Are there reels and jigs and such that are specifically Welsh? Or is it just Methodist hymns? I know this is slightly off topic but my wife was asking the other day, and at least its Celtic 
Immediately I thought of āTatter Jack Welshā. (N.B. Thatās a joke.)
I donāt know anything obviously Welsh, but hereās a link you might find interesting:
you might want to check out this group: http://www.ffynnon.com. they have audio samples on the site.
cheers,
Sara
yes there are welsh dance tunes. but what do you mean by Celtic? What makes music Celtic? The instruments played? The rhythym? The origins of the Welsh people? Particular technique used that is unique to Celtic music? How do you know it is Celtic anyway? Donāt you need to know something about the music to label it?
Celtic music like celtic people I guess. Even though the people arenāt particularly ācelticā but yeah. Itās an easy way to say āirish/scottish/welsh/breton/galician, etcā. I donāt see anything wrong with 'em- different musics are pretty different, but thereās a continuity thatās fun to play with.
My apologies. I donāt really have a problem with someone using the term Celtic. Some people do. generalizing is necessary for most things in life. I personally prefer to be more specific to avoid confusion and I think that Celtic is really too vague a term to use a lot.
It gets really annoying when somebody asks what kind of music I play. I respond āIrishā. Then they say, āCeltic?ā Sometimes itās hard to bite your tongue when you just gave them a very specific answer and they respond with an amoebic generality like that.
Yeah, that irritates me too (thoā I also see why they do it and I see that the termās useful sometimes- still annoying tho, ha). But Iām sure weāve all referred to āasianā or āmiddle-easternā, etc., music before, to be fair.
well, now that everyone else is already off topicā¦
yes, Celtic is a generalization, but sometimes a necessary one. it is somewhat inconvenient to refer to all the separate people/places. plus there are groups thatās itās hard to classify as specifically Irish/Scottish/anything else in particular but have that characteristic (yes, general) sound.
plus thereās this whole problem of the fact that the people we refer to as āCelticā today are actually mislabelled and have no connection to the historic group known as the Celts (which appeared in central Europe somewhere around 800-600BC). we have the 18th century romantics and nationalists to thank for that misnomer
cheers,
Sara
Really? I mean, yeah, theyāre not like the ancient Celts, but IIRC the Gauls, Celtiberians, Britons, and Scotti were all āCeltsā. Thereās some similar ancestry way back when. So I think itās reasonable enough to call them that. Itās like calling German/Scandinavian, etc. things āTeutonicā. Kinda wierd, not 100% accurate, but close enough.
itās reasonable to call them that because history has attached that label and we lack a better name for them. but for a long time scholars tried to justify a connection between the ancient Celts and the modern ones, and that just isnāt there for the most part. I actually did a whole research paper and whatnot on this. but Iāll do my best to sum it up in a paragraph or soā¦
Welsh scholar and nationalist Edward Lhuyd published his book Archaeologia Britannica in 1707, which attached the label Celtic to the group of similar languages in western Europe. He said they originated in the dead language of the ancient Gauls in France. He suggested the prehistoric migration of people from the continent to Britain and Ireland as how these languages came to exist on the islands, though he did not call those people the Celts. In a very short time Lhuydās ideas came to manifest themselves as a new nationalist, romantic identity for the peoples concerned. The term Lhuyd gave to the language group was used in reverse to justify the theory that the people shared a common heritage in an ancient race that had migrated out of central Europe.
The old, long-held theory was that the Celts originated in central Europe and migrated outwards. Recent studies suggest that the āCelticā languages are not leftovers from an invasion or westward expansion, but rather the common tongues of an Atlantic community connected by the sea. The old theory is not tied to more modern archaeological or genetic evidence, both of which have disproven it. The people we call āCelticā were indeed connected; they were connected to one another by means of the sea. Theirs was an Atlantic culture that developed on what we would call the fringes of Europe. So the places are indeed related historically, just not to the group of people that emerged in central Europe and were first called the Keltoi by the Greeks. The cultural ideas of those people may have made their way to the western and northern coasts of Europe, but for the most part the people themselves remained central.
I have a whole paper and bibliography if anyone wants more details. Iām hoping to get it published in an undergrad research journal in the spring. but anywaysā¦ thatās my 2 cents
cheers,
Sara
Hm. What about the Gauls? Iāve studied a tiny-tiny bit of their language (or the little we have of it) and I remember it had some likeness or relation to Welsh and Gaelic (not a huge similarity on the surface- honestly it was more like Latin- but itās like comparing English to Old High German, except much much more time in between).
I have a whole paper and bibliography if anyone wants more details.
Hey, Iād love to see that if itās okay with you 
Didnāt MacNeal(sp? of MacNeal and Lehrer [sp?]) do a documentary on this very thing a good few years back for PBS? It was a multi episode history of the English language, and its geographical/cultural origins I believe.
Ennistymon based harper Paul Dooley has a CD out of Welsh music fro mold manuscripts. Beautiful harper, you donāt know what O Carolanās about until youāve heard Paul play it on the wirestrung harp.
Anyhow, for the Welsh music look here.
sure, itās still in the process of revision and whatnot, but pm me with your email address and Iād be glad to send it to you.
cheers,
Sara
Hereās a Welsh music site.
Yes, there are lots of Welsh tunes. Many of the hymns were set to traditional tunes and there has been a recent tendency to play the tunes without the words, or to set traditional verses to them. There are a good few dozen here in ABC notation here:-
http://jodeejames.home.att.net/welshabc.htm
There are lots of hornpipes and plenty of jigs. Cadw Twmpath and Blodauār Grug are collections of dance music that are in print and easily available.
Welsh culture tends to be very structures (eisteddfod, choirs, etc.) and there is quite a high level of musical literacy in Wales, and a strong tradition of classical European music, so people are more likely to learn to play from sheet music than orally. The harping tradition is unbroken, via Nansi Richards, but the pedal harp is the most popular harp in Wales. The triple harp never quite died out and is undergoing a revival. Llio Rhydderch is a superb triple harpist, Robin Huw Bowen isnāt such a virtuoso but his settings are more standard, and he has a nice style. He also learned the settings and techniques of the Welsh Gypsy harp tradition from Eldra Jarman, the last of the Welsh Romany harpists.
The Rough Guide to Wales CD has a good selection of material.
There are many varieties of traditional singing in Wales, some religious, some not. There is a particularly strict way of singing to the harp, called penillion singing or cerdd dant, where traditional verses are sung as a counterpoint to traditional tunes. Itās a developed art form now, and the rules are very formularised, and itās usually sung by choirs in competitions. I like it a lot, but it can be a bit wearing after a while to hear competing choirs singing different counterpoints of the same poem to the same melody.
There are quite a few groups playing traditional songs and music in a variety of settings, and thereās a strong Breton influence on many of these. My favourites are Fernhill and Carreg Lafar. Ceri Rhys Matthews of Fernhill is a great musician, and he is part of the . The CD Pibau features bagpipe and reed pipe duets, and he has just released a solo album, Pibddawns (āHornpipeā) played on bagpipes with a pibgorn chanter.
Thereās a nice BBC Wales site here:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/traditional/
Itās Celtic because itās played by people who speak, or spoke, a Celtic language. I donāt mind the term too much, but āmusic of the British Islesā might be more accurate as a term. The traditional music of England has more in common with ITM (common tunes, common songs) than Breton music does.
[quote="flutey1
I have a whole paper and bibliography if anyone wants more details. Iām hoping to get it published in an undergrad research journal in the spring. but anywaysā¦ thatās my 2 cents
[/quote]
I would love to read your paper. So are the Welsh celts? What is the proper name for the āatlantic peoplesā. I thought I might get in trouble for my remark about Methodist hymns but I never dreamed the term celt was so problematic. The things one learns when they take up the tin whistle
So, did the ancient peoples like the Helvetti, the Belgae etc. speak a language that was intelligible by the ancient Irish?
I have the paper in pdf format, so pm me with your email address and Iād be happy to send it to you. input would be very welcome.
the problem is that there isnāt really another name for the āatlantic peopleā other than Celtic, because that was the name given to them. Bob Quinn calls them the Atlanteans, which I guess works as well as anything else. it hasnāt quite caught on yet though I think the Welsh would fall under the Atlantean category also. it basically covers the people that speak (or spoke) a āCelticā language. granted, people traveled and no doubt a few actual Celts made it to Britain and Ireland, that is just not at all a dominant feature of the genetics of the mislabelled people to whom the name now applies.
hmm, Iām not sure, but I would guess no and I donāt recall that being mentioned in the references I used.
cheers,
Sara
The Gauls, Gaels, Britons et al. spoke languages that have been grouped into a subcategory of Indo-European labeled āCeltic.ā Only the Insular Celtic branch of Irish, Scottish, and Manx Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish survived into modern times. There were Celtic languages spoken on the Iberian peninsula that may have survived up until about the Dark Ages. Gaels from 2,000 years ago would likely have found Gauls about as easy to understand as Spanish people trying to understand Romanians.
So yes, going by the modern sense of what is defined as āCelticā, the Welsh are Celtsā¦Whatever that means. Welsh is a Celtic language that isnāt intelligible at all to Irish or Scottish Gaelic speakers but a fair bit closer to Cornish (which is extinct though currently attempting to be revived by a handful of people in Cornwall) and Breton.
The thing about Welsh instrumental music is that there are scads of manuscripts full of dance tunes (especially pipe tunes), but not an awful lot of people who had been playing them until recently. Iām not sure how many of these tunes could be classified as ājigsā, āreelsā, āhornpipesā, etc. English-speaking parts of Wales in particular would have likely had those tunes. Groups like Fernhill and Ceri Rhys Matthewsā duet album with Jonathan Shorland have taken a consciously Breton-influenced approach to Welsh tunes. One other thing of note is that unlike in Ireland and Scotland, the Welsh harp playing tradition never entirely died out. A lot of modern harp players from Ireland & Scotland have been keen to research Welsh harp playing, not so much for repertoire (although that does factor in a bit) but more for playing techniques that may once have also existed in related forms in Irish & Scottish harp playing.
Any Welsh people out there with more information? Come on, I know there are a couple of you out there!
Iād also be interested in reading that research paperā¦Ah, the good old days of Napoleon and his Academie Celtique!