The Peripatetic Preacher Goes to Wales

When I was a freshman in High School, back in the dark age of 1960, I was 4 feet 11 inches tall. The very first person I met when I opened the door to my new school was the center on the basketball team who was that year 7 feet tall. I looked him square in the belly button, and nearly turned tail and ran home in horror. Still, I persisted, and even grew about 5 inches while serving my four years there. (I grew another 6 inches in my first year in college, making for much hilarity when I appeared back home in pants many inches too short!)

In my grade school we had a lovely man who taught us music every day—hard to believe now given many schools’ complete lack of musical interest. Mr. Ten Harkle was a huge gift to me, and I am sure to others. Because of his rigorous techniques—ear training, choral sound, and other activities I have long forgotten—I was eager to continue my singing “career” when I went to high school. My voice had just changed from watery soprano to even more watery tenor, and though I auditioned for the mixed chorus, the highest form of musical art at West High School in Phoenix, AZ, I did not make it; my voice was just too puny. So I was placed in the Boy’s Chorus, along with many other puny males who were not yet ready for the big time.

The conductor was a gruff Welshman whose first name was Beryl, and though I have searched my aging brain for his last name, I cannot recapture it. I, of course, never called him Beryl, but only by that forgotten last name, but for the purposes of this essay, Beryl it must be. My first impression of this man came on the first day of the choral practice when he, by himself, lifted one side of the practice piano off the stage to the floor of the practice room, while three of us (not me!) lifted the other side! His arms and chest were enormous, though he was perhaps only 5 1⁄2 feet tall at best. Like a whirlwind, Beryl put us through our paces, though we were as a group rather short on paces. He drilled and drilled us for sound and the shape of vowels and the production of whatever squeaky tone we could produce. Believe me, it was not much. The first semester we read some music, none of which I can recall, but we performed no concerts of our own or even any part of a concert.

But the second semester began with an anthem I will never forget. It was a stirring arrangement of that very stirring Welsh tune “Men of Harlech.” This tune, I much later learned, was written as a tribute to a long seven-year siege of the Welsh castle at Harlech in the middle of the 15th century. It was also used in a quite memorable way in the popular 1964 movie, “Zulu,” where a tiny British regiment withstood a vast army of Zulu warriors for a lengthy part of the film and after some survived the initial onslaughts, broke into the tune as a sign of their strength and fortitude.

The words are brutal, with talk of “wailing women and flying babies,” among other gruesome metaphors, that were not merely metaphors in the 15th century. The tune clearly was most dear to our conductor, and he led it with a right vengeance, attempting to coax from our tiny throats and tinier vocal cords some semblance of manly sounds. Alas, he failed, not because of his weakness but because of ours. Rather than virile and intrepid choristers, what Beryl heard were would-be men, croaking and pushing with might and main, but possessing little of either. I am sure that Beryl cringed inwardly each time we butchered his national epic, yet he never revealed his pain to us. He treated us as men, men who were dauntless, fearless, plucky, and daring, who were ready, given half the chance, to stand stalwart against whatever foe we might confront. I will always be tremendously grateful to this powerful man for treating us, for treating me, as an equal in the making of music, though we so clearly were not in any way equal to the task of making the tune vibrant and potent as he obviously hoped it would be.

When my voice changed again, just before my senior year, and had deepened and darkened in ways I could not quite fathom, I began to make sounds more commensurate with Beryl’s hopes. I sang in the mixed chorus my final three years, and in my senior year sang nearly all the male solos in that group. I went on to sing in college and became a soloist in a large church choir while I was in seminary and graduate school, making a decent supplementary living at it. But I never forgot “Men of Harlech,” trying even while singing Vaughn Williams or Menotti or Bach or Brahms to create that sound of virile power that Beryl had so badly wanted and was so incapable of providing.

And then I went to Harlech Castle in Wales during the year that I and my family lived in the Northwest of England for a year, 1993-94, my wife serving the British Methodist Church, I on sabbatical from my academic post, our two children in British schools. I was thrilled to visit those seven castles that Edward I had built in North Wales in the wake of his military campaign to control the restive Welsh in 1282. Carnarvon may be the largest, but I, because of Beryl, was most entranced with Harlech. It is built on a hill, overlooking the Irish Sea, and retains a good deal of its romance and charm even though its fortifications and ramparts have not all survived the 700 years since its initial construction.

As I stood on the reconstructed drawbridge leading into the castle, I could not help but hear the distant strains of that potent tune that I had tried so desperately to sing those 30 years before. My wife was with me, and she urged me to “heist” the tune once again. And so I did, though I could hardly remember many of the words. As I stumbled through part of it, I thanked Beryl again for giving me a large part of my continued love of music and singing, so much a part of my life now for 60 years. And I hoped that Beryl, that stout Welshman, would be proud of his former student, now singing that tune with some of the power and energy that he could not muster when a lad so long ago. How grateful I am for that memory, and how grand it was to stand in the very place where the tune was generated and given birth. Though I would now deeply question the military genesis of the words, the cruel and painful deaths it celebrated, I can still hear the tune now as I write, wending its potent way through so many of my days and bringing to me once again my love of singing and the power of music to change the world, for good or ill.