Cymanfa Ganu
Welsh sacred hymn festival
A Cymanfa Ganu (Welsh pronunciation: [kəˈmanva ˈɡanɨ], 'singing festival') is a Welsh festival of sacred hymns, sung with four-part harmony by a congregation, usually under the direction of a choral director.
The Cymanfa Ganu movement was launched in 1859 at Bethania Chapel in Aberdare, where it was pioneered by the Reverend Evan Lewis.
In Wales, cymanfaoedd canu are held each year in many villages and towns throughout the country. Some have more than one Cymanfa Ganu a year, as often many separate chapels hold their own. Some large annual events occur in some chapels and take place at festivals such as the National Eisteddfod and the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod. Some are occasionally held in theatres and concert halls. Cymanfaoedd Canu are held across the world – wherever members of the Welsh diaspora live, significantly in Y Wladfa (Chubut Province, Argentina), e.g. Trelew and Gaiman, where there were significant Welsh settlements from the mid-19th century. In some of these areas Patagonian Welsh is still in daily use, together with Argentine Spanish. Outside of Wales, in the UK there are Cymanfaoedd Canu in London, parts of the West Midlands and other areas where there are still evangelical chapels using the medium of Welsh.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cymanfa Ganu” as welsh sacred hymn festival. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5199360. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cymanfa Ganu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.