Welsh classical music

The distance between those two dates explains most of what follows, including why the best known living Welsh composer, Karl Jenkins, born in Penclawdd in 1944 and among the most performed composers alive, made his reputation with works for voices rather than with symphonies.

Anyone approaching the subject meets the choirs first, then discovers that the orchestras, the opera company, the conservatoire and the national concert hall all arrived inside a single lifetime. Welsh composers of the twentieth century wrote for a country that had thousands of trained singers and, for a long while, almost nowhere to put a professional orchestra.

Why the choirs are older than the orchestras

The choral tradition is older because it was cheap, portable and communal, and because it had an institution behind it in every valley. An orchestra needs about 80 to 100 players, instruments that cost money, a hall with a platform and a payroll. A choir needs a room and a precentor. In the industrial districts of south Wales and the slate districts of the north, the room already existed: the chapel.

Three things turned chapel singing into competitive part-singing on a national scale. The first was the Nonconformist revival, which put congregational singing at the centre of worship and made a good tune a shared possession. The second was tonic sol-fa, the notation system promoted by John Curwen from the 1840s, which let a working man learn to read a vocal line in evening classes without ever learning staff notation. The third was competition, formalised by the eisteddfod, which gave a choir a reason to rehearse one piece for months and a public verdict at the end of it.

The nineteenth century: Joseph Parry and the chapel repertoire

Joseph Parry, born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1841 and dead in 1903, is the figure in whom the nineteenth-century engine is most visible. He went into the coal mines at nine and the Cyfarthfa ironworks at twelve, emigrated with his family to Pennsylvania, won eisteddfod prizes for composition, was sent to the Royal Academy of Music by public subscription, and returned to become the first professor of music at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He wrote the hymn tune Aberystwyth, the part-song Myfanwy that every male choir still keeps in the folder, and Blodwen, the first opera in Welsh, staged in 1878.

Ivor Novello belongs to the same world at one remove. Born David Ivor Davies in Cardiff in 1893, the son of the choral conductor Clara Novello Davies, he wrote Keep the Home Fires Burning in 1914, then spent his career in the West End as an actor, a dramatist and a writer of musical plays until his death in 1951. That combination of trades is why he still turns up in crossword grids as the Welsh composer and dramatist, and it is worth separating him from the concert tradition described here: his work belongs to the theatre.

The institutions, and the century that built them

Almost every institution that gives Wales a professional musical life was founded between 1928 and 2009. The table sets out the order in which they arrived and what each one added that had not existed before.

Two of those entries have a conductor's name attached to them in the public record. The Welsh Proms was founded in 1986 by Owain Arwel Hughes, who has been its artistic director since; the same conductor was music director of the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1977 and music director of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from 2003 to 2010. The 2009 hall carries the name of the composer Alun Hoddinott.

The composers a listener will actually meet

Five names carry most of the twentieth-century orchestral and choral output. Grace Williams, born in Barry in 1906 and dead in 1977, studied with Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music and with Egon Wellesz in Vienna, wrote Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes in 1940 and Sea Sketches in 1944, and was the first British woman to score a feature film. Daniel Jones, 1912 to 1993, wrote thirteen symphonies and was a close friend of Dylan Thomas. Alun Hoddinott, 1929 to 2008, born in Bargoed, wrote ten symphonies, concertos and operas and was professor of music at Cardiff. William Mathias, 1934 to 1992, born in Whitland, wrote three symphonies and a body of church and organ music, and his anthem Let the people praise Thee, O God was written for the 1981 royal wedding at St Paul's Cathedral and broadcast worldwide.

Karl Jenkins is the outlier, and the reason the phrase Welsh composer now returns his name before any of the others. He trained as an oboist, worked as a jazz and rock musician with Nucleus and Soft Machine, and then wrote Adiemus in 1995, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace in 2000 and Stabat Mater in 2008. The Benedictus from The Armed Man is sung by amateur choirs across the world. He did not displace the others; he wrote for the forces Wales has always had in quantity, which is where the two traditions finally meet.

The shape of the present

The honest present tense is uneven. The choral base is smaller than it was, because the industries that filled the chapels have gone, and several male choirs now recruit from a much wider area than the village that named them. The professional base, by contrast, is more secure than at any earlier point: a broadcast orchestra with its own hall, an opera company with its own orchestra and chorus, a conservatoire, and a 2,000-seat hall in Cardiff. Wales spent a century acquiring the institutions that its singers had managed for eighty years without.

Also in this programme

• Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau: Land of My FathersThe anthem, its author and its music
• The eisteddfodWhat an eisteddfod is, and how the music competition works
• Famous orchestral conductorsThe conductors most people can name, and why