R.S. Thomas 25 Years On: Music, Man…Machine

Joshua Games, Co-Founder & Artistic Director, Brecon Choir Festival

It will soon be 25 years since the death of R.S. Thomas — the Welsh poet and priest known for his powerful, often uncomfortable reflections on faith, nature, and the modern world.

A deeply private man, Thomas never wrote to please. He wrote to provoke. And today, his voice feels more relevant and urgent than ever.

What would he have made of our time — one shaped by the deepening climate crisis, shortening attention spans, rising secularism, and now the surge of artificial intelligence?

He might simply have said: I warned you.

Farmer

In his famous poem Cynddylan on a Tractor, Thomas describes a farmer who has become “part of the machine, His nerves of metal and his blood oil.”

Though proud of his new equipment, the farmer is unaware that it separates him from nature — and ultimately from his own humanity.

As Tony Brown from Bangor University’s R.S. Thomas Research Centre has pointed out, for Thomas “the Machine” wasn’t just about automation; it symbolised mass society itself — the consumerist, materialist world in which we now live. Modern life, he believed, was dulling our attention, weakening our spirits, and pulling us away from what truly matters.

More troubling still, Thomas suggested that we – in service to the Machine – had lost control of our future. In The Fair, Thomas describes humanity as being “taken for a ride by a rich Relation,” comforted by the illusion of novelty and wealth. The impact of modern technology is to flatten the world, offering “fixed responses” that conceal the “warm, human tears” that characterise real human relations and feeling.

By contrast, Thomas found meaning in the Welsh landscape — not merely as a scenic backdrop, but as a site of deep spiritual encounter and nourishment. In Sea-Watching, he calls us to “wear your eyes out as others their knees” — a
summons to observe the natural world with reverence, as if in prayer.

Performances

At this year’s Brecon Choir Festival (17-20th July), we mark 25 years since Thomas’s death with the theme R.S. Thomas: Music, Man…Machine.

In close partnership with the R.S. Thomas and ME Eldridge Society and the R.S.Thomas Research Centre at Bangor University, we are commissioning several new choral works inspired by his poetry. This will include performances
by the BBC National Chorus of Wales at Brecon Cathedral and Hemiola at Christ College Brecon.

Our goal is to explore the potential richness of Thomas’s work for contemporary composers, and how choral music making and the natural world can help us to flourish in a world increasingly mediated by technology.

The festival programme includes a visit to Maes-yr-Onnen, the chapel near Brecon where Thomas once had a mystical experience — a moment when he felt he could grasp “the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of creation” which led him in a poem about that encounter to imagine the “wild, sweet singing of Rhiannon’s Birds.”

Thomas was always aware of the meaning-making potency of music with “chords reverberating in our twin being” (Sonata) . In his poem The River, Thomas extends musical imagery into the natural world, standing among fish
that he imagines are “silently singing”. He writes:

I bring the heart
Not the mind to the interpretation
Of their music, letting the stream
Comb me, feeling it fresh
In my veins, revisiting the sources
That are as near now
As on the morning I set out from them.

In Brecon this July, we invite audiences to revisit those sources which remind us of what it means to be fully human.

The fourth Brecon Choir Festival takes place across 17 – 20th July. Tickets are available at www.breconchoirfestival.co.uk