Sing it loud: The 60-member Australian Welsh Male Choir performs in Shepparton and Toolamba as part of the Shepparton Festival.
Some music has the power to stop you in your tracks, breathe and exhale, before carrying on with life.
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I’m sure everyone has a piece that can do this.
For me it’s Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the early protest songs of Bob Dylan and a Welsh male voice choir.
I know each has an association with a time or place deep in my past, but I can’t quite explain their effect other than to say I feel it in the gut. It’s a sort of squeeze in the solar plexus, the knot of nerves and ganglia found in the pit of the stomach just in front of the aorta — the main artery carrying blood from the heart.
That’s the closest I can get to describing what happens when any of this music appears on the television, comes on the radio, or drifts randomly through the air in a public space.
For me, the most peculiar and sometimes just plain embarrassing of the three is the Welsh male voice choir.
I have never been a blazer and tie sort of fellow. I have never played rugby or worked down a coal pit.
Nonetheless, as some of you may know, I was born in Llanelli, South Wales and my earliest memories are of steel grey skies, mountains of coal slag, streets of terraced houses and singing; lots of singing. People, mostly men, sang in the Methodist churches, in memorial halls, at the rugby, in the streets and in the pubs. My dad always sang when he came home from the pub.
That was more than 60 years ago — and I can assure you the Welsh are still singing.
I returned to the Land of Song for the first time in 20 years in 2018 to visit my nephew and his Welsh-speaking family in North Wales. In the evening we went to a pub in Bethesda where the locals spoke Welsh. At one point, from a table and corner lounge came a low murmur, which grew into a full-blown rendition of Cwm Rhondda also known as Bread of Heaven – the unofficial Welsh anthem, with its spine-tingling rising chorus. It could have been a special performance for the new English people in town, or it could have been the beer, but I don’t think so. This was just another Friday night in the pub for a few blokes who like to exercise the chords and the harmonies to see if they’ve still got it.
Proud history: The red dragon has been a symbol of Wales for more than 1000 years.
They still had it.
Wales has always had an otherness, which has kept it separate to the rest of the sometimes united kingdom.
It was never completely Romanised because of its mountainous landscape, and only one town was built — Caerwent in the south east. For a few hundred years after the Romans left, the Welsh fought each other and the Angles and Saxons and Vikings using the red dragon as a banner. Eventually the English Plantagenet King Edward I marched his army into Wales and in 1282 he said “right you lot — this is mine now, so you can all bugger off”.
Unfortunately there was nowhere to bugger off to, because America, Canada and Australia weren’t yet colonised. So the Welsh remained to become essentially the first indigenous nation to become colonised by the English. Edward I, generous soul that he was, gave Wales to his son Edward II who became the first English Prince of Wales in the hope that the Welsh would just shut up and knuckle down to English rule.
Fortunately, they didn’t and they kept on singing and rebelling and speaking their guttural, sing-song language. When coal mining arrived in the 19th century the Welsh, including their children, went underground to bring up the black stuff for their English landlords. They were among the first to get organised and form trade unions, go on strike and demand better pay and conditions. This didn’t stop Winston Churchill as Home Secretary sending in the British army to quell a riot and force workers back to the mines in Tonypandy in 1910.
All this deep history and struggle gives rise to something called hiraeth among Welsh people. Hiraeth has no direct translation in English, but essentially it is a feeling of longing and nostalgia for something that is missing — usually homeland and culture.
Which brings us back to the Welsh male voice choir.
We have the chance to experience something of this deep well of history and emotion when the 60-member Australian Welsh Male Choir visits Shepparton to sing later this month as part of the Shepparton Festival.
The Melbourne-based choir performs at Toolamba’s Junction Hotel on the evening of Saturday, March 18, followed by an afternoon performance the following day at Shepparton Art Museum.
I can guarantee that Welsh or not, you will experience your own hiraeth in the solar plexus when those voices lift the roof.
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