The Red Dragon Author:Charles Wilkins Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WELSH LANGUAGE, MUSIC, AND FOLK-LORE- The following article contains the substance of a lecture delivered in Welsh by the Oxford Professor of Celtic at on... more »e of the Southern Eisteddfodau. We have obtained the author's leave for the publication of our translation, which was effected in the first instance by the well-known Welsh litterateur " Brythonfryn," and afterwards subjected to revision at the hands of one of the first Welsh scholars of the day. Professor Ehys began by saying that when speaking of music, two kinds at least are implied, viz., vocal and instrumental. Of these two, he continued, as I remarked at an Eisteddfod some years ago, probably instrumental music is by far the most ancient. As to the other, there is room to infer that a kind of uttering or speaking, resembling a recitative, was the first attempt at singing, in the musical sense of the term ; and there are found in some of the Indo-European languages words which favour that view. We need not, indeed, go farther than the Welsh itself to find ambiguous words for singing and reciting, such as canu and dadganu. For instance, canu (singing) means composing in the poetical sense, as well as vocalising in the musical sense, or otherwise, playing on musical instruments. This causes a great difficulty to any one who may wish to know for certain what place poetry and music occupied respectively among the Welsh in past ages. And notwithstanding the use made by musicians of the compound, dad-ganu (recitation), they have not yet succeeded in limiting it to its musical meaning, as it is not commonly implied when talking of a man engaged in dad-ganu ei deimladau that he sings in the major or minor with the voice, or that he pours forth his soul on the strings of the harp. By what western nation vocal music was f...« less