Musical Curiosity: Edward Jones’s Global Contexts for Welsh Song

Edwards, Elizabeth (2025) Musical Curiosity: Edward Jones’s Global Contexts for Welsh Song. The Wordsworth Circle. ISSN 2640-7310 (In Press)

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Abstract

The publication of Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards in 1784 was a landmark in the development of Welsh Romanticism. Jones’s collection brought together 59 Welsh tunes and songs, prefacing them with an introduction – titled “An Historical Account of the Welsh Bards, and their Music and Poetry” – that presents his work as a record of survival against the odds. What remained, Jones argued, was an unrivalled tradition of national poetry and melody: “There is no living nation that can produce works of so remote antiquity, and at the same time of such unimpeached authority as the Welsh”. Jones’s Relicks quickly became a key reference point in contemporary perceptions of Wales. But less well-known is that he also went far beyond Welsh material in his musical career, publishing wider European (Norwegian, Finnish, Maltese, Greek) and even global (Indian, Chinese, Indigenous Australian) song in the little-studied volumes he created after 1794. This article takes the 200th anniversary of his death in 2024 as the impulse for a fuller assessment of his decades-long career in music collecting and publishing. Jones never stopped working with Welsh song, publishing his final collection, Hên Ganiadau Cymru (“Old Songs of Wales”), at the end of his life in 1820. Given that fact, what forms of identity and nation – Welsh and otherwise – emerge in the international purview of the volumes he produced after Relicks?

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions:	Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
Depositing User:	Elizabeth Edwards
Date Deposited:	13 May 2025 15:47
Last Modified:	22 May 2025 10:04
URI:	https://repository.uwtsd.ac.uk/id/eprint/3718

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