Pulling strings in music and business

Welsh harpist Meinir Heulyn will be celebrating the 20th birthday of her music publishing company Alaw at the Wales pavilion in the Lorient Celtic Festival next month.

For Meinir, music is not just something to perform, it's something to live and breathe. For thirty years she was principal harp with the orchestra of Welsh National Opera and since 1997 she has been Head of the Harp Department at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Her solo career and work as one of Wales's foremost teachers is well known. Her work as a publisher and arranger of a wide range of harp music, less so.

She founded Alaw, the publishing company, with her husband Brian Raby 20 years ago. «Without Brian's skills and expertise it would not have been possible,» she says. Together they are the complete makers of music.

For 20 years from her home in Pontypridd her music books have been dispatched to all corners where there is a demand for harp music. Last April she published Chì mi na Mòr-bheanna / Mist Covered Mountains, the first ever bilingual – Gaelic and English – collection of Gaelic tunes for the Clàrsach, the small Celtic harp.

Launched at the Edinburgh Harp Festival, the music, arranged by Welsh-speaking Scottish harpist Gwen Maìri Sinclair, is traditionally Gaelic. It is all in tune with Meinir's philosophy that young harpists should absorb their own music heritage as they learn to play the harp.

This month (July) Alaw had a stand at the World Harp Congress in Amsterdam where they launched the new Catrin Finch Collection - a certain success with Catrin's USA tour coming up next year. Also this year, the new Alaw website was launched.

For the first week of August, Meinir – or rather Alaw – has a music stand in the Wales Pavilion at the Lorient International Celtic Festival, the world's greatest showcase of Celtic talent and culture. «I was first invited to play there four years ago and it inspired me to renew my interest in folk music,» she says. As well as her own publications she will promote books and CDs of Welsh folk music released and published by Sain, Fflach and Kissan. Telynau Teifi harps will also be exhibited at the stand.

Publishing dream

Meinir's publishing dream began in her teens. From personal experience she had spotted a gap in the market and by the time she was thirty she was beginning to fill that gap. She remains independent, combining performing and teaching with publishing.

«My aunt, my mother's sister, who lived next door in Synod Inn, had a harp,» she recalls. «Harps were rare in those days and I would play about with Auntie Ela's harp, picking out tunes by ear, and my mother suggested I should have lessons.»

«When I was ten I began taking lessons from Alwena Roberts - every other Saturday at the Urdd centre in Aberystwyth. She was an amazing peripatetic teacher. She lived in Denbigh and would travel by bus around north Wales down as far as Aberystwyth teaching her pupils at various centres.»

«She taught Osan Ellis, Susan Drake would travel up from Newport, Pembrokeshire, to have lessons with her, Elinor Bennett (Wigley), Mair Jones, the former principal harp of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – she taught many, many harpists during her lifetime.»

Harp lessons were not the beginning of her music training. Like many Welsh children of that generation – she is still only 60 – she took her sol-fa exams at the local chapel in Synod Inn and had piano lessons, initially from the daughter of a local farm who had gone through the examinations system of one of the London Colleges of Music. «I suppose I must have been quite good because I played the organ at her wedding – I was about ten at the time.»

She went on to be taught by the legendary Professor (as he called himself) Ted Morgan, Llandysul. «I learnt very little about harmony when I went to study music at Cardiff University – I'd got it all from Ted Morgan,» she says.

Very early in her career she realised there was very little in the way of music arrangements for harp. «All the airs for Cerdd Dant, for example, were arranged for piano, and the ever increasing number of harpists had to do as best they could.»

Perhaps this was the time, as she struggled to play Haydn Morris's piano arrangements of the traditional Welsh airs and Brinley Richards's Songs of Wales on the harp that she realised there was a need for appropriate arrangements of the old Welsh tunes. Maybe it was then that the germ of an idea took shape that was to become a major part of her life a decade later.

She recalls an amusing incident from her teens. She was about 14 and a pupil at Aberaeron Comprehensive School when the teachers asked her to play the harp at a social evening in the Black Lion hotel in Lampeter. «Proudly, I told Alwena Roberts about the invitation, and she instantly forbid me from going.» “I haven't spent my life dragging the harp to the concert hall stage for you to take it back to the pub”, «she told me. My mother agreed and that's how I missed my first gig!»

There were many invitations to come for the talented girl. And to break with tradition. There was the stir when as an accompanist she played the harp in trousers on the stage of the National Eisteddfod. Women harpists did not do such things in those days. It was a first, and it was some time before anyone else followed suit.

After graduating in music at Cardiff, followed by the year of teacher training, she was on her way to an interview for a teaching post at Ysgol Morgan Llwyd, Wrexham, when she got a message that Victor Salvi – of the famous Italian harp makers - needed an au pair. Off she went to spend a year on the Riviera, outside Genoa.

Paganini Conservatorio

It was a wonderful opportunity to continue with her harp studies at the Paganini Conservatorio and at the end of the year she auditioned successfully for the Bristol-based BBC Training Orchestra. From there she was appointed principal harp of the orchestra of Welsh National Opera.

There she met her husband Brian Raby, the orchestra's principal trombone, and they were married in 1973. «As well as being a musician Brian was a professional copier – in those pre-photocopier days music scores for orchestras were copied by hand. It was something Brian did in his spare time – musicians can have quite a lot of spare time!»

In the 70s Meinir began arranging Welsh airs for harp, the need she had identified as a teenager 10 years earlier. «I wrote down my first arrangements when I was in hospital when Gwen was born.» Gwen, a lovely and talented girl, died tragically 15 years later.

Her early arrangements were published by Adlais, Abergavenny harpist Ann Griffiths's publishing company. Ann Griffiths's husband, the late Dr Lloyd Davies, would spend a month every year as a ship's doctor during which he would “typeset” – or letroset - music for their books. There is no denying Meinir's remarkable ability to produce arrangements for harpists of all ages and standard, but to really appreciate her talent there is no better way than listening to her CD Ar Lan y Môr, released on the Sain label, and admire the panache and energy of her performance of Ar Waun Tredegar.

Full use was made of Brian's copying skills in the early years of Alaw. The music for early editions of Sain y Werin was beautifully and meticulously copied by Brian. Now, Brian computer-sets the music, combining it with his freelance work. He retired from the London Philharmonic Orchestra two years ago.

Their daughter, Sara Mair, a fine linguist, is the business manager of a ski company in Courchevel, France, on the border with Switzerland, and she and her husband Robbie built the new Alaw website. She has also been appointed as an agent for Telynau Teifi in France – an exciting venture for her and Telynau Teifi.

«As a publishing concern, I think we have our fingers pretty firmly on the pulse of what's happening in the music world,» says Meinir. «I am still doing my solo work and teaching, privately and in my position at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and Brian is still playing the trombone with leading orchestras. A number of other professional musicians contribute to our publications – Catrin Finch, Skaíla Kanga who is a Professor at London University an Head of Harp Studies at the Royal Academy of Music, and that doyen of Dutch harpists, Edward Witsenburg.»

Local harpists and musicians from the Pontypridd area also contribute to and arrange music for Alaw– composer Robert Swain; harpist Katherine Thomas who plays for the Welsh National Opera; Valerie Aldrich-Smith, principal harp of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales; and Gillian Green, one of Wales's most successful teachers and co-director of Telynau Morgannwg (Glamorgan Harp Guild).

Telynau Morgannwg, of which she is a co-founder and co-director, is another of Meinir's long-standing projects. Over the years it has helped develop many promising young talents into successful harpists and will be celebrating 25 years next year.

Publishing is a tough business. Alaw's success is in no small measure due to Meinir and Brian identifying a need. Through total involvement and commitment to music, an awareness of trends, and a readiness to develop and adapt they have grabbed a significant corner in a very specialist niche market.

(voir le site) of Alaw