Singing

There is a tradition in the north of this county that most of Wales lost.

Plygain

Plygain is a carol service held before dawn, traditionally on Christmas morning, and it works like nothing else in British church music.

There is no choir and no programme. Parties of singers — usually men, usually family groups or neighbours, typically in three or four parts — stand up in turn, walk to the front, and sing an unaccompanied carol. When they sit down another party goes up. No carol may be repeated in the same service. When the carols run out, the service ends.

The carols themselves are long, verse after verse, doctrinally dense, and set to tunes that are frequently older than the words. The singing is hard-edged and unsentimental, in close harmony, with no attempt at prettiness.

Plygain declined across most of Wales in the nineteenth century as chapels formalised their music. It survived continuously in the Tanat and Vyrnwy valleys of Montgomeryshire — Llanfyllin, Llanrhaeadr, Llangynog, Pennant Melangell and their neighbours — and it is still sung there, now spread across January as well as Christmas so that people can attend several.

It is one of the few genuinely unbroken folk traditions in Britain. If you can get to one, do.

The hymns

The Methodist revival made Wales a singing country, and Powys contributed to it directly.

Ann Griffiths, born at Dolwar Fach in the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa near Llanfyllin in 1776, wrote some of the finest religious verse in the Welsh language and died at twenty-nine. She wrote almost none of it down. It survives because her maid, Ruth Evans, had memorised it and recited it to her husband, who wrote it out.

That is worth sitting with. A substantial part of the Welsh hymn canon came through one servant's memory.

Congregational four-part singing became the ordinary Sunday practice in Welsh chapels, and it produced a population that could read music and hold a line without training. The cymanfa ganu, the singing festival, brought congregations together to do it at scale.

The eisteddfod

Competitive meetings of poets and musicians have a documented history in Wales back to the twelfth century, and the modern eisteddfod was reconstructed and elaborated in the eighteenth and nineteenth.

Powys hosts the National Eisteddfod in rotation — Meifod and the Vyrnwy valley have taken it more than once — and local and regional eisteddfodau run throughout the county, in schools, chapels and village halls.

Cerdd dant, singing a counter-melody against a harp playing something else entirely, is a distinctively Welsh discipline that survives largely through eisteddfod competition.

The imported festivals

Two things in Powys came from outside and stayed.

Gregynog, near Tregynon, where Gwendoline and Margaret Davies ran a chamber music festival from 1933 to 1938 with Adrian Boult, Gustav Holst and Vaughan Williams involved. It was revived in 1988 and runs each summer.

Presteigne, where an internationally regarded festival of contemporary classical music has run since 1983, commissioning new work in a town of under three thousand people.

Both work for the same reason: a small town with a large church, good acoustics and enough people who care.

Where to hear it

Plygain services are advertised locally in December and January across north Montgomeryshire, principally in the Tanat and Vyrnwy valleys. They are church or chapel services rather than concerts, they are free, and visitors are welcome.

Take the invitation to sing seriously. Anybody may stand up.