The Welsh male voice choir: where it came from and what it sings
Welsh male voice choirs
WHAT THIS IS
Where it came from and what it sings
IN THIS PROGRAMME
SOURCES
Public record only. The biographical facts are sourced; see About.
A Welsh male voice choir is an amateur choir of men singing in four parts, first tenor, second tenor, baritone and bass, and the form as Wales knows it was made in the second half of the nineteenth century by four forces acting together: the Nonconformist chapel, the Sunday school, the coal and slate communities, and the competitive eisteddfod.
Almost every choir an outsider could name carries the name of an industrial village, and the reason is simple. The choirs were formed where several hundred men worked the same shift, walked home the same road and attended the same chapel on Sunday.
Where the form came from
The chapel supplied the room, the habit and the notation. Congregational singing was central to Nonconformist worship, and the Sunday school taught it to children as a matter of course, so a boy in a mining village learned to hold a part before he learned a trade. From the 1840s tonic sol-fa, promoted in Britain by John Curwen, made vocal notation teachable in evening classes without staff notation and without an instrument, and Welsh chapels adopted it faster than almost anywhere else. A man who could read sol-fa could learn a new part song from a printed sheet costing pennies.
The temperance movement supplied a second motive. A choir gave men somewhere to be on a weekday evening that was not the public house, and chapel and temperance organisations funded and encouraged them for exactly that reason. The eisteddfod supplied the third: a competition, at village, county and national level, with an adjudication delivered aloud in front of everybody. A choir that competes rehearses one work for months, and that is what produced ensembles of a hundred men who could hold intonation unaccompanied.
The industry supplied the rest. Treorchy Male Choir dates from 1883, in the Rhondda; Rhos, at Rhosllannerchrugog near Wrexham, sits in what was a coal and brick district in the north east; Pendyrus was formed in 1924 at Tylorstown; Morriston Orpheus was formed in 1935 outside Swansea. The London Welsh Male Voice Choir, founded in 1902, is the exception that proves the rule: it was formed by men who had left Wales for work and wanted the thing they had left.
What a male voice choir actually sings
The repertoire is narrower than a mixed choral society's and much more varied than outsiders expect. It divides into six kinds, and a typical concert draws on four or five of them.
| Kind | Examples | Why it is in the folder |
|---|---|---|
| Welsh hymn tunes | Cwm Rhondda, Calon Lan, Aberystwyth, Gwahoddiad | The chapel core; sung in Welsh, usually from memory, and the material the choirs were formed to sing |
| English hymns and sacred pieces | Abide with Me, settings of the psalms, arrangements of oratorio choruses | Carried over from the mixed chapel repertoire and used for remembrance and civic occasions |
| Opera choruses in arrangement | The chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco, the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore, the Pilgrims' Chorus from Tannhauser | Written for a full mixed chorus, then arranged for men; they suit massed male tone and give a concert its loud item |
| Welsh folk song and part song | Myfanwy by Joseph Parry, Ar Hyd y Nos, Sospan Fach | The unaccompanied test of blend and quiet singing; Myfanwy is the single most performed item of all |
| Show and popular arrangements | Numbers from stage musicals, film themes, spirituals in arrangement | What sells a concert to a general audience and what visiting audiences most often ask for |
| Twentieth-century commissions | Works by William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott and Karl Jenkins, and eisteddfod test pieces | Written for TTBB voices, often for a competition or an anniversary, and the reason the form has any new repertoire at all |
The national anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, sits outside those categories because it is not concert repertoire. It is sung standing, usually to close, and the audience is expected to join in.
How a choir is constituted
The four parts are first tenor, second tenor, baritone and bass, usually written on two staves and abbreviated TTBB. First tenor takes the melody in most arrangements and the highest line in the rest, and is the part every choir is short of, because the natural adult male voice is far more commonly a baritone than a tenor. Second tenor sits below and carries most of the harmonic work. Baritone is the largest section in most choirs. Bass supplies the foundation and, in the hymn tunes, the countermelody that gives Welsh four-part singing its particular weight at the bottom.
A choir is run by a musical director, who is often a professional musician and is the only person paid, and an accompanist, almost always a pianist, whose role is much larger than accompanying: the accompanist teaches parts in rehearsal by playing each line separately. Officers, a chairman, a secretary and a librarian, are drawn from the membership. Rehearsals are typically once or twice a week, all year. A choir of 60 to 100 men is normal; a few are larger.
The present tense, stated honestly
Membership is falling and the average age is rising. The reason is not mysterious. The choirs were fed by industries that employed thousands of men in one place, and those industries closed: deep mining in south Wales ended with Tower Colliery in 2008, and the slate quarries of the north had contracted long before. The chapel that supplied the room and the training has also emptied. A choir that once drew from one village now draws from a whole valley, and several have merged or have opened to singers from outside the area entirely.
Some things have gone the other way. Recording, broadcast and touring have widened the audience well beyond Wales, and a Welsh choir singing at the Royal Albert Hall or at a rugby international is still what many people outside the country think Welsh music is. Choirs have added youth sections and, in a few cases, admitted women to separate ensembles under the same organisation. The competitive structure that built the form is still in place, at the National Eisteddfod and at Llangollen.
What is worth saying plainly is that the male voice choir was never a folk survival. It was a modern institution, invented in an industrial society by people with wages, printed music and a train service, and it lasted as long as the society that made it. That it survives at all, two generations after the pits closed, is the interesting fact about it.
Also in this programme
- Welsh classical musicThe composers, the choirs and the institutions
- 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
- Concert venues in Cardiff: the hallsThe concert halls of south Wales