Music speaks to all nations

Here on the Costa Blanca we’re blessed with many choirs and bands, whether run by Spanish or expat nationalities. My wife Jennifer’s choir Cantabile has shared the stage with Ukrainian singers and dancers, Mexican ballet, Scottish pipers and drummers, Welsh choirs and Spanish guitarists. Few local choirs sing any songs in the language of their national hosts, though Cantabile does – a couple even penned by Jennifer. At one time the choir had a Ukrainian pianist and their common language had to be Spanish! A few weeks ago we enjoyed an a cappella concert of four young Ukrainian singers, offering songs in their own language, Spanish and English.

This afternoon we both attended a concert in the local church provided by the Danish choir Lyngby Kammerkor (Lyngby Chamber Choir from Copenhagen). The Danish choir sang five songs in English (Elgar, Purcell, Stanford, Bennett and Dowland), ten songs in Danish (including Carl Nielsen and Schultz) and three in Swedish. They sang a cappella, apart from the last three, accompanied on piano by Antonio Guillén. The conductor was Frank Sylvan. The choir has also toured to Paris and Berlin.

 

My Danish and Swedish are a bit rusty (!) but I enjoyed the event. Hearing songs in a foreign language is obviously enhanced if you can understand the words, but the clear tone and musicality transcends linguistic barriers; otherwise, the most famous Italian operas wouldn’t have become so famous, I suspect.

The concert concluded with Lars Edlund’s ‘Ant han dansa med mej’ – which was, roughly, about fifteen Finnish men who attempted to court a woman on Gotland, Sweden’s largest island in the Baltic Sea; she didn’t fancy any of these chaps and repelled their advances with axe, scythe and knife, ultimately cutting up all of them into little pieces. The choir particularly enjoyed singing this song! There was an encore to compensate for the blood and gore, all about peace…

‘Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.’ – Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

Welsh Cowboys and Outlaws

We all know it's a small world, and getting smaller with the aid of the Internet. Not so long ago, I was browsing in a shop here in Spain when I picked up and bought one of those UK nostalgia books packed with old photographs: Monkseaton and Hillheads (Whitley Bay). Inside was a photo of the house where I lived for most of my first seventeen years of life!

Another shop nearby stocked a couple of It’s Wales books, short 92-pagers, and I was drawn to this one – Welsh Cowboys and Outlaws by Dafydd Meirion (2003).

While the prose is slightly repetitive – ‘decided’ and ‘many’ are two overused words – the information, gleaned from a number of intriguing references, is interesting and possibly a good source for a plot or two of a western or historical saga of the Old West.

Meirion tells us that perhaps 250,000 Welsh left Wales for America – compared to 4.5 million from Ireland. The largest proportion originally settled in Pennsylvania (17%), while the rest wended their way west as the expansion gained pace. Of the 10,000 whites who died during the treks westwards, apparently only 362 were killed by Indians. Most succumbed to disease or the weather or renegade whites and Mexicans.

He also points out that Hollywood rarely depicts the ethnic split of cowboys, for example: only 63% were white; 25% were black; 12% Mexican.

He touches briefly on a wide range of Welsh characters. Isaac Davis, the Mormon renegade who raided settlements; the James brothers, whose great-grandfather was a Baptist minister from Pembrokeshire and emigrated to Pennsylvania; Sheriff John T Morris, who gunned down Belle Starr’s husband; Frank Jones and John Reynolds Hughes of the Texas Rangers.

Edward Davies from Llanrwst entertained in saloons; as did John G Jones from Bethesda, north Wales. Morris Price left Powys and travelled to Illinois where he started a small ranch which grew into one of the biggest. John Rowlands who was raised in a workhouse in St Asaph near Denbigh emigrated to America and changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley and became a famous journalist and of course tracked down Dr Livingstone in darkest Africa. Then there’s Robert Owen Pugh of Dolgellau who married the granddaughter of Chief Blue Horse of the Oglala Sioux; quite a character, Pugh, and a staunch friend of the Indians in their hours of need. And there are plenty more in these few pages. Also mentioned briefly is Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show visit to Cardiff; the locals didn’t take kindly to local lasses walking arm in arm with Indians!