«Welsh ballads as the reflection of common people's life» «Валлийские баллады как отражение народной жизни»

Конкурс исследовательских работ по иностранному языку

«Поликультурный мир»

ТЕМА ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬСКОЙ РАБОТЫ:

«Welsh ballads as the reflection of common people's life»

«Валлийские баллады как отражение народной жизни»

Introduction

Wales has a strong and distinctive link with music. Singing is a significant part of Welsh national identity, and the country is traditionally referred to as “the land of song”. It has a history of music that has been used as a primary form of communication.[1]

Studying Welsh music, we paid our attention to the ballad, which was a very popular form of song with its tales of manual labour, agriculture and the everyday life. McGraw-Hill Companies claim on their website that the ballad is the richest seam in Welsh folk song. They are marked by a characteristic "Welshness." This indefinable quality is at once sentimental and tough, humorous and stolid, and fiercely independent and indomitably proud of its homeland and heritage. [2]

Academic editor of the Welsh Ballads project, Dr Wyn James of Cardiff University’s school of Welsh, commented: “Ballads were the ‘daily newspapers’ for the poor throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and were sold cheaply and widely at markets, fairs, and villages.  They communicated news on local matters and overseas events of the day”.

So, it would be interesting to know how Welsh ballads reflected social life of common people and other events happening in the world.

The aim of this research is to correlate social events and the contents of the ballads sung in Wales.

So, our objectives are:

• to observe Welsh ethnic features;
• to study the peculiarities of folk music in Wales in general and the ballad as a popular form of song in particular;
• to analyze some Welsh ballads and establish the dependence on the social events;
• to draw conclusions about the degree of reflection of events in Welsh people's life in the contents of Welsh ballads.

In order to do our research we read some books, studied the Internet resources on Welsh history and music and analyzed Welsh ballads.

1. Welsh ethnic features. National Identity.

The different ethnic groups and tribes that settled in ancient Wales gradually merged, politically and culturally, to defend their territory from first, the Romans, and later the Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders. The sense of national identity was formed over centuries as the people of Wales struggled against being absorbed into neighboring cultures. The heritage of a common Celtic origin was a key factor in shaping Welsh identity and uniting the warring kingdoms. Cut off from other Celtic cultures to the north in Britain and in Ireland, the Welsh tribes united against their non-Celtic enemies. The development and continued use of the Welsh language also played important roles in maintaining and strengthening the national identity. The tradition of handing down poetry and stories orally and the importance of music in daily life were essential to the culture's survival. [3]

Patriotism, or a non-politicized form of nationalism, remained a strong force in Wales, with pride in its language, customs and history common amongst all levels of society. Throughout the period of conquest, the Welsh poets and musicians kept alive the dream of independence, which was glorified in folk songs.

Wales has a distinctive culture including its own language, customs, holidays and music. Throughout the whole history of Wales, its people struggled for their independence, their rights and their freedom and folk songs played an important part in the struggle and everyday life.

2. Early song

Wales has a history of using music as a primary form of communication.[1] As early as 1187, medieval chronicler Geraldus Cambrensis stated that the Welsh sang in as many parts as there were people, and even that quite small children could harmonize.[2]

The history of folk music related to the Celtic music. It has distinctive instrumentation and song types, and is often heard at a twmpath (folk dance session), gŵyl werin (folk festival) or noson lawen (a traditional party similar to the Gaelic "Céilidh").

The oldest known traditional songs from Wales are those connected to seasonal customs such as the Mari Lwyd or Hunting the Wren, in which both ceremonies contain processional songs where repetition is a musical feature.[1] Other such ceremonial or feasting traditions connected with song are the New Year's Day Calennig and the welcoming of Spring Candlemas in which the traditional wassail was followed by dancing and feast songs. Children would sing 'pancake songs' on Shrove Tuesday and summer carols were connected to the festival of Calan Mai.[1]

For many years, Welsh folk music had been suppressed, due to the effects of the Act of Union, which promoted the English language, and the rise of the Methodist church in the 18th and 19th century. The church frowned on traditional music and dance, though folk tunes were sometimes used in hymns. Since at least the 12th century, Welsh bards and musicians have participated in musical and poetic contests called eisteddfodau.

3. The Ballad in Wales

From the mid eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century, the ballad began to play a prominent part in Welsh life. The word "baled" in Welsh — a borrowing from Middle English — appears to have entered the language in the fifteenth century. ‘A chaned faled i ferch’ (‘Let a ballad be sung to a lass’), proclaims the late medieval Welsh poet, Lewys Glyn Cothi (c. 1420-89) in the first instance of the word recorded in the national dictionary of the Welsh language, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru. Poems of a ballad-like nature have survived in Welsh, mainly in manuscript, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many more have undoubtedly been lost. However, on reaching the eighteenth century, one witnesses a flowering in Welsh ballad production.

"Songs have been a natural medium for expressing strong emotions and political protest for centuries, and here in Wales there is a long tradition of ballads with a strong social and political theme," Dafydd Iwan said, a singer-composer and political activist. "The lyrics of the street ballad need to be simpler and more direct in expression than other forms of poetry". [5]

 Balladeers such as Elis Roberts (Elis Cowper), Huw Jones of Llangwm and Dafydd Jones of Trefriw, were the mainstays of the traditional ballad and sang ballads of their own work. The ballads were published in the form of pamphlets, usually eight pages long, including two or three poems, and they were usually printed by presses on the English-Welsh border. They were then sold by balladeers and singers in the fairs and markets. Typically, such sheets contained only the words to the song, with no musical notation. Sometimes, the name of the intended melody was given, and the buyer was assumed to know the tune already. Vendors were frequently also singers who could demonstrate the proper melody to a buyer. Finally, purchasers of broadsides were also free to compose their own tunes, or to fit the song to any existing melody. In this way, the same ballad text often entered the oral tradition with many different tunes attached. The most common singing style was a cappella, perhaps because ordinary people had limited access to musical instruments.[6]

The ballad seller would necessarily be a singer. In societies with limited literacy, the printed song needed to be performed in order to show its potential. In more literate societies, there was still a strong preference for hearing a song before it was purchased, because this unlocked its musical potential. The buyer could then either imitate the ballad singer's tune, find one from within his or her own experience that was more or less closely related, or else invent a new tune, albeit one that would need to conform to prevailing musical tastes.[7] The first hawkers of ballads were surely the authors themselves. They sang in the market place, in the fairground, or wherever a group of people would assemble. Balladeers of a lower standing would have a ballad or two of their own, but relied mostly on singing and selling ballads written by other balladeers.

Balladeers would mostly satisfy the tastes of the common man for exciting news. They socially appealed and the song texts concentrated on all the circumstances of life - the good and the bad, the decent and indecent, the sad and funny, important and the innocent. In this regard, they functioned in a similar fashion to that of the tabloid press of today.

This was also the period of the powerful religious reform, the wars against America and France, and the large fluctuations in agriculture and industry. Although religious and moral poems, that encouraged men to be better beings was the main body of the works of this period, the selling of ballads depended on providing plenty of excitement to the public, and they did this with poems about murders, unusual incidents and wonders, and the occasional obscene song.

The Welsh ballad tradition had well established itself by the mid-nineteenth century. The fairs were still at their peak, even after the advent of the railway, and the stations became a convenient meeting place for people to socialize with each other; there, the singers and balladeers had an audience. This was also the golden age of the Welsh language press, which saw printing offices set up in each town, the north and south alike. Shortly after, Caernarfon, Trefriw, Llanrwst, Carmarthen, Aberdare and Ystalyfera became important centers for the printing of Welsh ballads, and ballads poured from the presses in their thousands between 1820 and 1880. It was during this period that the four-page ballad became popular, but some of them were also printed in the broadside format.

 John Jones, the printer from Llanrwst, considered that the ballad was more profitable than any other publication, and used to print two thousand copies of each ballad at a time. He then sold them to booksellers or balladeers for a shilling per hundred ballads; they in turn, travelled around fairgrounds and sold them for a penny each.

So, the ballads offered folk-song evidence on what Welsh bardic culture was like, and they also exemplify the remarkable growth of literacy in Wales during the same period, and how that was fed by the printing presses of Wales and the Borders. In an age, which was devoid of the mass media we are so familiar with today, the ballad was one of the main mediums for disseminating news about dramatic events and inform public opinion. Over the centuries, the ballad has played an important and influential role in Welsh social and cultural life. Broadside ballad production was in its heyday in Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [8]

WELSH BALLADS: NATIONAL IDENTITY

One of the most remarkable features of Welsh life down the ages has been the regular renewal of Welsh national consciousness from generation to generation, despite close proximity to England and the strong forces for Anglicisation that have been at work over many centuries.

The awareness of common identity can be seen in ballads devoted to one of the most popular sporting activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century - foot-racing. Two of the surviving ballads were written subsequent to the race at Bath in December 1846. The final race at Slough in July 1847 is the subject of the third ballad. They reflect the spirit of these popular mass events.

Another ballad was written in 1858 not in praise of a runner, but of a prize boxer, Dan Thomas (1823-1910) of Pontypridd, who shot to fame in 1858 when he beat prominent English and American boxers. Again it is interesting to note the national fervour that permeates the two extant ballads to this boxer, including the following verse:

On the whole, the ballads display a clear awareness of the national aspect of the events, with the runners regularly being referred to as the ‘Welshman’ and the ‘Englishman’.

WELSH BALLADS: INDUSTRIALIZATION

From the late eighteenth century onward, the valleys of south-east Wales experienced rapid industrialization, as first iron works and then coal mining developed in the area on a large scale.

The working conditions in most of the coal mines were far from safe and reliable. This caused many human victims. Common people tried to attract the authorities' attention to this problem by composing and performing so called ‘pit disaster’ ballads.

It occurred in the month of September

At three in the morning the pit

Was racked by a violent explosion

In the Dennis where gas lay so thick.

Now the gas in the Dennis deep section

Was packed there like snow in a drift,

And many a man had to leave the coal-face

Before he had worked out his shift.

Now a fortnight before the explosion,

To the shotfirer Tomlinson cried,

"If you fire that shot we'll be all blown to hell!"

And no one can say that he lied.

Some ballads described the living conditions of the miners and their families The ballad ‘Song of Praise to the Subscribers of Relief for South Wales By a Collier who has a Wife and seven Children’ is a six-verse poem which has survived from those times. Some people organised a distress fund and soup kitchens to aid the starving families of the area. The poem tells of and the way the soup kitchens had saved them from starvation, and sings the praises of those willing to come to their aid. No author’s name is given.

The great role of ballads in supporting the moral spirit of miners is proved by words of the novelist Jack Jones (1884-1970), in his autobiography, Unfinished Journey (1937), where he tells how he, as a young striking miner in Merthyr in 1898, whose only earnings were what he received for ‘a day a week stone-breaking for the council’, went with his mother and brother to neighbouring valleys on ‘begging expeditions’, taking with them "supplies of ‘ballads’, as the song-sheets pleading for justice for the miners were called."[9]

WELSH BALLADS: SLAVERY

By the 1730s the British had become the world’s leading slave-traders, ‘and would occupy that position until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Poems on the subject of slavery were published fairly regularly in Welsh throughout the period from about 1790 to 1890.

Ballads played an important role in promoting opposition to slavery and the slave trade in Welsh-speaking communities, both in Wales itself and in North America.

The ballad of Samuel Roberts (1800–85) – or ‘S. R.’ as he is always known – ‘Cân y Negro Bach’ (‘The Song of the Little Negro’) was to become perhaps the most popular and influential of all Welsh anti-slavery poems during the campaign in the 1850s and 1860s to abolish slavery.

These ballads reflecting the emphasis on slavery as a religious and moral issue, rather than a political and economic one.

WELSH BALLADS: COMMON LIFE ISSUES

The subject matter of the ballads encompassed all the circumstances and experiences of life. The vast majority were concerned with religious topics, often urging their listeners or readers to adopt a higher morality or to decry swearing, blaspheming, drunkenness, and miserliness towards the poor. All aspects of love and marriage are exhaustively covered.

A ballad, which caught our imagination, was the very beautiful Yr Eneth gadd ei gwrthod (The rejected maiden) - a 19th Century ballad from the Cynwyd area near Bala, which tells the story of a young girl who, finding herself pregnant out of wedlock is thrown out of her family home by her father, ostracised by her community and left destitute. It ends with the girl drowning herself. She is found with a water-sodden note in her hand, asking to be buried without a headstone, so her existence would be forgotten.

CONCLUSION:

Only we have observed a tiny part of the Welsh ballad heritage. Nevertheless, all these ballads - heroic, amatory, historic, and nationalistic - reflect the ‘journalistic’ role of the ballad and are marked by a characteristic "Welshness." They really represent social life of common people and other events happening in the world.

Over the centuries, the ballad has played an important and influential role in Welsh social and cultural life. Broadside ballad production was in its heyday in Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although not usually poetry of the highest order, this popular verse is an invaluable field of study for anyone interested in the language, literature, history, religion and music of modern Wales. These poems are also an indispensable source for the study of the daily life and world-view of the common people of Wales in the modern period.

Today, musical tradition in Wales is thriving as younger musicians turn to ballads for inspiration but continue to develop it further with rich musical collaborations around the world.

Bibliography:

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Wales#cite_note-Davies579-1

2. http://spotlightonmusic.macmillanmh.com/m/teachers/articles/folk-and-traditional-styles/welsh-folk-music

3. :     http://www.everyculture.com/To-Z/Wales.html#ixzz4UuRbfju5

5. (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-24557218).  

6. (https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-and-essays/musical-styles/traditional-and-ethnic/traditional-ballads/) (https://books.google.ru/books?id=7YzeCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=role+of+welsh+ballads&source)

8. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/special-collections/subject-guides/welsh-ballads 

9. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/special-collections/subject-guides/welsh-ballads/lame-chick-and-the-north-star

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/publication/rhys-welsh-ballads