Sally Harper

Thursday 28 March 2024
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Sally Harper
Sally Harper

The Art of Music is pleased to announce two publications typeset in association with The Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies at Bangor University.

We have also supplied the InDesign™ template for Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru vol. 7, published by The University of Wales Press.

Music has also been engraved for a number of related projects.


Sally Harper is Deputy Head of the School of Music at Bangor University in North Wales, and Director of The Centre for Advanced Welsh Music Studies at the University.

Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650
cover of Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650

Containing 480 pages, this book provides the first serious study of Welsh music before 1650 and draws on a wide range of sources in Welsh, Latin and English to illuminate early musical practice.

Music in Wales has long been a neglected area. Scholars have been deterred both by the need for a knowledge of the Welsh language, and by the fact that an oral tradition in Wales persisted far later than in other parts of Britain, resulting in a limited number of sources with conventional notation.

The book challenges two prevailing assumptions, both of them false: namely (a) that music in Wales before 1650 is impoverished and elusive; and (b) that the extant sources are too obscure to warrant serious study.

Harper demonstrates that there is a far wider body of source material than is generally realised, comprising liturgical manuscripts, archival materials, chronicles and retrospective histories, inventories of pieces and players, vernacular poetry, and treatises. The book is structured around three distinct musical categories: the uniquely Welsh practice of cerdd dant ('the music of the string', for harp and crwth); the Latin liturgy in Wales and its embellishment, and 'Anglicised' sacred and secular materials from c.1580, which show Welsh music mirroring English practice.

Taken together, the primary material presented in this book bears witness to a flourishing and unique musical tradition of considerable cultural significance, aspects of which have an important bearing on wider musical practice beyond Wales.

Contents

Introduction: The sources of Welsh music in context

Part I: The Sources and Practice of Medieval Cerdd Dant

1 Cerdd Dant: a Welsh bardic craft in context
2 Mastering the bardic crafts: oral and written sources
3 Harp and crwth in early medieval Wales
4 The players of Cerdd Dant and their social code
5 Gathering the documentation of Cerdd Dant
6 The historical and theoretical sources of Cerdd Dant
7 The Robert ap Huw manuscript and other Welsh tablature

Part II The Latin Liturgy, its Chant and Embellishment

  8 Sources for the medieval Welsh liturgy: an overview
  9 Early Welsh Clas institutions
10 Anglo-Norman liturgical reform
11 Shaping a new liturgy: the adoption of Sarum Use in Wales
12 Sources with music I: the Penpont Antiphoner
13 Sources with music II: the Bangor Pontifical
14 Late medieval evidence I: the institutions
15 Late medieval evidence II: musical practice

Part III Welsh Music in an English Milieu c.1550–1650:

16 Mirroring England: cultural imitation and infiltration
17 Domestic and popular music-making I: the context
18 Domestic and popular music-making II: the repertory
19 A Welsh translation of John Case's Apologia Musices
20 The post-Reformation church I: parish and people
21 The post-Reformation church II: cathedral and household chapel

Appendix of liturgical manuscripts
Bibliography
Index

Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650 is published by Ashgate Press.

Welsh Music Studies: Bearers of Song
cover of Bearers of Song

Jointly edited by Sally Harper with Wyn Thomas, Director of the Archive of Traditional Welsh Music.

This delightful collection of essays and poems in the area of Welsh music studies is an affectionate tribute to two great ‘Bearers of Song’, Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney.

The volume has been assembled by their friends and colleagues as a celebration of their immeasurable contribution to the culture, music and language of Wales over the last fifty years.

All of the material is presented fully bilingually in both English and Welsh, and there are numerous musical examples and illustrations.

Two of Wales’s leading poets, Tony Conran and Gwyn Thomas, offer specially-commissioned works for Merêd and Phyllis, while Robin Gwyndaf contributes the poem that gives the volume its title.

There is also a warm appreciation of the couple’s joint achievement by R. Geraint Gruffydd and an extensive bibliography of their complete writings by Huw Walters.

Bearers of Song is published by the University of Wales Press.

Music typeset

Examples of music engraving for Sally Harper by The Art of Music can also be found in the following:

  • "Robert ap Huw Studies" in Welsh Music History / Hanes Cerddoriaeth Cymru vol. 3
    (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1999)
  • In civitas Domini (antiphon from the Bangor Pontifical for the blessing of a bell)
    in The Light of Life (RSCM Press, 2002)
  • 'Dafydd ap Gwilym, poet and musician' at Dafydd ap Gwilym.net (so far there are no examples or illustrations  shown in this article)

 

 
 
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