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Wales has always been called the LAND OF SONG AND POETRY. It was our voice.

When did it begin? What day did it begin? What year?

Ruth, the wild folk singer in this oratorio gives us an opinion - "We're ancient and we're modern, we ripen and we rot - we're older than tomorrow, but younger than the past."

I've placed the day of birth in the summer of 1843 during the Industrial Revolution. It was a difficult birth, and at the same time a creation myth.

I've centered the place more towards the mid and south of Wales, rather than Llewellyn's first parliament at Machynlleth. In this place you will find no stone monument - only a secret valley with a river and a woods.

Others who know me will say - it's in Merthyr - on a field beneath the viaduct at Pontsarn and a hundred yards away from the Blue Pool.

All the music is stylistic borrowings from the Welsh sense of the sacred song, the spiritual, the HYMN, the LAMENT, JIG, comic action song, plaintiff love, minstrel, the triumphant patriotic, and the early chapel blues.

Hopefully a Welsh Language version of the Libretto will come soon.

This work is a conceptual idea, and I apologise to the village of Rhydwilym, Dyfed, for causing imaginative plunder.

The Oratorio will be in two forty minute cantos

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