Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
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Stories from the Tŷ Cerdd archives
– rediscovering the music of Wales, one box at a time...
A date with one of Wales’s most mysterious musical artefacts
by Ethan Davies, Publishing and Research Manager, Tŷ Cerdd
In April, I joined the IAML UK & Ireland conference, held in Cardiff, for its ‘speed date our artefact’ event which involved participants bringing an object from their archive and wooing the delegates into casting a vote for ‘the artefact I’d most like to take home’.
I brought, from Tŷ Cerdd’s shelves, probably the oldest ‘eligible artefact’ attending the blind date format that day. At a spry 413 years of age (although looking hardly a day over 90 in the form of the safely portable University of Wales bound facsimile which is in our collection). Let’s meet bachelor number one…
“So, what’s your name and where do you come from?”
My full title is Musica neu Beroriaeth (BM Additional MS. 14905), but my friends call me the Robert ap Huw Manuscript. I’m a collection of harp music, from Anglesey… sort of. I’m actually a direct descendant of the William Penllyn Manuscript, which was lost a long time ago – luckily, I bear a striking resemblance! So much so that around 20 of my pages were copied directly from it by Robert ap Huw.
[That’s enough Blind Date contestant personification!]
It could be argued (as I did, to the delegates at the conference) that this potential suitor underpins the foundations of Wales as a musical nation. Certainly it’s the oldest written Welsh music of any kind that we have, and is the oldest notated harp music in Europe. It shows us the types of music – resembling what we know as cerdd dant today – performed in Wales, and by Welsh musicians, during the 17th Century. Some of the music included in the manuscript is likely significantly older, perhaps as old as 700 years, but all we can truly know is that the tunes seem to have been alive and well in 1613 when they were written down.
The approaching twilight of the hitherto strictly aural bardic tradition, after some booming years of court music under Tudor reign, appears to have concerned William Penllyn (a Welsh harper of the 16th century) sufficiently to break this listen-and-learn method of transmission, and to try to notate the music to ensure its preservation for centuries to come. Unfortunately, for musicologists of even the most imminent future, it looked like this:
Ethan Davies's role at Tŷ Cerdd includes working with composers and music-creators, and their written music – sometimes those composers are involved in development projects, others may be working outside these schemes, and sometimes he works solely from unpublished or out-of-print scores to continue the legacy of their music. Many of these works are published by Tŷ Cerdd, and are available on our online shop tycerddshop.com which he administers:
Other responsibilities include the curation and maintenance of Tŷ Cerdd’s Welsh Music Collection (musical scores, books, recorded music, and other miscellanea), our archival work across Wales, and administration of the hire library. He also assists with studio and location recordings, as well as video production.
Outside work, he regularly sings and performs with the BBC National Chorus of Wales, as well as writing his own music, working on arrangements and transcriptions, and performing on various instruments.
...it’s the oldest written Welsh music of any kind that we have, and is the oldest notated harp music in Europe.
Pages from the Robert ap Huw Manuscript
As far as we know this is a unique tablature, which presumably would have been legible at the time to William Penllyn, Robert ap Huw (who copied the Penllyn manuscript into a small part of this larger collection of his), and whoever remained of their bardic contemporaries, but not to many since!
Thanks to centuries of research – much of it refuting the interpretations of previous generations – we can glean, from the manuscript, information of musical structures, melodies, tunings and more. The titles and other notes, written in an old style of Welsh, suggest the various contexts in which this music was performed: paired with poetry, it would praise those who’d paid the money for its composition; other tunes would have been an accompaniment to singers; and some instrumental pieces would have stood alone, such as one piece of ceremonial music for the salt-cellar being placed on King Arthur’s round table… at least, according to ap Huw! And the techniques described within even paint a picture of the length of harpists’ fingernails (substantial).
It continues to be interpreted today and so much has been written on the subject, that this brief post can barely scratch the surface.
You can listen to how some of the music might have sounded here, on a bray harp, played by Bill Taylor with a buzz characteristic of the instruments of the time. Today, the Welsh tradition which most closely resemble the music in this manuscript are probably the cerdd dant, which is still performed all over Wales, most notably in our many Eisteddfodau. And Robert Evans and Mary-Anne Roberts, as Bragod, regularly perform versions of the music from this manuscript, as seen in this picture from NAWR Festival in Swansea in 2025, with Mary-Anne visualising the binary measures found in the manuscript.
IAML represents and promotes the interests of music librarians, libraries, music–related archives and music information providers.
Robert Evans and Mary-Anne Roberts of Bragod, performing at Gŵyl NAWR 2025
The original MS has been held in the British Library since 1844 but you can view an online version here.
Our bound edition of the Robert ap Huw manuscript lives in Cardiff Bay, on a shelf next to the IAML 2026 ‘speed-dating’ award which it won – a Dalek, now christened ‘Robot ap Who’.
The Cardiff-themed IAML prize – a Dalek – next to the Robert ap Huw manuscript on the shelves of Tŷ Cerdd's Welsh Music Collection
Further Reading