Teyrngedau i Huw Roberts, ar-lein ar BBC Cymru Fyw
Huw and Bethan came to Armagh in August this year. We spent a good few days playing music in the house, and travelling to see harpers’ places. Huw especially wanted to go to Magilligan to see where Dennis Hampson was from, and we had a great lunch in the Angler’s Rest. We also travelled south, to have lunch in Strandfield and then to go to Patrick Byrne’s grave in Carrickmacross.
Huw had so many projects on the go, which he often discussed with me. Some were in progress: he asked me for input into how to set up the trust to own and manage the reproduction Owen Jones / Telynor Seiriol harps, which was a big project that started after his exhibition that I visited last year had finished. And I remember him proudly showing me a video of his four pupils playing a 30 second clip that they had made as a submission to an online compliation. Other projects were more vague or pie-in-the-sky; he was fascinated by my scanning and plans for the Egan traditional wire-strung harp, and he was seriously considering the possibility of doing the same with one of the Welsh triple harps. I suggested that the Cefn Mably harp would be a good example to scan and make technical makers’ drawings of. He was also keen to try and bring me and Sylvia (and our students) across to Anglesey with our big wire-strung Irish harps, to have a joint concert of Irish and Welsh harp music in the Oriel: I think he was very inspired by the story of Abraham Wilkinson coming to Caernarfon and playing a concert with Richard Roberts in 1840. But these ideas never got as far as working out how to fund them.
I found Huw fascinating in that he really had the inherited tradition; he had never learned classical harp but had learned to play the Welsh triple harp in the inherited tradition, with a lineage of teachers back through Llio Rhydderch, and Nansi Richards, and so on back to the 18th century or earlier. He was quite opinionated about the difference between traditional Welsh harp and classical harp; he strongly believed in playing on the left side, left hand in the treble and right in the bass. He also had a strong traditional focus. He was very interested in the history and traditions of the Welsh harpers of his local area on Anglesey, and like me, he was collecting news clippings, portraits and anecdotes of the harpers. His book with his teacher Llio Rhydderch, about the harpers of Llanerch-y-Medd, is a wonderful example of how this kind of research can be done and presented. I was very inspired by the good work he was doing.
My most recent interaction with Huw before he died was mid-October, when I sent him this link to a drawing of a Welsh harper; he replied in his usual enthusiastic way “Waw …. Never seen this one – lovely image!! Many thanks for sending it!”. A couple of days previously I had asked his help trying to work out a phonetical Welsh tune title from a tune list from a concert played by Patrick Byrne in 1848; the news clipping read “The sweet Welch air of [????] Non”. After the usual flurry of emails (he seemed incapable of only writing one message; after a few minutes another one would arrive saying something like “Me again!!- phoned you a few minutes ago!”) we got a better reading, “Lewie Non”, and he phoned straight back to say “Llwyn Onn – The Ash Grove”.
You can read about this concert tune list in Patrick Byrne Part 7. And you can listen to Huw playing the sweet Welsh air of Llwyn Onn, in real old traditional Welsh style, on his restored 1840s Bassett Jones triple harp:
It was an honour and a pleasure to know and work with Huw. Now his students have a big job to do, to carry his legacy forward to the next generation.