The Choral Tradition in Whitland

 The natural custom of Welsh congregations even into the 1840’s was to sing in unison. By the middle of the century however a large number of singing teachers, instruments and music books had appeared all over Wales and the common people demanded grandiose chapel buildings. Chapel galleries were excellent for separating the various choral voice parts; chapel buildings with their flat ceilings often had superb acoustics and there appeared a widespread enthusiasm for elaborate choral singing. In the religious revival of 1859 much emphasis was placed on congregational singing.   The evangelised congregations sang their hymns with passion and fervour and sometimes gathered together to sing non-stop for three days and three nights.  Eleazar Roberts brought Curwen’s tonic sol-fa into Wales in 1860, and this simple and effective method of teaching people to read music quickly spread like wildfire in Wales more than in any other country. The London Tonic Sol-fa College was seen as a poor man’s university, and the various certificates of the college were displayed with pride, gilt-framed, on the walls of cottages the length and breadth of the land. By the end of the nineteenth century most chapels had organs or harmoniums, some even small orchestras, and so important did the music become that people worshipped in chapel not with their families but with other sopranos or tenors in the places assigned to them in the gallery.

  The Welsh people in the second half of the nineteenth century began to hold innumerable eisteddfod meetings and these encouraged the performing of works secular as well as sacred. The eisteddfod adjudicator and the cymanfa conductor became the demi-gods of Welsh society and by 1870 Wales became the land of the great choirs. The seal was set by the victories of the great  choir of the conductor Caradog of Aberdare (Côr Mawr Caradog) at the Crystal Palace music festivals in 1872 and 1873. The whole period from 1860 to 1914 forms a distinct period of Welsh chapel and eisteddfod music. The aesthetic cultural revival of the 1890’s had its effect on Welsh music with a fresh revival of interest in folk songs, and a Welsh Folk Song Society was founded in 1906

In the 1841 census of the Llanboidy district Whitland was described as a small village, but things changed with the arrival of the railway in 1854 and the junction with the Cardi Bach in 1869. The population in the Llanboidy district grew from 1,789 in 1841 to 2,095 in 1851. Chapel and eisteddfod were the key institutions in the Welsh musical renaissance in the 1860’s. The first musical journal appeared at this time, “Y Cerddor Cymreig”, in 1861. There was only one choir competing in the Aberystwyth eisteddfod in 1865 – but in 1873 there were six. Carmarthen had seven choirs competing in 1867 – but in 1911 there were sixty nine. ‘A few years before’, remarked the musical journal “Y Gerddorfa” in 1873, ‘there were very few choirs in Wales, now they  can be counted in the hundreds’.

 Rapid industrialization brought in its wake a thriving religious and popular literary activity and a musical excellence in choralism. It could have been in the 1870’s that the Whitland Male Singers started after the arrival of the railway in 1854 and the incorporation of the Whitland & Taf Valley Railway in 1869. The sudden growth in the population of the area, with the increase in jobs created by the coming of the railway, would have created the necessary influx of people to create a choir. The foundation of the Tabernacle Chapel in 1873 seems to have led the choir movement with their precentor Tom Davies as the conductor of the various choirs; mixed, ladies and men. Tom Davies was a tailor who lived in Greenfield House, Whitland and there was always a close association between the mixed choir and the male voice party.

Rhydolwyn, Penrherber, Newcastle Emlyn, Carms.  SA38 9RS

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WebMaster: Steve Stephenson

Whitland Choir

1930’s