"If one begins with the big questions of 'Who am I?' and 'Why am I here?', the understanding of the roads back in history seem as important as the ones forward, whether or not it pertains to the individual or collective, to the subject of love or the control of information."
In The Book Of Secrets, Loreena McKennitt's seventh release and successor to the U.S. gold records The Visit and The Mask And Mirror, the Canadian artist continues a process of cultural excavation of the pan-Celtic heritage, serving as a creative springboard and a passport to eras past.
Breathing life into long-forgotten lyrics, McKennitt first made her name as a folk singer, singing traditional folk ballads like "She Moved Through The Fair" with freshness and immediacy. Over the course of her three most recent albums, however, she has expanded both her music and choice of narrative subjects.
The Book Of Secrets was conceived over several journeys, including one taken via the legendary Trans Siberian Express, in which the self-managed singer and record company head found the quiet she needed to reflect and prepare for The Book Of Secrets. Finally, she had the time to read Dante's The Divine Comedy, echoes of which appear in the album's closing track, "Dante's Prayer."
Something of the motion of that epic solo voyage is imprinted on the restless folk who populate the songs on The Book Of Secrets, many driven by movement and change: the "thundering hooves" of "Night Ride Across The Caucasus"; the soul mates of "Dante's Prayer" who "share this humble path," the dramatic cast of McKennitt's setting of the Alfred Noyes poem "The Highwayman."
Even the isolated monk of "Skellig" only finds peace in his hermitage after "many a year perched out upon the sea." "The setting of the Skellig Islands is unbelievably harsh. . . set out in the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland. Even now to take a boat over there is a risky thing," comments McKennitt. Pursuing a deeper understanding of the connection between Irish monks and classical European culture, she visited Bobbio, the mountainous location of the first Irish monastery in Italy.
"It addressed in part how far certain individuals isolate themselves, in an extreme sense, to heighten their connection to that essence called God," says McKennitt of her visit to the site.
A long line of tangents form an associative construct for McKennitt's song narratives. "The Mummers' Song" links the work of a marionette maker she met in Palermo, Sicily with the "hobby horse" of May Day celebrations in Padstow, Cornwall and a Sufi order in Turkey.
Yet, as with all fine art, McKennitt's technique is translucent. Ultimately, the months of research underpinning each track are subliminal; the experience of the music is simply sensual.
The central melody of "Marco Polo," the instrumental track inspired by the legendary 13th century explorer of Asia, is a traditional Sufi chant which Polo himself might have heard.
"As with the last three recordings, this one is also a document of my own path of exploration through the vehicle of music and history. There are a lot of mechanisms within our contemporary society that seem to dilute and diminish our sense of identity. As a result, I think there is a heightened need to understand who you are, what your roots are, and where they are connected."
In some measure, The Book Of Secrets is an attempt to address these searching philosophical questions that incessantly intrigue McKennitt's lively intellect. An eager auto-didact, her conversation is a torrent of cross-cultural allusions. Although she takes pains to stress her amateur status, she has grown into something of a self-taught authority in her chosen field: how Celtic and other cultures have exchanged and fused over centuries to weave the intricate tapestry of our culture today.
"I try to figure out why things are the way they are, and you can't understand that without going back. And in the course of going back, you discover that, yes, history does repeat itself. There are cyclical patterns."
Although much of The Book Of Secrets represents the Mediterranean phase of her explorations, McKennitt was born and raised in Morden, Manitoba, a town of Irish, Scottish, German, and Icelandic inhabitants in the middle of the Canadian prairies. One could say it was here she was first exposed to her inter-cultural influences. The most vigorous Highland dancer in her rural community, she was raised by her mother, a nurse, and her livestock-trader father.
"It was a very modest community. People came from immigrant stock. Survival was the order of the day and in some ways broad cultural exposure was limited. Although my family's ancestors on the most part came from Ireland, there was very little overt 'Celticness' to my upbringing in the sense of music or storytelling." After an adolescence spent in Morden, McKennitt was eager to move into a wider world. She was first exposed to the Celtic folk boom in a Winnipeg folk club.
"The first step for me was Celtic music. The whole sound drew me in an almost instinctive way and it became this vehicle to pursue history in a way I could never have imagined," she recalls.
In more cosmopolitan Winnipeg, she briefly studied to be a veterinarian, before moving on to finally settle in Stratford, Ontario, where her composing and performing skills were soon appreciated in the lively scene around the city's internationally renowned Shakespearean Festival. McKennitt still makes her home there, living in a rural farmhouse.
Already in love with Yeats and the music of Breton harpist Alain Stivell, Planxty and the Bothy Band, McKennitt could sense the lyricism of Irish folk music. When she made her first journey to Ireland in 1982 she was to find a similar lyricism in the contours of the land and the spirit of the people.
Back home, she put her newly stirred Celtic fervor into an interpretation of Yeats's "The Stolen Child." Inspired by a D.I.Y book called How To Make and Sell Your Own Recordings, by Diane Sward Rappaport, she set up her own record company, Quinlan Road, in 1985, and recorded Elemental, a nine-song cassette. She ran off copies and began selling them from her car while meeting the public on the most immediate level, as a busker.
As McKennitt's mailing list grew, word of mouth in cafés and bookshops built her a significant audience. Her growing audience empathized while McKennitt explored the traditional canon, always seeking the reverberation that would make an ancient voice harmonize with her own. She's particularly proud of tracking down "Bonny Portmore," included on The Visit. An obscure ballad mourning the loss of ancient British stands of oak, once worshipped by pre-Christian tribes, it has a contemporary relevance to today's fight to save old-growth forests.
McKennitt followed Elemental by cutting a seasonal perennial in the Christmas carols of To Drive The Cold Winter Away (1987), and made her first steps towards cross-cultural fertilization in the subsequent Parallel Dreams (1989). It was at this time she was commissioned to score music for the National Film Board of Canada's acclaimed film series "Women and Spirituality."
A pivotal moment for McKennitt's evolution occurred in 1991 in Venice, Italy, at the largest ever exhibition and collection of international Celtic artifacts.
"Until I went to that exhibition, I thought that Celts were people who came from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany," recalls McKennitt.
Seeing the unimagined riches and variety in the centuries of Celtic art gathered from as far afield as Hungary, Ukraine, Spain and Asia Minor, she recalls, "I felt exhilarated. It was like thinking that all there is to your family are your parents, brothers and sisters, and then you realize there's a whole stretch of history that is an extension of who you are."
That epiphany transformed McKennitt's music.
The primeval sounding tamboura drone that introduced her next album, The Visit (1992), announced a new direction with its bold, cinematic interpretations of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and an unusually edgy take on the Henry VIII-penned ballad, "Greensleeves."
This process reached a dramatic flowering on 1994's The Mask And Mirror. McKennitt's new staging post on the voyage was in Galicia, the Celtic corner of Spain, and then on into 15th-century Spain itself when the cultures of Judaism, Islam and Christianity merged to produce what is still remembered as the Golden Age, a time of profound cultural influence on the evolution of Western civilization.
The distinctiveness of McKennitt's musical vision is matched by the independence with which she has approached the music business. "I think coming from a farming and rural background gave me the insight into being self-sufficient. You become familiar with creative problem solving. If you want something badly enough, you will roll up your sleeves and start chipping away."
When McKennitt decided the time was ripe to move toward the industry establishment, she signed a unique deal with the Warner Group for the world. It is a deal which has been very fruitful indeed as her recordings have gone on to sell in the millions in over 40 countries. Beginning with The Visit, Warner has distributed her work, while she controls every aspect of creation and promotion.
With her one-artist label Quinlan Road expanding into its second office in London, much of her time is now spent commuting between there and the Stratford base, attending to the myriad of things which come with running an international career in the music business.
At the exhilarating commencement of a new phase in the cycle of research, recording and touring, McKennitt surveys the arc of a career that has delved into the past to reflect the future.
"I feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to marry the vehicle of my talents with the fuel of my curiosity and imagination. This process has allowed me to explore the greater depths of our humanity and the human condition in a way that is tangible and full of meaning. It has taught me that indeed we are a culmination of our collective histories and that at the end of the day, not only are we and have been more or less the same, but also there is probably more to bind us together than tear us apart. It is a force of faith I must believe in."
Source: http://www.wbr.com
