Well, the quote above refers, if memory serves, to the large number of blind harpers - and I imagine this applies to other instruments as well. I don't think it relates to the question of fragmentation.

I don't think I actually responded to that point above, unless you mean 'fragmented' in the sense of broken tradition, in which case I did. The harp had its downturns but it has had an unbroken line of players. The Roberts clan (Cambrian Minstrels - Welsh gypsy harpers) territory would have stretched down to Merthyr and there's quite a lot known about them. Seems to me that someone recently told me that one of the 'lineage' was still playing the harp (but my memory is swiss-cheesy at times so I wouldn't swear to it).

If you mean fragmented in terms of regionalized, I'll agree with you, although I don't know how much of that can be proven for instrumental - particularly harp, fiddle or crwth - music. The available manuscripts are often of 'jobbing musicians'; regardless of where they were based, they travelled for a living and their repertoire was made up of both old and 'new fangled' tunes which their audiences wanted to hear, sing or dance to. So they aren't 'regional', even the older ones. Whether an instrumentalist like Cass Meurig, Robin Huw Bowen or 'other' would be able to shed more light, I don't know.

There certainly are very interesting regional variations in song, which is part of the work I am currently doing in Pembrokeshire and down in the South East (of Wales). Most of the published collections of songs in the last 25 years have made a point of giving historical background which helps us understand the music from a geographic point of view.

I obviously live in West Wales and I've never had any problem with St Fagans although I do agree that being where it is makes individual research for most of us a problem. (An international and cross-sectoral problem of locating all the resources in the capital city which is usually inaccessible to most citizens.) The project we are doing in Pembrokeshire came about to give us a mechanism for taking the local songs which are on the museum tapes and re-introducing them into the communities from which they came. "Releasing into the wild". The curators and being very supportive.

siân