ABSTRACT
Wales occupies a mountainous peninsula along the central west coast of Great Britain. Its nearly three million people live in an area of 20,768 square kilometers. Musically, Wales is most famous for its traditional harp playing and choral singing and its annual competitive music festivals, The Royal National Eisteddfod and the International Music Eisteddfod. Foreign influences on Welsh folk song were mostly English, and to a lesser extent Irish. Nineteenth-century American minstrel shows gave rise to Welsh songs on tunes such as "Oh Susanna" and "Just Before the Battle, Mother," and these have entered the Welsh repertoire. The first scientific analysis of Welsh tonal structures, based on a sample of four hundred tunes, found that about two-thirds of Welsh tunes are in diatonic five-, six-, and seven-tone patterns. In the late 1100s, an ecclesiastic, Giraldus Cambrensis, noted that the Welsh had three kinds of musical instruments: harp, crowd, and pipes.
