Loreena McKennitt 'An Ancient Muse' album

“This record is a little like equipping yourself with a Eurail card,” says Loreena McKennitt of listening to her new album, AN ANCIENT MUSE. “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to go to on this trip. I’m just going to get on board the train, and allow each encounter to lead to the next.’”

On her seventh full-length studio recording, McKennitt follows her Muse across time and tide, from Homer’s Greece to Ottoman Istanbul to England in the age of the Crusades. As with earlier albums, particularly the multi-platinum The Book Of Secrets, she takes her inspiration from the history and migrations of the Celtic people, fusing the melodic sensibility of Scots and Irish balladry with musical traditions from Greece, Turkey, Spain, and even Scandinavia.

“The process is like coming up with a new recipe,” McKennitt explains. “You think, well, I’d really like to make a dish with these elements.” Although there are clearly some favorite new spices — the lute-like oud; a Greek folk violin called the lyra; the triangular kanoun, which is similar to the zither; and the nyckelharpa, or Swedish keyed fiddle — the music itself isn’t tied to any particular style or epoch. Instead, McKennitt draws from far-flung influences, moving easily from the sinuous Silk Road groove of “Caravanserai” to the courtly quiet of “The English Ladye And The Knight,” with its boys’ choir and viols da gamba. “There are some extreme tasting-menu moments,” she laughs.

Accompanied by regular collaborators including Brian Hughes, Donald Quan, Hugh Marsh, Caroline Lavelle and Rick Lazar, McKennitt has also invited a host of other acclaimed international performers to collaborate on An Ancient Muse. Despite the differences in instrumentation, all of the performances derive from similar inspiration, or what McKennitt describes as the “landscape” of the song. “When I’m working on a piece, I try to locate it in terms of geography and time,” she explains. “I have a visual image, or a series of images, in mind for most, if not all, songs I’ve ever recorded. And when I get into the studio, I reference those images. Because if I don’t do that, I won’t have my legs, so to speak, in terms of choosing what instrument, what feel.”

That sense of landscape also helps her convey what she has in mind to her musicians. “I will tell them, ‘Here is the painting that is in my mind,’” she says. “In ‘The Gates Of Istanbul,’ it’s about approaching Istanbul in 1453 — there are camels, there are horses. It’s the end of the day, and the campaign has gone very well. Everyone is looking forward to getting through the gates and seeing their loved ones. And as you come in, there are the wonderful parks, and water… I try to paint a central picture for them, so they can say, ‘Ah, OK.’

“Very rarely is any music ever written down when I bring it to the studio,” she adds. “When one is working with musicians of that caliber, the songs develop very organically in that environment. Even though they are playing what might be regarded as folk instruments, my collaborators’ skill and sensibility really lies as much in the classical realm. So I might gesture toward a phrase, a modality, and then I just let them go to it.”

In addition to setting the scene, McKennitt’s musical landscaping helps ground the music in specific emotional terms. “At the end of the day, I’m trying to preserve a feeling that stretches out, and changes, journeys through and comes back,” she says. “The landscaping may have to do with some of the years I spent around or in the theatre, and even, on a couple of occasions, working in film. Which is why this recording opens with the track ‘Incantation’: I think of it in my mind’s eye as being in a theatre when the lights go to half, and the music might start. Then the lights go to black. ‘Incantation’ sets the scene, and then the first song per se is ‘The Gates Of Istanbul.’”

In that sense, An Ancient Muse begins with a return home, and ends with a departure, “Never-ending Road (Amhrán Duit)”. Along the way, the album conjures the wonder of wanderlust in “Caravanserai,” weaves a tapestry of lost love and the dramatic tales of the Crusades in “The English Ladye And The Knight,” visits the ruins of a Celtic settlement in Anatolia, Turkey in “Beneath A Phrygian Sky,” and even conjures the loss and longing felt by those left behind in “Penelope’s Song.” “The English Ladye And The Knight” is based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott. “I usually choose at least one poem by another author to use in every recording. I find it inspiring to explore the words of such wonderful writers via a musical treatment,” McKennitt says. Although the classically Celtic melody is supported by strings, she opted for the more ancient sound of viols da gamba instead of violins and celli. “It’s rawer and slightly less refined, and I wanted that sound,” she says. “Instead of making the setting too pretty or too sweet, I felt the viols added a wonderful texture, and contributed their own sonic imagery.”

As for the poem itself, McKennitt was drawn by the fact that “it touches on the issue of people loving across cultural lines, so to speak, and tragedy happens. What was interesting, I found, is that at the end of the story, the knight goes off to fight in Palestine.

“Well, here we are — it’s 2006, and conflict in Palestine is still in the news.”

“Penelope’s Song” also has a literary antecedent, taking as its inspiration the long-suffering wife of Odysseus, who sat at home waiting for and worrying about her husband while he had the adventures recounted in Homer’s The Odyssey.

“In our contemporary Western experience, where we have access to a lot of technology, or have the affluence that allows us to travel, that whole notion of people going away for long periods of time with the prospect of not seeing them again, really doesn’t enter our experience,” she says. “So I wanted to create something that was sparked by a person waiting for someone to return, and being true to them.”

Not every song on An Ancient Muse is an epic, of course. “Sacred Shabbat,” for example, was conceived more as a snapshot. “It’s apparently a very well-known melody in the Mediterranean area,” she says of the traditional tune. “I heard a version of this on a recording that came from Spain – part of a collection of Sephardic music.” Although there are traditionally lyrics for the tune, McKennitt recorded it as an instrumental, performing with Haig Yazdjian on oud, Panos Dimitrakopoulos on kanoun, Sokratis Sinopoulos on lyra, and cellist Caroline Lavelle. “I wanted to put it in as an experience, as if you overheard these particular four musicians sitting around in a park, casually playing this piece of music.”

Yazdjian, Dimitrakopoulos and Sinopoulos appear on a number of selections, as do bouzouki player Georgios Kontogiannis and percussion ensemble Krotala. Yazdjian is Armenian but lives in Greece, as do Dimitrakopoulos, Sinopoulos, Kontogiannis and the members of Krotala, and their inclusion in the album, McKennitt says, “grew out of learning that the Celts had made their way to Greece as well. In fact, in 279 B.C. the Celts actually attempted to sack Delphi, and that was all the excuse I needed to head off in more of a Greek direction.” She laughs. “It was like a license to open up a door to Greek literature and Greek influences. So I wanted to bring that geographical territory closer through these instruments.” Again, though, it wasn’t just the history and culture that attracted McKennitt; there was also the emotional weight of the instruments’ sound, particularly that of the lyra. “I was drawn to the Eastern sentiment,” she says. “I remember the first time I heard a kemanje, which is a Turkish instrument very similar to the lyra — a small bowed instrument with a loud, rich and very evocative voice. It was in Istanbul, at Yerebatan Sarayi, a astonishingly beautiful 6th century Roman cistern, and I just found the sound of the kemanje so appealing, because it has tonalities similar to the human voice, in the way the cello does. It is a haunting sound.”

Istanbul also figures in the album’s other instrumental, “Kecharitomene,” which was inspired in part by the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, considered by many to be the first female historian. Kecharitomene — Greek for “full of grace,” the greeting the Angel Gabriel gave the Virgin Mary — was the name of the convent in which Comnena wrote her major work, a book that among other things presented a critical view of the Crusades from the vantage point of the Byzantine Empire, rather than that of Richard the Lionheart and his fellow Western European adventurers.

Loreena’s Song Notes

Many artists seek to imbue their work with contemporary points of reference; for my part, I have sought inspiration by reaching back in time via the trajectory of Celtic history. As I have no formal education to assist me in undertaking such a task, in some ways my efforts are more of a serendipitous rummage through various corners of our collective past. The challenge lies in knitting these many strands into the musical and lyrical themes of a recording.

As I feel that there are few solid conclusions I can draw from this process, my endeavours ultimately feel a little like the work of an amateur treasure hunter who brings back nuggets here and there and says simply: “Did you know this? I didn’t.” I can only acknowledge, rather than answer, all the questions that follow. What does this mean? Where does it fit in? What was its significance in its time, and more importantly, now?

There have been many elements and people who have informed and played a role in this project: archaeology professors, writers past and present, tour guides, musicians and other people like myself who may lack training in the relevant disciplines, but are endowed with a healthy curiosity about corners of our history, the evolutions of our cultures and what relevance these legacies have for us in the 21st century. It is a never-ending journey and a never-ending road. – L.M.

Incantation

One of the first journeys I took in preparing to make this recording was into the pages of a book: Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, and it proved an excellent place to start. In May 2005, when the orange trees were in full bloom, I sequestered myself in a guesthouse at the edge of a walled orchard on the Aegean island of Chios, alternately reading Cahill’s work and listening to an audio recording of the CBC series The Great Books.

In the previous autumn, and again a year later, I would find myself in another corner of this part of the Mediterranean. As I explored some of the early Christian churches carved into the “fairy chimney” rock formations in the astonishing and beautiful landscape of Kapadokya (Cappadocia) in central Turkey, I wondered what music their walls had heard in days long past. With “Incantation”, I wanted to create a piece of music that would musically set the stage for a story and a journey; an atmosphere that would hearken to this place and time and all the extraordinary history this period and region embodies.

The Gates Of Istanbul

I am deeply fascinated by the elements that constitute and inform our religious and spiritual make-up. We are living at a time where some parts of the world have moved away from religious and spiritual engagement, while substantial segments of humanity still consider it a fundamental aspect of their social and cultural lives. I have also been drawn to focus on, and seek to understand, certain places and periods of time where religious tolerance and mutual understanding existed and even thrived: the time of Constantine the Great during the early years of the Roman Empire; the world of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire; Spain prior to the Reconquista and, concurrently, Constantinople (now Istanbul) during the reign of Mehmet II. I wanted to create a piece of music that reflected the optimism of those who came to this city with hopes and dreams of a better life.

Caravanserai

When visiting Turkey in 2003, I was introduced to some handsome examples of buildings known as caravanserai. Fortified structures, they functioned as glorified inns for travelling merchants with their goods and livestock, and, in so doing, supported a flow of commerce, information and people across a network of trade routes, including the fabled Silk Road. Musing on these buildings – many of them now only ruins – I reflected on those who chose or found themselves in a life of constant movement; the nomadic path.

I was afforded an insight into the geographic extent of this tradition when, later that season, I had the good fortune to spend a few days with a nomadic family in Mongolia and had a taste of the daily routine of their lives. As it was September, they were preparing to move their livestock to the winter pasture; I was reminded of the ancient Celts, anchoring their calendar on the movement from pasture to pasture. In such societies, the world revolves around their camels, cattle, goats, sheep and horses. It was my hope that in this song I could, albeit lightly, touch upon aspects of this nomadic culture, and its beguiling mix of impermanence and continuity.

The English Ladye And The Knight

Sir Walter Scott provides the lyric to this song, in an excerpt from his narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a tale of chivalry and deadly feuds in the Border country between Scotland and England. Echoing the larger poem from which it springs, this tale of a Scottish knight and the lady whose English family harbours bloody suspicions of the Celtic foreigner in their midst is set in Carlisle. Once an old Celtic settlement, it later became a Roman town, Luguvalio, and it lies just a few miles from Scotland, with all the political and tribal disquiet that position implies. His bride killed by her own family, the grief-stricken knight goes on to fight in her name as a Crusader in Palestine.

For all its melodrama, the lyric contains something of the eternal: a reflection on how political histories and human stories become intertwined, sometimes fatally. It is a tale of love, of war, of who we love and believe we hate, and why. I had a particular imagery that I wanted to paint with the arrangement of this song: a deep melancholic lush green; a castle set deep within that vegetation, with a lake in front; the mournful cries of starlings. Its sense of lost time is, I hope, evoked by the voices of the boys’ and men’s choirs and the sounds of the viol da gambas.

Kecharitomene

The inspiration for this piece began with Susan Whitfield’s wonderful book, Life Along the Silk Road. It chronicles the lives of a number of individuals who traversed this weave of roads linking Europe, India and the Far East in the first thousand years after Christ. The next inspiration came from the period just after the demise of the Silk Road; the time of the Crusades. As with much of history, there are many dimensions to this period, and conflicting interpretations abound. One such dimension was made apparent to me via James Renton’s study Warriors of God, examining the collision of the Christian West and the Muslim world at the end of the twelfth century and, in particular, the roles played by Richard I (The Lionheart), king of England, and the Kurdish Muslim leader Salah al-Din, or Saladin.

As I am reminded that history exists only in its kaleidoscope of perspectives, I turn to the third element in this song’s inspiration – the voice of an extraordinary woman that many consider to be the first female historian, Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, who chronicled that bloody age of conquest and conflict. She ended her days writing her masterpiece The Alexias in a convent in Istanbul named Kecharitomene (“full of grace”, the words spoken by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation). I hope this song, wordless as it is, evokes some of the sweep of history and those voices, lost and lingering, that it contains.

Penelope’s Song

Every journey begins, as it is said, with a single step; inevitably, it also begins with a departure from familiar places and people. Inspired to write a song that evolved around taking leave of someone, I could not help but consider the constant elements, and the changes over the centuries, of our stories of travel. In an age long before airplanes and the internet, the journeys people took in ages past were often made in the knowledge that great lengths of time might pass before they came home again; indeed, the prospect of never returning was always a possibility. In most travel narratives, we hear the voices of those who leave; more rarely do we hear from those who are left behind. As I listened to an audiobook version of Homer’s The Odyssey – an 8th century BC masterpiece whose power is undimmed and is arguably the template for all travel narratives since – the perspective of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, came to mind.

Sacred Shabbat

On each recording, I try to seek out other voices than my own, be they literary or musical voices. This piece is built around a melody known throughout the Mediterranean; like many Celtic melodies, its origins were long ago obscured as it was adopted and adapted across a wide region and a long stretch of time. It was introduced to me during our recording process by Haig Yazdjian, a Greek-Armenian oud player who grew up in Syria, and I would later hear another version on a collection of Spanish Sephardic-Jewish music.

At the time Haig played it for me, I had just finished reading Irfan Orga’s Portrait of a Turkish Family, a fascinating and poignant memoir of Turkish family life just prior to the First World War. I am reminded of how sensual, playful and rich the Ottoman world was; in my mind’s eye, I saw musicians playing in a park, fountains trickling and splashing and people gently conversing with each other over tea. Although it seems a rather romantic image, it is one I have observed through my travels in Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East, as rituals both religious and social intertwine in the joyous fabric of daily life.

Beneath A Phrygian Sky

This song was born of my musings on the ghostly presence of the Celts in Anatolia, Turkey. Traces of a Celtic tribe, the Galatians – later addressed by St Paul in his Epistles to the Galatians -- have been found at an archaeological site at Gordion. Once the capital of the Phrygian empire and seat of the legendary King Midas, in the third century BC it was settled by some 20,000 Celts, largely mercenaries and their families. I visited the Gordion dig, and was struck by the resemblance of the area, with its green landscape and Iron Age hill forts, to Europe’s Celtic fringe thousands of miles to the west. I was captivated by the patience of the archaeologists, painstakingly sifting through time’s dust for traces of human stories: humble loom weights; a typically Celtic Janus-faced statue; the foundations of a grand public building; piles of dismembered human skeletons bearing mute witness to ritual sacrifice.

As I worked on the music and evolving lyric for this song, I wanted to try to summarise some of the thoughts that sprang from this experience: if these stones could speak, what would they tell us? If we were to meet these long-dead forebears, would we fear or admire them? Would we recognise them as brothers and sisters? And what of those evolving constants of religion, language and culture, and the ever-present spectre of war: have such shards of history anything to tell us about ourselves?

Never-ending Road (Amhrán Duit)

Of the countless ways that humanity expresses its intimation of the divine, I have been drawn most strongly to poets who explore their relationship with their God through elements more common to love poetry: eleventh century Jewish philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol; two thirteenth century Sufis, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and the Anatolian poet Yunus Emre; sixteenth century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross. What is more, I have wondered about the similarities between these writers’ transcendent deity and the god of The Song Of Amerghin, an ancient, incantatory Irish poem that begins: “I am the wind that breathes upon the sea/I am the wave of the ocean”. One constant in all these poetic expressions, it strikes me, is the reminder that life’s journey – in all its joys, sorrows, hardships and shared pleasures – is ultimately a journey toward love, toward completeness, toward peace. Conscious as I am of the far greater talents and vision of those whose work has inspired me, this song is my own modest gesture to the tradition.

“If I may be so bold as to have ambitions for this recording,” Loreena McKennitt says of An Ancient Muse, “it would be
to whet people’s appetite, to broaden the scope of their awareness of our collective past by saying, ‘Back in the Crusades, well,
it wasn’t just the story of Richard the Lionheart — there was Saladin as well.’ But then, I primarily see myself as being like a
travel writer, because the best ones are those who serve as conduits and catalysts, rather than saying, ‘This is my story, and it’s
all about me.’”

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Loreena McKennitt - An Ancient Muse