Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales Christopher Macklin Available Online: 03 Nov 2009
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This article was downloaded by: [Yale University] On: 21 December 2011, At: 15:54 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of the Royal Musical Association Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrma20 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales Christopher Macklin Available online: 03 Nov 2009 To cite this article: Christopher Macklin (2009): Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134:2, 167-183 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690400903109059 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 134, no. 2, 167Á183 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales CHRISTOPHER MACKLIN IN his book Acoustic Communication, Barry Truax proposed that auditory phenomena could be usefully described along a continuum stretching from the limited subset of highly structured and semantically specific gestures that constitute human speech to the amorphous and semantically ambiguous me´lange of acoustic events that make up the listener’s situational ‘soundscape’.1 Between these two extremes lies music, which, according to Truax, ‘refine[s] the sounds of nature into a powerful form of human expression’, or, as Bruce Smith put it, ‘moves nonhuman sounds in the direction of speech, and speech in the direction of nonhuman sounds’.2 Although Truax’s framework was originally formulated to account for music’s ‘colonization’ of new acoustic space at both ends of the spectrum wrought through late twentieth-century (particularly electroacoustic) composition, it is equally relevant to what we might term the ‘rediscovery’ of old acoustic space through historical and musicological investiga- tion. In recent years, scholars of music, drama, literature, theology and even law have drawn attention to the need to grapple with the ‘performing voice’ in historical texts,3 and Truax’s continuum is a reminder of the imperative to think beyond conventional disciplinary divisions in developing methodologies for the study of oral/aural The author would like to thank Phyllis Kinney, Meredydd Evans, John Potter, Carol Symes, and particularly Sally Harper, David Klausner and Richard Rastall for their investments of time and resources into this project and insightful comments on early drafts of this article. 1 Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ, 1984), 43Á7. Downloaded by [Yale University] at 15:54 21 December 2011 2 Ibid., 43. Truax lays out both an initial definition of a soundscape as an acoustic environment and the first conception of acoustic space as a continuum stretching from unordered sound to human speech. His model places music in the middle of this continuum not on the basis of any mediatory role, but by virtue of its intermediate values of strictness in syntactical structure, temporal density of information, ‘ambiguity of meaning’ and size of acoustic repertory (ibid., 45). The transitional and mediating aspects of music’s role in acoustic environments were then explored by Bruce Smith in his wide-ranging discussion of aural experience in Shakespeare’s England, which explained the relationship in the terms quoted here. See Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, IL, 1999), 51. 3 See, in particular, M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066Á1307 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1993); Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, NY, 2007); and Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado and Marilyn Lawrence (Cambridge, 2005). ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online # The Royal Musical Association DOI: 10.1080/02690400903109059 http://www.informaworld.com 168 CHRISTOPHER MACKLIN performance. This issue is particularly acute for traditions where there is limited documentary evidence; in musicology, therefore, much of this innovative work has occurred in textually elusive domains such as the performance of secular music in the Middle Ages and in the study of traditional musics outside the classical canon.4 However, the centrality of music in Truax’s scheme of auditory signification suggests unrealized potential for musicological studies to feed into new insights among the linguists and historians who study acoustic phenomena at the edges of the spectrum. One area where this kind of disciplinary syncretism has been embraced to excellent effect is the study of the ‘Musical and Poetical Relicks’ of medieval and early-modern Welsh court bards.5 The consummate expression of this art lay in the ability to compose and deliver elaborate strict-metre lyrics in the vernacular, accompanied in performance by some sort of instrumental elaboration.6 There is a gross disparity, however, between the surviving vernacular lyrics apparently intended for oral performances of this kind, which number in the thousands, and the handful of non- liturgical records that feature recognizable musical notation, all of which are contained in two codices and lack indications of performed verbal texts.7 How can this pattern of documentation be reconciled with accounts of contemporary performance? The present study seeks to illustrate how historical and ethnomusicological approaches informed by Truax’s auditory continuum can interact productively to shed light on modes of secular performance in early Wales. Juxtaposing the ambiguous allusions to musicality in medieval and early-modern Welsh records with their parallels in historically distant yet structurally similar performance cultures such as early Latin 4 See, for example, Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives, ed. Gerard Be´hague (Westport, CT, 1984); Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985); John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050Á1350 (Cambridge, 1986); and Leo Treitler, ‘History and Music’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 299Á319. 5 This term comes from an early collection assembled by the harper and antiquary Edward Jones (1752Á1824), published as Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards Preserved by Tradition, and Authentic Manuscripts, from Remote Antiquity; Never Before Published (London: printed for the author, 1784). 6 This elaboration was most often delivered on the harp or on the six-stringed bowed lyre known in Wales Downloaded by [Yale University] at 15:54 21 December 2011 as the crwth, although a late reference printed in 1592 in Sioˆn Dafydd Rhys’s Institutiones indicates that in less accomplished performances the lyrics might be accompanied simply by the rhythmic pounding of a staff on the floor by a little-regarded class of performer known as the datgeiniad pen pastwn (stick-end reciter/declaimer). See Sally Harper, ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym, Poet and Musician’, 2007, Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym, University of Wales, Swansea, Bhttp://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/essays/sally_harper/ index_eng.php, accessed 2 March 2009. 7 These manuscripts are the so-called ‘Robert ap Huw Manuscript’ and the ‘Iolo Morganwg Manuscript’ (London, British Library, Add. MSS 14905 and 14970 respectively). Many excellent articles exploring their provenance, use and contents have been published in the journal Welsh Music History. See, in particular, Welsh Music History, 3, Special Issue, ed. Sally Harper (1999), dedicated to the Robert ap Huw Manuscript, which contains an article by Paul Whittaker (pp. 252Á70) on the tablature of the Iolo Morganwg Manuscript. See also note 21 below. For an introduction to medieval Welsh vernacular poetry and its manuscript sources, see Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff, 2000). CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON SECULAR VOCAL PERFORMANCE IN WALES 169 song and the bardic performances of the Kigandan court permits a new historical voice to emerge that neither purely sings nor speaks, but instead moves freely between music and speech, and delivers poetic texts musically and musical texts poetically. Polysemy in medieval Welsh vocal terminology Ambiguity regarding vocal performance registers in Wales is inherent in its language. While English and most other modern Western European languages make a clear semantic distinction between the types of vocalizations used, for example, in ‘singing’ a solo recital of Lieder in a concert hall and ‘reciting’ a dramatic monologue in a play or poetry in a coffee house, Welsh words deriving from the Indo-European stem *kan-, caˆn- (as in the Latin cantor)