Machynlleth-based harpist Cerys Hafana is more of a reinventor than musician – opening up her instrument, the triple harp, past its constrictive, traditional form, allowing it to congeal with modern songwriting. Although with change comes scrutiny, Hafana immortalises folk music for future interpreters like herself, and discussed this with Emma Way.

Why did you choose the triple harp as your instrument?

Cerys Hafana: It was an accident, in a way. I started off learning the piano, and then I moved to Wales. My mum’s Welsh teacher was also a harp teacher, and lived across from us. My mum asked me if I wanted to learn the harp. I said, “More than anything in the world!” – which was kind of dramatic and random. I don’t know if I even knew what a harp was.

I started having lessons on a small standard type of harp, but my teacher just happened to be one of the only people who teaches the triple harp – I think three years into learning, I got the upgrade to the triple. There are things that you can do on it that you can’t do on other types of harps, and the fact that so few people play it is exciting.

Do you know how many people actually play the instrument, nationwide?

Cerys Hafana: It’s a pretty rare instrument. There are two strands: the Baroque early music strand – there are some people in Italy who play the really old type, but not many – and the Welsh strand. There’s basically been two full-time professional players in the last few years. At the Eisteddfod, maybe five years ago, they got nearly all of the triple harpists in Wales onstage together, and there were 30 of us.

Is it even a Welsh instrument?

Cerys Hafana: It started off as an Italian instrument about 300 years ago and travelled over to London. The Welsh Londoners started playing it and took it back to Wales. It died out everywhere else in the world, but it kept going in Wales. So it’s not originally Welsh, but Wales is mostly where it’s played today.

So Wales has come to adopt the instrument. How did you come to write your own music?

Cerys Hafana: My music has a different tonality to standard folk music. It’s quite inspired by minimalism: I like repetitive patterns and chords. When I was 14, I got to a point where I felt like I’d learned all the Welsh triple harp’s available repertoire; I was getting a few more performances and I needed pieces to be able to play, so I just started writing once. I think it just happened accidentally that I brought in other influences.

Is that why you were supporting Adwaith, for example?

Cerys Hafana: Yeah, that was really cool. I’m happy that sort of thing can happen – you do worry you’ll get pigeonholed as a folk harpist because there are so many stereotypes about what harp music is what folk music is, and who it appeals to. I’m really glad other people can hear those other influences in my music.

Is that something you’d like to do more of in the future as well, play more unconventional lineups?

Cerys Hafana: Yeah – in the last year it’s been slightly mad, with the range of gigs that I’ve been doing. It keeps it interesting, having such different audiences. Going from standard folk festivals to supporting a pop musician [Charlie Cunningham] on a big UK tour. I feel lucky to have that variety.

What’s an audience’s reaction normally like?

Cerys Hafana: My favourite reaction to get is people saying that they don’t like harp music, but they liked my harp music. That’s the best compliment – I don’t really like harp music, usually! I think people are just surprised that I make it sound a bit more intimate and agentic than what they’re expecting a harp to sound like.

You wrote your second album Edyf with the help of the Welsh national online archive. How did you incorporate it?

Cerys Hafana: All the stuff that I was using was online and had been digitised. The archive contains little manuscripts – there’s no audio, it’s little notebooks that people wrote in, like 200 years ago. They’d go around the place, listen for tunes and write them out. For some of the songs, it’s these ballads that were written as a way of spreading news about what had happened before everyone could read. The ballads would get printed in newspapers. You can go and search and put words in, and it will give you a song, related to that word, that was written about something that happened in some village in 1853.

I’ll play around with one on the harp until I come up with some way of making it sound cool: a lot of them have been written out quite badly, and they’re quite wonky. They don’t make sense as tunes in and of themselves. So part of the challenge is trying to make them feel like whole melodies again.

So you’re reproducing them in your own way.

Cerys Hafana: Yeah, I was always under the impression that’s part of what folk music is: you learn these tunes that are passed on to you, but you give your own interpretation and your own version of it. That’s what I’ve been doing.

There’s a small body of work that’s still popular in Welsh folk music, and everyone’s singing the same songs all the time. It’s cool, but it also gets a bit annoying when you think you’ve found this gem and seven people have already done a version of it. So I did specifically go looking at these manuscripts to try and find ones I knew nobody would have done anything with, so I could have free rein to do my thing. 

You used a water bottle as an instrument on Edyf – was this to complement all the water sounds I can hear on that album?

Cerys Hafana: It was much more stupid than that! The water bottle sounds are the weird spacey sounds that are on the first and last track. It was a uni assignment – we had to make a piece of music manipulating a random sound, so I hit a water bottle and then dragged it out to the last 10 seconds, reversed it and then pitchshifted it all. When I was about to finish the album I was listening to the tracks, and I thought it could do with some water bottle nonsense.

The percussion sound on the album is done with a bodhrán, which I think sounds quite watery – kind of liquidy. But there’s a lot of sea-related stuff going on. There were a few words from the archives that had to do with the sea. So I think there was, yes, water on my mind.

Cerys Hafana plays Ara Deg, Neuadd Ogwen, Bethesda (Fri 25 Aug) and Between The Trees, Merthyr Mawr (Sat 26); then St Augustine’s Church, Penarth (Sat 2 Sept); CellB, Blaunau Ffestiniog (Sat 16 Sept);Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan (Fri 29); The Wyeside, Builth Wells (Sat 30).

Info: ceryshafana.com

words EMMA WAY