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context and hear 17 tracks played on the crwth by Doctor Bevil go
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Master of The Crwth - Digon o Grwth

The Man

Dr. J. Marshall (Jack) Bevil is a native of Houston, where he also currently lives. He is both a
string music educator and a musicologist (B.Mus. with honors, Oklahoma Baptist University,
1970; M.Mus. - Musicology, University of North Texas, 1973; Ph.D. - Musicology, University of
North Texas, 1984) with specialization in the history of bowed string instruments, oral-aural
musical transmission, British and British-American folk music, and British popular and
academic music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His doctoral dissertation on
the centonate, or oral-aural transmittive, process in Southern Appalachian folksong has been
published by University Microfilms, International (UMI No. 8423854, "Dissertation Services"),
and he has published post-doctoral studies in professional journals and presented papers in his
areas of specialization, including computer-assisted musical analysis, at regional, national, and
international academic convocations in both the United States and Great Britain. He also is the
author of encyclopedia articles on John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Percy Aldridge
Grainger; and he has published on the Internet. In addition to his pedagogic and academic
pursuits, he is a performer on the crwth, a composer and arranger for string and vocal ensembles
(publications on www.sibeliusmusic.com from December of 2004), and a forensic musicological
consultant and expert witness in copyright and intellectual property misappropriation disputes.

The Music

(To hear the tracks click on THIS LINK )

The Interview

1.What prompted you to make the decision to study Celtic music, and why did you specialize in
the Crwth?

"I have been aware of my predominately Celtic roots almost ever since I can remember. As a
small child, I used to listen to my great-aunt, who was born in 1871, sing some of the old ballads.
She and my maternal grandparents, with whom I spent many idyllic childhood summer days, had
a lot of the old-country expressions in their speech, even though they were born and raised in the
American Midwest. My grandfather Marshall, while not a practicing musician himself, was a
lover of fiddle music and owned several shellac-disc recordings of the Irish fiddler Patrick
Gaffney in performance. I still remember playing “Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!” over and over,
on my grandparents' “wind-up” 1915 Victrola that I now own along with the collection of
records, most of which have survived several moves.

My investigation of the crwth started in 1965-1966, during my senior year in high school (S.P.
Waltrip, Houston), when my studies in English focused on British literature. I volunteered to find
out what Dylan Thomas was speaking of in “Under Milk Wood” with his reference to the crwth
and also to parchs (ministers). Already being a violinist, I was fascinated with what I learned
about the crwth, gathered more than enough information to mightily tax the patience of the
classmates to whom I subsequently discoursed, but personally was left with far more questions
than answers. Even from that quick, cursory investigation, I became aware of the many
conflicting views about the crwth’s origin, its development, its function, and its place within the
large and diverse chordophone, or string, family. Demands of college kept all the questions
largely on the back burner for the next four years, except in the case of a research project that I
did in my senior year, in connection with which the crwth came up again as a tangential issue.
Unable to get it out of my mind and, frankly, being more than a little irritated over being unable
to answer a lot of nagging questions to my own satisfaction, I took up the matter in earnest the
following year in graduate school at the University of North Texas (1970-’71), as a semester
project in my first musicological research seminar. The result was what even then I felt to be a
less than satisfactory, seventy-page study that presented the often diametrically opposed views of
earlier investigators such as John Hawkins, Anthony Baines, Kathleen Schlesinger, Hortense
Panum, Karl Geiringer, Arnold Dolmetsch, and others. While my professor commended me
heartily, I was still far from satisfied, so I deliberately spent an extra year and summer on my
master’s degree in order to bring closure to something that had been bedeviling me for years. My
research took me far beyond the University of North Texas Music Library and other American
repositories to the British Museum, the National Library of Wales, Durham Cathedral Library,
the library of Trinity College in Dublin, the Welsh Folk Museum in Sain Ffagan, numerous sites
where important icons exist such as Worcester Cathedral and St. Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury,
and the homes of a number of live informants across the water. The final product was a thesis
that, even with substantial cuts, reached dissertation proportions before wrap-up and nearly drove
me mad but, at the same time, was a pleasure to prepare. For a number of years after its
presentation in 1973, I maintained a running, annually updated volume of addenda that took into
account studies that came out after the completion of my thesis, until doctoral study and both
teaching and research fellowships forced me, after more than a decade, to lay the matter aside. I
still perform from time to time on the crwth, and I still occasionally run across something new in
the way of valuable information, such as iconographic evidence. I have no illusions (or
delusions) of having answered all questions once and for all, so it’s something to which I plan to
return after retirement from teaching, probably sometime within the next couple of years."

2. How widespread was knowledge of the crwth when you began your studies? How difficult
was it to obtain information/source materials?
"There was a fairly large amount of superficial knowledge, along with a huge volume of often
contradictory theory about both the crwth’s origin and its place in the string family, particularly
with regard to its relationship to the violin and its kin. Source materials were rather plentiful, but
many of them were both brief and dated, even in 1966. Further, most of them treated the crwth as
a side issue, relegating it to the category of curious anachronisms among string instruments. It
wasn’t until I located the Meredydd Morris monograph, in the Welsh Folk Museum, that I found
a whole book-length document on the subject; and even it, while of enormous value in terms of
the place of the crwth in Welsh folk culture, was of limited usefulness in terms of technical
matters. My reconstructions of both the genealogy of the crwth and the playing techniques were
dependent on an understanding of the entire string family in general and fiddles and fiddling in
particular.

As one who was still something of a novice investigator, I had to learn quickly how to pull the
necessary strings to obtain access to materials that were in closed-stack holdings, which most of
the British repositories were. Fortunately, my major professor had anticipated that and prepared
for me a letter of introduction that helped greatly everywhere except the British Museum, where
one stickler of a bureaucrat informed me that they did not accept recommendations from
American professors, and that I needed to get a recommendation from, perhaps, Thurston Dart at
King’s College, London. When I told him that such was quite impossible in light of Professor
Dart’s rather recent demise (eliciting a giggle from a pretty girl behind the desk who did not care
for the bureaucrat and later told me that she was so glad that he’d been caught in an error), I was
told to go to the American Embassy. I later learned that such shenanigans were not official
museum policy, but merely reflective of one small individual’s prejudice. At any rate, armed with
my letter from the American Embassy, I ultimately gained entrance to not only the reading room
but also the special manuscripts room of the British Museum, where ink pens are verboten and
even turning a page with a pencil in one’s hand is a cardinal sin.

The Welsh Folk Museum was wonderfully accommodating, not only furnishing sources that I
requested but also assigning two staff members to assist me during the several days that I was
working there. Assistance with translating the archaic colloquial Welsh in a number of
documents was of enormous help, and my assistants even tracked down some material that I had
previously known nothing about, including the Morris monograph. In addition, I was allowed to
examine, photograph, and measure each of the original instruments and reproductions in the
museum’s holdings.

I would have hit an unyielding, insurmountable wall at the National Library of Wales in
Aberystwyth had it not been for the assistance of a librarian who aided me with documents
written not only in the characteristic backhand script of the fifteenth century but also in late
medieval Welsh."

3. Can you tell us a little about the history of the instrument?

"We should remember, first of all, that crwth, which literally means protuberance or a swelling
out, and probably refers to the rather hunch-backed appearance of both the most recent
instrument and most of its forebears, denoted several different small, hand-held lyres that were
used in western Britain at least as far back as the early eleventh century. The modern crwth,
meaning the most recent instrument so designated, was one of the last of the bowed yoke lyres.
That large and diverse species seems to have emerged around A.D. 900, when the bow crossed
over both the Bosporus and the Straits of Gibraltar, entered Europe in a sort of pincers
movement, and was applied to pre-existing European lyres that previously were plucked. It’s
important to keep in mind that bowed instruments did not emerge along a single line, and that, in
particular, the viol and violin did NOT emerge from the crwth and similar lyres when the yoke of
the lyre was removed and the sides were incurved to facilitate bowing. Independent fingerboard
lyres (that is, those with fingerboards but no yokes), including those with sides incurved for
acoustic reasons, were developed as plucked instruments in the Middle East, perhaps as far back
as around 3000 BC. One school of thought treats them as an entirely separate family from the
lyres, calling them collectively the lute family. They, too, crossed over into Europe during the
first millennium of the Common Era and later had the bow applied to them. It is from those that
the viol and violin emerged. Unlike the viol and violin and their larger relatives such as the viol
da gamba, violoncello, lyra da braccio, and double-bass viol, whose designs became
standardized, the bowed lyres existed in many different forms in various regions of Europe and
were used as instruments of the minstrels until the end of minstrelsy shortly after the close of the
Middle Ages. After that, they were absorbed into the various local folk cultures, where a few of
them survived in practice until fairly recent times. The Scandinavian talharpa, for example, could
still be found in use as late as the early twentieth century, although it appears to have emerged
prior to the advent of the modern crwth.

The modern crwth seems to have sprung from at least one and perhaps multiple closely related
immediate prototypes within the Welsh folk culture, probably around 1500. It thrived there as a
fiddle used at country dances and in some cases by ballad singers (the “newspapers” of the time
and place) until around 1730. It seems to have been played most often as a solo instrument but
on occasion in ensemble with the harp (telyn) and hornpipe (pibgorn). The crwth and pibgorn,
along with dancing, were victims of the rise of the evangelical Protestantism, specifically
Calvinistic Methodism, that swept Wales, much like the Great Awakening in America, in the
1730s and ‘40s. Large numbers of those instruments, along with decks of playing cards and other
so-called implements of the Devil, were destroyed in what can be described most accurately as a
mad orgy of religious fervor. The harp, due to its academic associations, suffered much less. The
crwth and pibgorn survived, albeit in much smaller and diminishing numbers, in some remote
locations for about a century beyond that time. According to oral tradition, the last of the old
crythorion, one James Green of Bron y Garth, died in 1855.

With the establishment of musicology as a recognized discipline, initially under the leadership of
German scholars, in the early twentieth century, came an interest beyond the dilettante level in
old music and old instruments, including the crwth. Unfortunately, many of the early
investigators were less than careful in their treatment of instruments outside the academic
mainstream, and it was at that time that many erroneous notions regarding the crwth arose,
including the view, representing misapplication of Darwinian biological theory, that the violin
emerged when the yoke arms were removed from the crwth and the sides were incurved. Also
prominent were romanticized, utterly unsupportable notions such as that of the crwth’s having
been played at Stonehenge and elsewhere by the Druids. Still another error was that of
superimposing academic performance technique, primarily that of the viol, onto the playing of
the crwth. Much of the research since then, including mine, has been devoted to debunking
earlier views and approaching the crwth and other folk music phenomena from within the native
cultures as much as possible, not from some far-removed point in the academic mainstream."

4. How would you describe its sound?

"In brief, the sound is something of a cross between a fiddle and a bagpipe, especially when the
tuning in paired fifths is employed. A tuning in paired seconds is still mistakenly regarded as
standard. Initially it was reported by only one writer, Edward Jones, in his Musical and Poetical
Relicks [sic] of the Welsh Bards, and then subsequent writers picked up on that and passed it
along unquestioningly. The tuning in paired seconds is practical for playing chords, but very
impractical for the playing of melodies. The tuning in fifths, with a dominant between the two
roots or keynotes, has numerous precedents and parallels in the history of European string
instruments, and turns the crwth from a dull, droning instrument into a reasonably nimble
melodic executant with the ability to support its own melodies harmonically – in essence, a self-
contained string ensemble. The tuning that I use is based on William Bingley’s report in A Tour
Round North Wales. While Bingley almost certainly was in error in reporting the height to which
the highest string was tuned, I suspect that he was more generally correct in reporting a tuning in
paired fifths (for example G-g-D-d for the strings over the fingerboard). That is very similar to
George Emerson’s report of the Scottish fiddle tuning G-D-g-d (Rantin’ Pipe and Tremblin’
String), a tuning that also used to be common among the old-time fiddlers here in America,
especially in Appalachia, where chordal playing made possible by nearly flat bridges was once
very common. Tuning in paired fifths, incidentally, differs from standard violin tuning in that the
latter is in consecutive fifths (G-D-a-e) to facilitate mainly melodic playing. "

5. Were you a violin or other stringed instrument player prior to discovering the crwth?

"Yes, I was a violinist. I still am, and one of my favorite activities is directing a group of
youngsters in a string orchestra program. I’ve played my crwth with their chamber ensemble, or
top group, on occasion, using my arrangements of traditional dance tunes, and we’ve all had a
great time with that."

6. Was it difficult to move from the violin to the crwth? How different is playing the crwth, and
how is it different?

"Yes and no, with regard to difficulty. At the time I was reconstructing crwth performance
methodology, I had been away from the violin for over a year, so the shock was minimal. The
biggest adjustment was learning to apply a lot more pressure to the crwth bow. A bow drawn
across the strings at an oblique angle, rather than at a right angle as on the violin, will “ice skate”
out of control, and also produce a thin sound, if it’s not pressed firmly. Pressing it firmly, of
course, produces a tone that’s totally taboo on the violin – namely, a lot of upper partials and
plain, old squeaks. That sound, however, was prized among crythorion. There’s an old Welsh
adage that states in translation, “Let him who plays his crwth sweetly be hanged!” I have found
going from crwth back to violin more of a challenge than going from violin to crwth. It’s easier
to go after an instrument somewhat aggressively, as one must do with the crwth, than to approach
it with the care, restraint, and meticulous finesse that one must use in playing the violin. I suspect
the adjustment would be not quite so marked, at least in terms of right-hand technique, if I were a
double-bass player."

7. How widespread is the crwth today? Are you aware of other crwth players, groups or crwth
makers?

"I would say that it is more widespread now than it was when I began my research. More
importantly, it is now more often viewed and played as the non-academic, folk instrument than it
was, as opposed to the prevailing pre-1970s methods that were based on academic technique.
Certainly the crwth, along with the bagpipe, penny whistle, and other traditional Celtic
instruments, has benefitted from the enormous, almost exponential, explosion of serious,
disciplined scholarly interest in, as well as the increased general popularity of, traditional Celtic
music over the last thirty years or so. I have seen crwths advertised in a number of catalogs,
including that of Lark in the Morning. I know that there are a number of makers both in the U.S.
and the U.K. Anyone interested in obtaining one should have no trouble locating a maker on the
Internet. Since I have my own, I have made no inquiries myself. Anybody interested in making
an historically correct crwth of his or her own might find handy the appendix of my thesis, which
includes detailed descriptions and diagrams of known originals and copies."

8. If someone were interested in learning to play it, where would you suggest they start?

"That question makes me think that I need to write a tutorial on the subject. At the risk of
sounding dreadfully conceited, which I’m really not, I’d suggest my thesis. I can provide copies,
at production and mailing cost, to those who are interested. It does not include a tutorial on
playing the crwth, but it goes into more detail than any earlier document that I know of in
describing what appears to have been playing methodology. A summary of that can be found in
my online abstract of “Some Observations Regarding Crwth Performance,” the URL of which is
http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth03.html
I also would be happy to answer questions in e-mail, as in fact I’ve done on occasion over the
years (llywarch@earthlink.net saves the trouble of writing via Americymru). If there appears to
be enough interest, I can eventually post some information online, but of course that cannot be
done overnight. Having said all that, I should stress that the crwth has not been the focus of my
musicological activity for over twenty years. During that time there may have been written one
or more tutorials that are based on reliable investigations and that avoid advocating academic
technique such as one would use with the viol or violin.

As far as previous knowledge and skills are concerned, a background in playing strings is
helpful, especially an understanding of how whole steps involve spaces between the fingers
while half-steps do not, if one is a violinist or violist. If one is using the diagonal cross-torso hold
that I prefer (holding it up like a violin makes working the drones very difficult), a background
as a cellist could be useful, except that the distances between the points of contact on the strings
are smaller. Probably the biggest problem regarding left-hand technique is that of extending the
thumb sideways and plucking the drones. That gives the entire hand sort of a claw-like character
that is totally alien to orchestral string playing. The thumb rests against the side of the
instrument’s neck on the violin and viola, and it rests on the back of the neck of the cello or
double-bass.

Anyone seeking tutelage from any crwth player needs to find someone who is knowledgeable of
the crwth’s history in performance, and particularly someone who does not treat it like an
academic instrument. In other words, run for your life from anyone who teaches the crwth as
merely the less agile cousin of the violin or viol!"

9. Were you able to find compositions or music for this instrument? What kind of music was
used for?

"The crwth was a folk instrument, and as such was not supported by a written musical tradition.
Both the method of playing it and the music for it were traditionally passed down from father to
son, and I gather that there was more than a modicum of guarded secrecy. Sorry, ladies, but the
traditional belief was that it was such bad luck for a girl or woman to play the crwth that her so
doing would literally wake the dead and send bodies from the churchyard wandering around the
town. Morris relates an account of that view in his monograph. I personally do not share that
view, by the way!

Most of the music played on the crwth was that used for traditional Welsh dances such as ring
dances, floral dances, and reels. I included some very late examples of those in the companion
recording to my thesis and subsequent updates, and many of them are now at this site, with
apologies for the great age of the original recordings on tape that is now rather badly printed
through and eroded. Some older tunes can be found in collections published by Playford and
others, but care should be taken since it was not unusual in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (or, for that matter, even the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century) to “correct”
what academic compilers viewed as errors in the folk tunes."
10. You've composed music for the crwth - is there a particular type or style of composition you
think it best suited to?

"I prefer either re-created or adapted to composed in most cases. Everything at this site, for
example, is music that was initially fashioned by some talented but anonymous folk artist who
probably did not read or write a note of music. There is musicality in each of us, just as surely as
there is a penchant for verbalizing. As far as actual composition is concerned, I’ve had in my
head for years – decades, in fact - a multi-movement piece called “Twmpath Dawns” (“Dance on
the Village Green”) for crwth and orchestra, but I’ve only committed a tiny portion of it to
writing. That’s one of so many things on my to-do list for post-retirement. Its style is not at all
original, but rather based on that of the dance and ballad tunes that I located in my research,
although I’ve not actually copied any of the melodies."

11. How important is the crwth in the Celtic musical tradition?

"I would regard the crwth as very important, although I have come to consider the oral-aural
tradition supporting both the playing of it and the music for it, along with music for other folk
instruments and vocal music, as even more important, not only because oral-aural tradition is the
foundation on which so much else in folk culture is built, but also because what exists only in
memories is so volatile and easily lost. Instruments are concrete phenomena and hence more
durable entities. That is part of why my doctoral dissertation was on the oral-aural processes in
melodic transmission, preservation, and change rather than on an instrument."

12. Do you believe that the crwth can make a comeback? Does it have a place in the mainstream
musical tradition?

"I think it already has made a comeback as part of the larger emergence of both popular interest
and scholarly inquiry in Celtic music. As to whether or not it will attract a huge following, I
suspect not. We must remember that, of all the music education programs in our schools, strings
in general tend to be the smallest group in terms of participants. For example, in American public
schools, band members outnumber orchestra members ten-to-one, although, interestingly, studies
have shown that string players are more likely than wind or percussion players to keep playing
their instruments after finishing their formal educations. In my son’s high school, there were four
huge bands and one orchestra of modest size. Given the limited number, although usually the
deep dedication, of string players, I suspect that the crwth attracts and will continue to attract a
relatively small but intensely devoted group of adherents.

Technically the crwth is in general far less facile then modern orchestral string instruments, and
it’s not supported by either the huge written musical tradition or anything even remotely
approaching the instructional regimen that exists for them. It is best suited to the music for which
it was created, which is but one enjoyable but narrowly circumscribed segment of the entire
Western instrumental music repertory. Hence I suspect that, while someday the crwth may enjoy
an even greater status than it now occupies as an historical instrument useful in, for example,
certain movie soundtracks or period and/or regional compositions, it will never stand as an equal
partner with the violin. This is certainly not to speak disparagingly of the crwth in any way. After
all, within the continuum of its particular repertory it can provide its own accompaniment and in
so doing perform a feat at which the violin is far more limited except in the hands of a few of the
greatest virtuosi.

There always is the possibility, of course, that a composer will come along who specializes in
writing for instruments outside the usual academic milieu. There, in fact, was such a composer in
the last century. His name was Harry Partch. He even invented some special instruments, in some
cases by adapting earlier designs, and I seem to recall that he wrote for some antique instruments
such as the panpipes. To the best of my knowledge, he wrote nothing for the crwth."

13. Other than on this site where can people obtain samples of your work?

"There is my personal website, which includes the main crwth page that’s linked on my
Americymru page. For direct access to my online bibliography of publications and presentations,
go to

http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/pubpr.html.htm

It includes listings for my studies in other areas as well as those on the crwth.

My other “crwth pages” are as follows:

http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth02.html (performance advertisement)

http://home.earthlink.net/~llywarch/cth04.html (thesis bibliography with additional references)

A copy of my thesis is available via university interlibrary loan from the Music Library of the
University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, 76203. Also, as I’ve previously stated, I make and
mail copies for the cost of production and mailing. I plan to put the whole thing, with revisions
reflecting what appeared in my running supplement of addenda, online eventually."

14. Do you give live performances or demonstrations with the instrument?

"Yes, I do, although not all that often. I’ve performed with a harpist at the Mucky Duck Pub in
Houston, a location where entertainment often includes live Celtic music, and I’ve performed at
wedding receptions and various fundraisers for the arts in the Houston area since the late 1970s.
At one point I was with Young Audiences of Houston. Also, I was once on “Inside Area-5,” a
feature news program in the Dallas area, not too long after completing my thesis. For more
detail, see my performance advertisement listed above."