Culture Highlights 2024: Songs of protest and the tale of an escaped slave

Mel Perry

One Saturday lunchtime in June, St Davids Cathedral is busy with people visiting this ancient building with its purple Caerbwdi sandstone walls and pillars, and oak-panelled roof.

Many stay to sit, rest and enjoy an informal concert.

I have been a member of Sweet Harmony Community choir in Carmarthen since 2014 when Natural Voice Practitioner Maya Waldman first established the group. We sing a cappella and, as our name suggests, in three or four-part harmony.

Due to popular demand Maya has recently set up a sister choir, Lleisiau Preseli, based in Hermon, North Pembrokeshire. The strength of our choirs comes from, in Maya’s words, that we are all welcome and we are to leave all judgement of our own and others’ voices at the door.

Songs of protest

Our joint repertoire is varied and global with songs of protest and sorrow, community action and love, rooted in international folk traditions. We sing songs of Wales, European countries, England, African nations and their peoples, Native American and black cultures. With almost 70 members between us, we sing mostly for the enjoyment often invited to support other events such as Glasbren’s Seed Festival in the spring or an event at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. We have also sung at four weddings in the last eighteen months too.

A 2024 highlight for many of us in choir was to sing in St Davids Cathedral one Saturday lunchtime in June. The acoustic was stunning, as the architecture offers the perfect space to hold and reverberate our rich sound. One of my favourite pieces to sing is Mravalxamier, a song from Georgia of revelry and celebration, to wish someone a long life, particularly at New Year.

We sang this piece that June day and later learned that someone, from Georgia, had recorded Mravalxamier, sent it to a friend and from there it went viral, in Georgia at least.

Choir is important for me allowing time and space for me to switch off from stress and responsibilities and to enjoy being supported to sing. To know that our beautiful songs, which come from across the globe, can be heard in harmony of voice and felt in harmony of spirit, back in that song’s homeland is a moving and joyful testament to the power of music across communities.

Glyn Edwards

James by Percival Everett – the dense orange sky, silver stars, the wanted-poster typeface, the woodcut-style graphic of Jim wading purposefully through the Mississippi.

The cover alone was enough for me to relent to the familiar character, Jim from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and to my second Percival Everett book in a week.

Were I to choose my favourite from any book I’ve read this year, it would be Everett’s The Trees, for, once I’d fathomed the depth of the satire, and the breadth of the humour, I hurried to the conclusion of the crime novel in days.

Like The Trees, James was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and like The Trees, its pages disappeared in such a frenzy that I barely recognised the significance of what I was reading: hold James at arm’s length and through the narrative of an escaped slave in pre-Civil War Missouri, it is lens to modern America.

Any novel that considers the irrational roots of a country’s racism, does, of course, make difficult demands – specifically, it asks the reader to reconsider how easily we allowed Jim to become peripheral in Huck’s story in the first place.

And as Jim becomes James, as slave becomes protagonist, so we discover the antidote to unrelenting vengeance, malice and ignorance of the ‘white folks’ is the sensitive, resourceful, resilient and literate alternative we had long, long overlooked.

Slight of hand

I took far longer to read Richard Powers’ Playground, and I’m willing to concede the novel isn’t perfect – the novel’s central conceit is its genius, and it takes a monumental effort to appreciate the slight of hand.

The narratives of a billionaire inventor and an oceanographer coincide on an island in the Pacific that must collectively vote on their future: retain tradition, community, low-paid jobs and poor services, or relent to an uncertain future as the base of an international seasteading programme.

Although not published this year, I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Mason’s North Woods, a narrative of polyphonic voice and form set in a single location in New England over 400 years, while Langston Hughes Selected Poems is a book I wish I had encountered far earlier in my poetry reading.