Cae Mabon: Part the Second. In which many people sing many songs and some people go walking the rain.

I realized a few days after I wrote the first Wales post that I neglected to mention WHY I was going to all this trouble to get to Wales in the first place: there was a singing workshop run by Patty and Larry of Village Harmony, a singing group that Sarah (roommate Sarah) introduced me to.  They are awesome, and sing lots of traditional kinds of music from various countries, including South Africa, Corsica, Bulgaria, and the U.S. (shape note, Appalachian folk song, 30's gospel), to name a few.  I'm on the mailing list, and got an announcement back in the fall about how there was going to be a workshop in Wales at this place called Cae Mabon involving hobbit houses and learning how to sing all these different styles of music (and even some dancing).  I jumped up and down a bit, and then emailed my friends about it, and Gwen and Maggie and I all wound up being able to go.  So I've been looking forward to this since about October.

Anyway, back to Wales...
(apologies to those of you who also get Gwen's emails--some of this will be a repeat of what she said)

First of all, the scenery.  Wales was so very Wales-ish.  What I mean by that is that I always imagined Wales to be very damp and mossy and green and mountainous, and it was all of that.  Maggie tells me that this isn't true of all of Wales, but Northern Wales at least is delightfully full of mossy damp green forests on misty mountains dotted with ruined castles and gray lakes.

And then there was the food, which was AMAZING.  Among the most to-die-for meals I have ever had, which is saying something given that I've spent the past nine months in Italy.  And it was all vegetarian.  Now, I'm not vegetarian, but I will happily eat vegetarian food, and I definitely can appreciate people who can make really good vegetarian food.  Since we were in the UK, there was lots of tea--also in part because there was a issue with the water filter, and boiled (and thus hot) water is not very interesting unless you put something in it.

And then there were the hobbit houses, which you've seen pictures of, and I think they speak for themselves, so I won't go on in detail about them.  Also the composting "loo with a view" and it's rainwater collection system for handwashing, the woodstove heated hot tub, and the dragon-shaped nook/bench/fireplace, which I somehow neglected to take a picture of.


Last, but certainly not least (on the contrary!): the people and the music.  When you get 20-odd singers with a penchant for folk music together for a weekend, they just don't stop singing.  You can't make them.  Aside from the workshop sessions themselves, we sang while clearing up after meals, while standing in line for lunch, while in the loo or in line for it, while sitting in the hot tub, etc, etc.  The polite struggles over who would do the dishes were, in this case, about more than just people being thoughtful and polite: some of the best singing went on over dish washing, and if you managed to score so much as a dry dish towel to work with, you had an excuse to get in on it.  Some of it was music we'd learned in the workshops (it is not often that absent-minded humming is likely to provoke four-part harmony from the people wandering by), but we also taught each other other songs as well, songs people had picked up from other workshops, festivals, relatives, friends, and choirs.  Various members of the group had sung with each other in different configurations before, so there was just enough overlap to be able to teach not just the melody but the parts to many of the songs.  Looking back later, I realized that a lot of the styles of music we were learning in the workshop have been passed on orally for a long, long time (one of the them is so unsuited to western-style written notation that people have come up with two or three different alternative notations in an attempt to write it down--and it's still easier to learn by ear)--and that was exactly what we were doing informally on the side.

Which is not to say that we spent every waking minute singing.  We also talked, and it was a really lovely group of people to get to know.  I wished it could have gone on all week, instead of just a weekend--at least in part because I was coming back to final exams, but also because it was just that much fun.  In the workshop sessions, I loved learning not just the notes, words, and dances to the songs, but also the feel of each kind of singing.  The style of it.  The way your body should feel, the way the music should sound.  The soul of it.  Clearly, we couldn't actually get the exact sound of, say, a South African choir or a trio from the Balkans, but we did learn to change the way we, as a group, sounded--and got some pretty darn good approximations.  Or at the very least a noticeable difference in sound that was going in the right direction.

On Saturday afternoon during the long break, Maggie, Gwen and I and two of the other singers went for a hike up and down and along the mountains around the lake to an old Welsh watch tower.  The day was gray and damp and mossy again, and we wound up seeing lots of wild goats and climbing the old stone watchtower in the rain to look out through the window at the top over the misty, damp Welsh valley below, while Maggie explained to us about watchtowers and strategic defense and Welsh history.  And then we hiked back to sing some more cool songs.  And Sunday morning it was even gloriously sunny, and we moved lunch outside (a process that involved a great deal of confusion and people wandering around with stray furniture.  We'd already moved the tables outside to make room for singing  inside, and there was some confusion as to whether we needed to move the tables back in or the chairs out or some of both, and did we need another bench and where should I put this chair, hurry-up-it's-heavy?).  And there were fudge brownies for dessert.

Oh--and on the way home, I got to spend 24 hours in Dublin with Gwen and her mathematical aunt.

Couldn't have asked for a better weekend.