1650. In so wide-ranging a study, it is inevitable that Harper has had to draw heavily on the work of many other scholars, though the extent of her debt may not always be evident. In general she has taken account of very recent studies, though it is unfortunate if inevitable that some significant publications, such as Marged Haycock's magisterial new edition of poems from the Book of Taliesin, or Michelle Brown's latest discussion of the Lichfield Gospels, appeared too late to be taken into consideration.Footnote ² Nonetheless there are occasional curious omissions. The comments (p. 193) on Lewys Morgannwg's poem in praise of the abbot, for example, would surely have been more accurate had the modern edition of his works been consulted, rather than relying on Glanmor Williams's out-of-context quotation from an obsolete source in his now ageing general history of the Welsh Church.Footnote ³ More generally, if recourse is made to the often valuable testimony of poetry, some comment needs to be made about the degree to which eulogistic references by poets can be taken entirely at face value, given the poets' reliance on the largesse of the patrons they addressed. There are a number of slips in the copy-editing, such as misspellings (e.g. ‘Gogonedog’ for ‘Gogoneddog’, p. 186) and inconsistencies in, for example, manuscript shelf-marks, place names (such as Tregare/Tregaer, with only Tregare indexed), and personal names (the poet Lewys Morgannwg, for instance, is also referred to as Lewis Morganwg, giving rise to separate entries in the index). Some place names are glossed with an explanation of their location whilst others are not, or not at the first reference, even if they are arguably less likely to be familiar to a non-Welsh audience.

At times Harper's reliance on secondary sources in fields in which she may have less personal expertise is evident. One example is the inference (p. 192) that the Black Book of Basingwerk was copied at the abbey of that name. Although it does indeed seem to have been held there by the early sixteenth century, it has been established for some time that this manuscript was almost certainly copied at Valle Crucis, where its main copyist, the poet Gutun Owain, spent forty years of his life.Footnote ⁴ Her discussion of the comparative size of initials in the Penpont Antiphonal (p. 221) would have been clearer had she referred to depth by number of lines rather than employing vague terms such as ‘double-size’ and ‘slightly smaller’. Manuscripts specialists will also undoubtedly find irritating and confusing the unorthodox system of sigla used for libraries, especially as not all are listed in the key on pp. xvi–xvii.

On a more general level there is a tendency to build hypothesis upon hypothesis without sufficient caveat, as, for example, in the comments on the presumed date of the repertory preserved in the Ap Huw manuscript (p. 159). Furthermore, general assumptions are sometimes made which further research or reflection might have modified. The discussion of bindings is a case in point. The ‘appearance of scraps of printed material within later Welsh manuscript bindings’ does not necessarily ‘confirm’ that ‘a number of the wealthier parish churches’ in Wales ‘evidently bought printed Missals during the sixteenth century’, for we know that manuscripts owned in Wales were often bound elsewhere, in neighbouring towns east of the border such as Oswestry, or as far afield as London, and binders did not necessarily only acquire their waste locally. This is an area where more work remains to be done, and the binding fragments in the National Library of Wales, some of which include musical notation, cry out for further investigation. NLW MS 22081D, for example, which is not noticed here, contains two folios from a twelfth-century missal that could be of either English or Welsh provenance.

Despite these reservations, however, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650 is a valuable guidebook to a very complex field that will now be opened up to a far wider audience in Wales and beyond, and should stimulate further interest and research in the early history of Welsh music. The numerous illustrations and frequent presentation of information in table form help the reader to assimilate the wealth of material, and the book is written in an accessible, straightforward style. It is enlivened by a wealth of fascinating snippets and anecdotes, such as the tale of the boy who hurled a stone from the choir gallery at St David's cathedral at one of Cromwell's soldiers intent on pulling down the organ. The soldier was severely injured, but young Williams, we note with glee, ‘escaped retribution … by concealing himself in one of the bells’, and survived to become a vicar choral later on. The music is thus never divorced from its context, so this study provides a window not only onto the history of music but also onto cultural life in Wales during a period of tremendous changes.