Eisteddfodder

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 12

Eisteddfodder

T. DAVY’S DAY is past; and the wave of Welsh music has ebbed, leaving us a trifle dazed and filled with seasonable reflections on national character. An historian of considerable eminence but an individual turn of tongue has, described the people in question as "a race of quarrelsome nightingales," in support of which view there is the remark of a thirteenth-century chronicler: "In their musical concerts they do not sing in unison like the inhabitants of other countries, but in many different parts; so that in a company of singers, which one very frequently meets with in Wales, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers." The music of Wales may, I suppose, be said to have certain characteristics traceable to a Celtic background, but it is very different from the music of the other Celtic nations. This difference consists most obviously in the absence from the Welsh tradition of the nostalgia and obsession with defeat that dominates the Irish and Highlanders and their music. The Welsh decline to be repressed, a feature which has sometimes brought their Celtic neighbours to regard them with a certain coolness. The reason is probably that the Welsh succumbed to the brutal Saxon in the late Middle Ages, when nobody cared a fig for the clash of national cultures; and, aided by a succession of lalf-Welsh Kings in London-Lancasters, Yorks, and Tudors were able to preserve their speech and song in comparative peace. One cannot too much emphasise the importance to Welsh culture of a reserve of native art-uncomprehended or uuheard of by the outsider-on which the nation could fall back. The Welsh

possess as a living fact what to their neighbours is a dying cause, or worse, a literary revival.