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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An active music archive
Stories from the Tŷ Cerdd archives – rediscovering the music of Wales, one box at a time...
by Ethan Davies, Publishing and Research Manager, Tŷ Cerdd
Discovering a new favourite thing – be it an author, a sport, an album, or even a pub – is a particular thrill. Is it an innate human desire for novelty? An urge to carve out an identity through shared interests? Whatever it is, musicians and music enthusiasts – especially performers – have a particular compulsion to share those discoveries, to follow through on projects, and to dig deeply into the catalogue of a composer that’s a new find. We enjoy finding paths, through creating, playing, or listening to music, which become uniquely our own, and sometimes those paths which are most neglected and overgrown attract the most curious minds.
When I began working at Tŷ Cerdd, I had little to do with our archive and library, and when I first stepped in to see the collection of Welsh music held in that back room, I was taken aback by the quantity of music that seemed to unfurl in front of my eyes: so many shelves, holding so many boxes, each holding dozens of scores, amounting to thousands of musical compositions! How many of these names, written on sides of file boxes, would I have been able to identify as Welsh composers before walking in? Only – I’m embarrassed to say – a very small proportion. As someone with a lifelong love of ‘dots on paper’, the urge to throw myself into it all was irresistible.
...so many shelves, holding so many boxes, each holding dozens of scores, amounting to thousands of musical compositions!
The names, beyond those giants like Grace Williams, William Mathias, Meirion Williams and a handful of others, initially held little meaning for me (although I later realised that some of the songs and other music were already familiar to me through a process of Eisteddfod-osmosis).
But who, or what, is a Morfydd Owen? Dilys Elwyn-Edwards; she wrote a song for Charlotte Church, right? Didn’t John Hughes live opposite my Mamgu? Ah, not that one. What about this John Hughes? … Not him either. At the time, some of these names were just faded black-and-white images to me; dusty figures who’d written music that had been lost to time. Surely, you might naturally wonder, if it was any good, it would have been more well-known, remembered as part of the fabric of music in Wales and beyond? Only one glance at these works will tell you how wrong this supposition can be. Some music only has a brief lifespan, before it becomes ‘lost’.
That dizzy awareness of being a small speck in a vast universe is what I felt when I first saw our shelves at Tŷ Cerdd: if this is what one small nation has produced, can you imagine how much other unperformed, unseen, and unheard music must be out there in other countries? I felt quietly proud that Wales had apparently done so much to contribute to the ocean of music ‘out there’, but plenty of it is still ‘in here’. Any musician with an interest in music from Wales, who may be searching for that ‘something new’, in exploring the Tŷ Cerdd Archive: – can find something ‘new’ in something old.
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.