Artists such as Loreena McKennitt bring such exquisite grace to music that the act of listening becomes a humbling experience. That experience goes toward the medieval notion that singing was a heartfelt way of saying, “Please listen to me.” McKennitt need do little more than pluck a few harp strings to command attention, for she is one of the most revered performers in the world.
From her native Canada, she has reached across time and through the past to create a palette of colorful compositions steeped in Celtic influence on recordings such as Elemental, The Mask & the Mirror, and the breakthrough Book of Secrets.
The offering of A Midwinter Night’s Dream so close on the heels of 2006’s An Ancient Muse comes as a delightful surprise, the gift from an old friend you didn’t expect to hear from. No fan of McKennitt seriously expects her to deal with mundane Christmas songs yet she proved on 1995’s A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season that with proper arrangement, an ancient song such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” takes on new life. It is that five-song CD more than a decade old that provided the basis for A Midwinter Night’s Dream. Its combination of eclectic and traditional bears McKennitt’s burnished gold touch.
McKennitt called recently to talk about the new record but we ended up talking about how her arrangement of the old English carol became a hit in Turkey. It was a rare audience with the queen of New Age, which is a sincere but pathetically thin way to describe her deeply organic grasp of world rhythms ancient and modern. Her days always begin with taking care of business, as she is involved with all aspects of her career, noting on this day that she still has “all these things to be done and we’re having a terrific snowstorm here in southern Ontario.”
“This project was unusual in that it was built out of five songs that we recorded in 1995,” she continues. “In the years, it’s been suggested we lengthen the recording but it wasn’t until this past year when we were getting ready to go on tour in Europe that I had a number of musicians assembled and I thought we should book a rehearsal and finish these songs.
“I really didn’t want to do the overtly well-known carols like ‘Silent Night,’ and I tried to find pieces that had a bit more antiquity to them or lent themselves to an Eastern or Middle Eastern interpretation. There’s often a modality in them that I am looking for. So these pieces were chosen in rather short order. Regardless of whether I write the material or I am curating the material, I’m looking for a composition of aesthetic elements and conceptual things that vary.
“’God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ was one of the tracks from 1995. I knew I wanted to move my music to raise more of a Middle Eastern vibe. I have the wonderful image in mind of the musicians sitting and playing these wonderful Middle Eastern drums. They really give weight to that rhythmic pattern and I wanted to bring the East into some of the pieces and that piece really lent itself to that direction where a lot of other pieces wouldn’t.
“It’s also funny because that’s the piece that when we released A Winter Garden in ’95, that recording somehow made its way to Turkey, in particular Istanbul. A promoter contacted me a year later to ask if I would come perform a concert there. I never knew my music was released in Turkey and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ was being played up and down the streets of Istanbul. By the summer of 1996 we were able to go into a 5,000-seat venue because of that recording and primarily because of that piece. A fun career development.
“There’s an authenticity to not only the rhythmic pattern, but the whole idiom in which it is played. [Percussionists] Hossam [Ramzy] comes from Egypt and Rick’s [Lazar] parents came from Iran and Iraq, so they brought that authenticity as well, and we had an Egyptian fiddler that does an improvisation within that piece. These were textures and modalities that anyone from the region could easily relate to yet the arrangement was not a conventional Middle Eastern one, it was a different twist to a piece that for the most part people were unfamiliar with. Clearly, it was that rhythmic pattern and eclecticism of the arrangement, and perhaps a quality to my voice.”
Clearly.
This article appears in December 5 • 2008.