The area along the Menai Strait in the Welsh principal area of Gwynedd is home to a rich and thriving traditional music scene as a result of the folk revival movement across Britain in the middle to late 20th century. One of the places where traditional music can exist include informal events known to its practitioners as sesiynau in Welsh, or sessions in English. Surprisingly, tunes and songs outside of Wales regularly feature in these sessions. The aim of this thesis is to develop a theory to account for the diverse nature of traditional music played in these sessions along the Menai Strait. Current literature regarding Welsh traditional music has not addressed this in the context of informal music making, which is a gap this thesis will cover. This thesis asks why there is a multiplicity in traditions practiced in sessions along the Menai Strait, and how it fits in the wider traditional music scene. This is to better understand how transnational elements can play a part in shaping musical practice within the context of revival.

Through observation, interviews, case studies, and surveys, I found that the multiplicitous nature of sessions in the area exists because of increasingly accessible resources leading to diverse interests, amplified by the insular nature of sessions as practiced in the area. However, the different traditions that are represented in sessions of the area are interpreted through the framework of Irish traditional music, which practitioners use because of how it established its practices are in the wider traditional music world. This importance of this study is that it introduces a focus on relationships between transnational practices and informal musicking in the revival process, adding to our understanding of how practitioners utilise various elements informed by practices from other traditions in order to revive and reconstruct broken traditions.