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Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xix + 441 pp. £60. ISBN 978 0 7546 5263 2.

Music in medieval and early modern Wales has long remained a closed book for all but a small band of dedicated specialists. Musicologists without a good knowledge of the Welsh language have been unable to gain access to many of the secondary as well as primary sources, whilst the paucity of original materials in conventional notation, inevitable in a culture where oral tradition has persisted far longer than in many other modern European countries, has proved a further stumbling block. As Sally Harper notes in her introduction (p. 1), the prejudiced assumption that much of the material is ‘obscure and mediocre by comparison with other musical repertories’ has also been a hindrance. Moreover, much of the published work in this field has been rather scattered, appearing either in the form of journal articles or in volumes of essays on particular themes where musicologists might not think to look. Sally Harper’s own recent article on the interface between Welsh and English musical traditions is a case in point. This volume thus fills a major gap by providing an accessible English-medium guide to the often disparate sources from which a clearer view of musical traditions in Wales can be pieced together. And disparate those sources certainly are. Information has had to be gleaned from administrative, legal and ecclesiastical records, from chronicles, from contemporary literary sources, manuscripts of later antiquarians, correspondence and so on. The volume is divided into three main sections – the first two focusing on secular and liturgical music respectively, and the third discussing the evolution of music in Wales in the aftermath of the 1536 Act of Union, whose imposition of English language and laws had such far-reaching implications for Welsh culture in the widest sense. Each section is prefaced by a map locating the main places referred to in the chapters that follow. The first section, on secular musical traditions in the earlier period, may well prove to be both the most enlightening and the most difficult for non-Welsh readers, as the history of Welsh music cannot be divorced from that of poetry and the bardic order. The first chapters give an overview of the social, musical and literary circumstances, as well as a discussion of instruments and performers, before outlining the available sources for the history and theory of cerdd dant (music played on harp or crwth). These preliminaries provide the setting for a detailed account of the content and tablature of perhaps the single most important, and most enigmatic, source, the famous manuscript of Robert ap Huw. Over the years both practitioners