Loreena McKennitt
An Ancient Muse
Audio Interview QRCD109EU1
1. What is the origin of the album title for An Ancient Muse? 1:42
2. Where do you seek the inspiration for your music? 3:44
3. What led to your interest in history and travel? 1:52
4. How would you describe your creative process? 1:20
5. How do you use your research and experiences to create the songs and the musical landscape of the recording? 3:50
6. What kinds of musicians and instrumentation appear on An Ancient Muse? 1:52
7. Where did you record An Ancient Muse? 0:56
8. How would you describe the recording process? 2:56
9. What did making An Ancient Muse mean to you and what do you hope that it imparts? 1:26
Loreena McKennitt’s commentary on the individual songs from An Ancient Muse
10. Incantation 1:06
11. The Gates Of Istanbul 2:13
12. Caravanserai 2:54
13. The English Ladye And The Knight 1:57
14. Kecharitomene 2:35
15. Penelope’s Song 2:05
16. Sacred Shabbat 2:03
17. Beneath A Phrygian Sky 1:42
18. Never-Ending Road (Amhrán Duit) 1:26
1. What is the origin of the album title for An Ancient Muse? 1:42
The title An Ancient Muse was inspired by the threads that remained from the previous recording, The Book of Secrets. I wanted to go back to the earliest time of the Celts and this would have been around 500 BC. And I thought it would be interesting to go and find what were the other historical moments in this path of history. So when one looks at what was going on in 500 BC, it was roughly around the time for example that the Silk Road was established, Alexander the Great, around 400 BC. The Celts, in fact, tried to sack Delphi in Greece around 279 BC and they extended straight into what we now refer to as England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, much, much later into, you know, 1,000 AD. And I wanted to use this path of history as a creative springboard for the recording. And when I was looking at each of these corners of history, I wanted to delve into the literature. So, for example, when I got to Greece I was fascinated to learn more about Homer, or the fact that the Celts were in Asia Minor, in Turkey, and they’re referred to in St. Paul’s Letters to the Galatians. So, this whole path of the earliest period of the Celts was something that I drew on as an inspiration for the recording An Ancient Muse.
2. Where do you seek the inspiration for your music? 3:44
I take my inspiration from many experiences. I find that I am not that interested in delving into my personal life as inspiration for my compositions but rather, it has been this Celtic history that has led my curiosity. And I find that the process resembles a form of musical travel writing and so, in order to do that, I must travel. And I found myself over the years travelling to various places where the Celts would have been found. In preparation for this recording, for An Ancient Muse, the travels began somewhere around 2000. I was a guest of the son of the late King Hussein of Jordan, Prince Ali, for a period of time in 2000.
I went to Mongolia in 2003 as well as to a place in China, in the northwest corner of China, a city called Urumchi. And in Urumchi, in that area, they had found these mummies that had red hair and they were wrapped in cloth that had tartans. And they would have dated back about 1,000 BC and are believed to have been the precursors to the early Celts.
I’ve travelled to Greece on a few occasions. So, what this travelling does for me is it certainly informs me to the aesthetic of the countryside and a lot of that aesthetic I use to paint the picture in the music. So for example, when — I often spend about a minute or two minutes sometimes setting a song up before I even start singing the lyrics. And the whole objective of doing that is to try to draw upon those travels and the imagery, the light, the sound, the smells, and try to paint that imagery with that musical set-up before I actually get to the song.
The travels also afford me an opportunity to meet many different kinds of people, certainly when I’ve tapped into some of the academics. I’ve met with various archaeology professors – certainly the trip that I made to the archaeological site outside of Ankara in Turkey. Dr. Mary Voight escorted me around that site, or Dr. David Soren from the University of Arizona. There would be travel writers that I might meet. There would be musicologists that I might meet. So all these people, as well as just absorbing the everyday cultural essence of the local people, really fed a great deal into the characteristic of the music.
I remember one occasion when I was in Turkey in 2003, I stayed at a lovely little hotel and the proprietor knew me and knew my work and he said, “Well, when you come back from dinner, perhaps I could arrange for some musicians to be here and we could have an evening of music.” So when I arrived back from dinner, he had indeed done that and we spent, I don’t know, three or four hours, well into the night, playing music. And it was such an exquisite, intimate opportunity to get to know people through the commonality of music. So I would find that the travels become a very integral part of informing the musical stamp and, indeed, my own education.
3. What led to your interest in history and travel? 1:52
I found that when I was in school I wasn’t very interested in history. And it was really when I became exposed to Celtic music that it was impossible to fully appreciate it without understanding the economic, the political, the social circumstances from which that music sprang. So, once I understood that, I thought okay, I’m going to continue exploring Celtic history and use that as my creative springboard. So the travels become a very important part of tasting that.
In the research, I also spend a lot of time with books, many different kinds of books. Some of them are academic books. Some of them, again, are travel books. And some would even be just photographs. I have some beautiful, beautiful books from Greece and Turkey based on certain museums and the artefacts in those museums.
I think one of the most pivotal moments in my exploration of Celtic history came in 1991 when in Venice there was the most extensive exhibition ever assembled on the Celts. There were a lot of artefacts that had just appeared from the ex-Soviet empire and that had never been seen by the West before. And I was absolutely stunned as to how broad this Celtic landscape was.
So, in terms of where I take my inspiration from, it really ranges from my own travels to reading books. I might also watch TV documentaries or listen to radio documentaries or audio books. And so the inspiration really comes in a variety of ways.
4. How would you describe your creative process? 1:20
My creative process is probably — I’m sure every creative person has their own methodology. I know that I would find myself sitting with all my materials and my books, my audio books, video material and so on, and I would digest as much as I could in a period of sitting down. And then I might go for a walk and I’d resigned myself not to actually be thinking about the material but just take in the countryside and let my brain relax and shift into another gear. But inevitably, quite often, it seemed almost at a subconscious level that some of the material that I had been reading about or consuming was seeping into my psyche and every once and again there would be a melodic line that might crop up. Or there might be images that I might think of or see.
But for me there is no set way that the creative process takes place. Sometimes an idea might begin with a few words, a few phrases. Then again it might begin only from a musical line and I’ll say, “Okay, what does this music say to me?”
5. How do you use your research and experiences to create the songs and the musical landscape of the recording? 3:50
Sometimes in the creative process I would embark upon an exercise that would be similar to filmmakers which is like a storyboarding of the project. So I would, first of all, I would try to find the title of the recording that I felt would help retain the focus over the many months or possibly years of the assembling of material. And then I would start looking at the themes and ideas that were starting to rise up out of my travels or my research and say, “Okay, I’d like to construct a song that really delved into this particular idea or into this particular theme. Or cast light on a particular corner of history.” So when I think of — in An Ancient Muse, there’s a song called “Kecharitomene”, which is a song that reflects on the broad swathe of time that involves the Silk Road and people travelling back and forth. “Kecharitomene” was actually the name of a convent. A woman — actually one of the very few female historians from around the time of the Crusades, that she was chronicling some of the Byzantine period and this was, the “Kecharitomene” was the name of the convent where she stayed. So, in that instance, I was looking to create a song that musically represented and perhaps evoked that period of time but also allowed me to speak to, in the liner notes, this unusual woman who was a historian in that period.
One other dimension of the creative process involves gathering musicians of different kinds together. Over the course of the building of An Ancient Muse, I was in Athens on a couple of occasions working with musicians there. There was another session in Italy with some musicians there, and Los Angeles and Toronto. And I would be looking for musicians who also played instruments that I tried to evoke a very particular period or a very particular place. So, for example, in Athens, we worked with some musicians that played bouzouki, that played the lyra, played a kanoun, oud. I remember the one session we also had a piper who played a set of pipes that came from, I’m not sure, I think the Balkan region. When I go back to the inspiration and the imagery landscaping that I’m trying to create, for me it’s very important that I choose the right instruments and the right players who play in those idioms to help bring authenticity to that imagery.
Another musical session – we call them, rather, musical chemistry experiments – in Los Angeles, I was working with a drummer who comes from Israel. And what was great about that was because he came from the Middle East, and there are certain aspects of my music that are influenced by the Middle East, he could bring the kit drum, which is a very contemporary instrument and bring a very Middle Eastern attitude to the playing of some of the pieces that we were exploring. So I would perhaps from time to time bring in a kit drummer and a bodhran player or another percussionist who might play tablas. So I’d be exploring the different cultural fusions of these rhythms and how the voices of these drums would sound.
6. What kinds of musicians and instrumentation appear on An Ancient Muse? 1:52
I used quite a broad range of musicians in the development and the ultimate recording of An Ancient Muse. A number of people that I’ve worked with in the past, such as Brian Hughes, who plays guitars, Donald Quan, viola, Caroline Lavelle, cello, Hugh Marsh on violin, bass player, we’ve used various bass players for different feels and different — and also depending on who was available – Tim Landers and Charlie Jones. Different kit drummer players and percussion, Middle Eastern percussionist, as well as Irish percussionists. There are Irish pipes. There’s a segment of a boys choir, the Westminster Boys’ Choir in London, England, and also a viol da gamba group called Fretwork. We also have used some musicians from Greece; they played some very interesting instruments. One, a lyra, which is — it’s a tiny, I would say it might be one and a half or two feet tall and it’s played on the lap. And its Turkish counterpoint is called a kemenche. Oud, bouzouki, kanoun, and a kanoun is like a hammer dulcimer but it’s plucked rather than hammered. We had a wonderful instrument called the nyckelharpa which is a Scandinavian instrument that is bowed but has — the whole mechanics of it are actually similar to a hurdy-gurdy, which we also had. But the nyckelharpa is quite haunting. It’s quite a haunting instrument that is played with a kind of keyboard even though it’s bowed. So the instrument range on this recording spans quite a wide geography and cultural footprint. And I like that. I like to reflect the journey and the travels through some of these instruments.
7. Where did you record An Ancient Muse? 0:56
We recorded An Ancient Muse primarily at Peter Gabriel’s studio in England, at Real World, which is down in the Wiltshire countryside. One of the main reasons why we recorded there was that it seemed like a central depot where we could be, whether we’re drawing musicians from North America or whether we were drawing musicians from Europe. It was a kind of central location. And there were other pragmatic details to do with visas and so on.
So, one of the other features of working at Real World is that every once and again I think, “Hmm, we need an esraj player or we need a kemenche or something.” And because Peter often — I mean, he has the world music label, the Real World label that works with a lot of world music musicians, it’s quite easy to say, “Oh, well we know of a kemenche player, an esraj player and here’s their phone number.” So that’s a large part of why we end up working at Real World.
8. How would you describe the recording process? 2:56
One of the wonderful things about recording at Real World, and particularly in this space called the Big Room… the Big Room is a very unusual room. The mixing console is in the middle of the room and it faces to this kind of bay window of very long windows that lead onto a pond and in the pond often there are swans and ducks and herons and kingfishers. So we’re entertained by the hour by the wildlife that goes on outside the window. But it also allows the musicians and myself to be in the same space. So, for example, it would not be uncommon that the musician or musicians would be in the same room as the control room. They would be miked up and we’d be rehearsing away and then I’d say, “Okay, why don’t we start to take this?” And either they would continue to record in the Big Room and we would all be in headset or they would start filing away into the recording booths for isolation. But it is an environment where you feel very much connected; physically and psychologically and emotionally connected to each other. I find that the musicians being able to play off each other actually strengthens their performance quite often.
So, the recording process often begins in a kind of musical chemistry kind of way. I’m often still working out the arrangements when I’m in the studio, which is a very expensive way of recording. But at the same time, I want to be able to capture the moment when things are fresh so when I feel we’ve more or less come close to the arrangement of things, then it’s just to seamlessly slip into a phase of tracking it, where we’re still retaining the freshness and excitement on the piece.
One of the other features of working at Real World is that it truly is like a cross between a conservatory and a sanctuary. And the light in the room allows me to feel connected with the natural world, and being out in the countryside it helps one psychologically focus.
I would also have my routines every day. I would get up early in the morning, go and get my newspaper, come back, read it in the — depending on what time of the year, but if it’s the summertime I’d sit on the picnic bench for an hour or so before we work in the studio. And then come into the studio at about 10 o’clock in the morning and work until 5 o’clock or so and then I’d go for a run and then we’d come back and work some more and have dinner and then work some more until midnight. Now, we would work seven days a week and often two or three weeks at a stretch which is pretty steady you might say but it seems that the environment is very supportive of working in that particular way.
9. What did making the recording mean to you and what do you hope that it imparts? 1:26
The process of travelling and researching for this recording has been an incredible vehicle of self-education. I have my Grade 12 education but I never took formal education past that so I’ve often said to people, even if I never made a CD after I produced the music and in fact, even if I never created the music, just the whole exercise of research and meeting people and studying has been more than gratifying unto itself. The fact that I’m able to take that research and that travel and forge it into a musical document that other people are interested in is a huge bonus.
I guess in terms of things that I personally have learned, and I’m not sure who else or others that would share this, but I really feel that there’s a tremendous importance in understanding history and its relevance to what is going on today.
I think the final thing, if I’m to have a modest aspiration for the recording, or certainly to feel that what I’ve learned through my travels and research, is that there is in this cultural fusion of our histories and the evolution of these cultures, that there is really more to bind us together than tear us apart and that that is an overall universal theme to which we can all strive.
Loreena McKennitt’s commentary on the individual songs from An Ancient Muse
10. Incantation 1:06
The song “Incantation” was inspired from a few corners. One was that I have had some experience working in the theatre. And I always loved, particularly at the Stratford theatre, there’s a kind of stage before the play actually begins, there’s a pre-theatre moment or pre-play moment where the lights go to half, there might be some kind of sound effect. I know, in Stratford there’s actually a bell that rings. Its purpose seems to be to try to set you up psychologically and emotionally for an event that is going to happen.
The piece that begins An Ancient Muse called “Incantation”, the purpose of it is primarily to set up an emotional mood. As far as the melody that is involved in this piece, I really want to allude to an earlier period of time. And I think some of the imagery that was inspiring the melody was I had a chance to spend some time in an area of Turkey called Cappadocia where there are these incredible rock formations and within these rock formations housed these very early Christian churches or chapels. And it was at a period of time that the Christian community was under persecution and they were retreating to these places of worship found within these rocks. And you go inside and you see this exquisite artwork that harkens back to the second or third century AD. So the song “Incantation” was really built with these dimensions in mind.
11. The Gates Of Istanbul 2:13
The inspiration for “The Gates Of Istanbul” came via a route that has come up before in some of the recordings and that is reflecting on the theme of places and periods of time where various religious communities cohabitated somewhat harmoniously. When I think of let’s say Spain prior to 1492, there were about 700 or 800 years where the Christian, Judaic and Muslim communities cohabitated and it represented a real pinnacle of a time where agriculture, literature, mathematics excelled. And indeed it’s believed that some of these influences that ultimately made their way into the West actually originated in the Arabic culture in Africa and came up through north of Africa into Spain and then via pilgrimage routes like that of Santiago de Compostela; that this influence then migrated into other parts of Europe. So I was wanting to create a piece that shone a spotlight on another period of time which would have been around the time of Mehmed II. This was, I believe, 1462, somewhere in there. It was just going from being called Constantinople to Istanbul. And he was encouraging people to come to the city so he could populate it with people of different skill sets and sensibilities. It was a real renaissance, that period of time. I mean, I know that one of the incredible lessons that has struck me time and again as I’ve pored over various corners of history, that history has many faces and it has many perceptions and many interpretations and, indeed, there are a lot of controversies that go with all of that, but it is one interpretation that this period of time during the reign of Mehmed II was a kind of renaissance for the arts. And so I wanted to create a piece that just shone a spotlight on that particular period.
12. Caravanserai 2:54
The song “Caravanserai” was created with more of a rumination of the concept of home and that a home can be a physical place but, in many respects, home is as much, if not more so, the people that reside either in that physical space or, as in nomadic cultures, that travel with you. The word “caravanserai” actually represents a physical place which was kind of a glorified inn. I’ve seen a couple in Turkey. They are handsome fortified structures that would have been peppered along the Silk Road and other merchant routes. And it would be a place where locals as well as travelling or itinerant people would gather. It was a place where you could protect your goods, whether they were livestock or whether they were rugs or any other kinds of goods that you were travelling with. And merchants would come into these caravanserais and spend a night or a few nights, sort of regroup before they went on their travels again. And around the periphery of the caravanserai there would be the locals and there would be bazaars. And they became a kind of lightning rod for cultural intermingling.
One of the travel experiences that informed “Caravanserai” was when I had the opportunity to spend some time with a nomadic family in Mongolia. It was in October of 2003, I believe, and this family was just getting ready to leave their summer pasture for their winter pasture. And as many of the nomadic families in Mongolia, they had the five livestock groups. They had goats and sheep and horses and camels and cattle and their whole lives were surrounded by the maintenance of these livestock groups. And indeed their calendar was fixed on when the weather or when the pastures were ready that they had to move these livestock to the next place. And I remember reading some years ago that this was in actual fact a characteristic of the very early Celtic people who were nomadic. That rather than designing their calendar on crops and the time of the year that crops would have to go in, they actually designed their calendar on when their livestock needed to be moved from their summer and winter pastures. So, for example, the Celtic New Year is more around the 1st of November or the end of October, and that would be about the time that people would be moving their livestock. So, the song “Caravanserai” was informed by a range of these experiences and these themes.
13. The English Ladye And The Knight 1:57
In the song “An English Ladye”, this is a segment of a very long narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott called The Lay of the Last Minstrel and what fascinated me by this corner of this long narrative, it’s situated at Carlisle Castle. Now, Carlisle Castle is built on an ancient Celtic settlement site so there was that kind of Celtic archaeological moment. But also in the story it reflects upon a sort of Romeo and Juliet story where a Scottish knight falls in love with an English woman, and follows a theme that love often transcends cultural barriers. And in this story, the brother of this English lady finds it intolerable that his sister should be in love with a Scottish knight and he murders his sister. The Scottish knight comes and then murders the brother and then in this depth of passionate grief, he decides to go on and fight a war for the love of this woman that died. And then in the last verse you hear that he goes off to fight this war in Palestine. And what’s quite fascinating is that of course Palestine is a place that is very much in our contemporary minds and lives, and the troubles there. And I just thought it was an interesting note, you might say, where yes, this is a historical piece of literature but in actual fact, as with history, history is never really truly dead, that history is really the underpinnings of our contemporary times. And the poem also caused me to reflect on certainly one of the reasons why some people go off to war or have gone off to war.
14. Kecharitomene 2:35
There is an instrumental called “Kecharitomene” and this piece of music was inspired primarily from three different directions. One of the inspirations harkens back to a book by a woman called Susan Whitfield. The book was called Life Along the Silk Road and it’s a wonderful profiling of different kinds of people who travelled up and down the Silk Road, whether they were soldiers, whether they were monks, whether they were merchants. And it gives a very intimate taste of what their experience was and the different cultural expressions and permutations there was along the Silk Road at that time, how those cultural permutations expressed themselves in food or in music or in religion, even animal husbandry. And again, I’m always fascinated to look at places or roads or circumstances where cultures come together and influence each other.
One of the other inspirations came through a book called Warriors of God by a man named James Renton and it examines this sort of collision of cultures during the time of the Crusades and particularly focusing on where this collision between the Christian West and the Muslim world, and more particularly, at the end of the 12th century, and profiles the roles of Richard I or the Lionheart and the Muslim leader Saladin. And I think what I found fascinating about this book is that we in the West, you might say, have heard one side of that or a couple of similar sides to that slice of history but, indeed, we haven’t heard more of the more eastern or Muslim side. And again, although this is a snapshot of history, it has very, very contemporary relevance.
The third strand of inspiration for the song, “Kecharitomene”, arises and in fact informs the name, it arises from a woman called Anna Comnena who was really the first female historian and she lived around the time of the later Crusades and she chronicled this very bloody period of the Crusades. And she ended her days in a convent in Istanbul which was called Kecharitomene which essentially means full of grace.
15. Penelope’s Song 2:05
“Penelope’s Song” is a piece of music that I wrote inspired from a few different travels and experiences. Certainly the one that comes to mind was a week that I spent in May of 2005 on the Greek island of Chios, which is not far actually from the Turkish mainland. And I stayed in this beautiful bed and breakfast in this compound. There was an orange orchard in my — my residence was actually like a garden hut at the far end of this orange orchard. And because it was May, all the orange blossoms were out — I’d walk through this stunning environment and smell this gorgeous aroma of these orange blossoms. And during that week I listened to an audio recording of Homer’s Odyssey which one certainly could consider as one of the most significant travel narratives of history. And it got me thinking about, once again, this business of travelling, this business of journeying and the experiences that one encounters when one is travelling but also the fact that in many circumstances over the course of human history, yes, there have been people who have left and there have also been people who’ve been left behind. And I wanted to create a song from the perspective of the individual or individuals that were left behind. And it is a story that certainly is universal in its theme, that when I think of some of Irish history and the time during the famine, and there were people that emigrated to, let’s say, Canada or the United States on these horrible coffin ships. And that there were families that were also left behind and their loved ones would be heading over to the New World. And you can’t help but think of those, there have been people who have left their loved ones for all kinds of circumstances. And the pain of seeing them go off and not knowing if they’ll ever return. So I wanted to create a song that captured some essence of that sentiment, of waiting for your loved ones to return. And “Penelope’s Song” was a gesture towards this.
16. Sacred Shabbat 2:03
There’s an instrumental called “Sacred Shabbat”. This piece of music I first heard when we had one of our musical chemistry experiments in Athens. And I asked three of the musicians to play a piece that they all knew together and they came up with this particular melody and as soon as I heard it I thought what a delightful melody. And it wasn’t until some months later that I encountered the same piece of music on a recording of Spanish Sephardic music coming from the Judaic tradition. And it brought to mind how pieces of music migrate with the people as the people migrate or emigrate and that one actually loses track of where a piece of music in fact began. And I’ve subsequently learned that this particular piece is known and loved all over the Mediterranean. And so I wanted to profile this dimension on the recording.
Also around the time that I heard these musicians play this for me in Athens, I was just finishing a book by a Turkish writer called Irfan Orga and the book was called Portrait of a Turkish Family. And it’s a memoir of Irfan’s family just prior to the First World War and his family in Istanbul. And it’s a very, very poignant tale of — it’s kind of like the very end of the Ottoman Empire and you can see and taste and feel and hear the remnants of the beauty of that culture. And I could imagine hearing a melody like this “Sacred Shabbat” being played in some of the more family social circumstances, whether it was in a park or whether it was in their living room. And I wanted to, again, in bringing this piece forward, highlight these corners of history and even some of these notes of inspiration.
17. Beneath A Phrygian Sky 1:42
There’s a piece called “Beneath A Phrygian Sky” that was inspired by my visit to an archaeological site near Gordion just outside of Ankara in Turkey, in Anatolia. And as with various archaeological sites that I visited, I’d be standing there looking at stones — and on one level they’re just stones but you can’t help but feel that these stones have been witness to extraordinary periods of history. And in this archaeological site near Gordion they had uncovered some Celtic ruins but it appears that they weren’t quite sure whether, in fact, this was a permanent Celtic settlement or if indeed that this was a contingency of mercenaries. For the Celts were well known to be very, very fearsome warriors and that often were off battling other people’s wars. And so this theme of stones, this theme of wars, why people go to war, but also the reflection that surely there’s enough history behind us, and embodied in that history enough lessons in it, that we should be able to be learning and improving and not making the same mistakes over and over again. So this song is as much a rumination of these threads as it is any definitive statement. But it reaches towards – if there is one thing that can and should carry us forward, it is a concept of love.
18. Never-Ending Road (Amhrán Duit) 1:26
The last song “Never-ending Road” was inspired by the tradition found within certainly the Christian, Judaic and Muslim traditions of mystics writing metaphoric poetry that is really reaching towards capturing the essence of the relationship between humanity and God. And I’ve loved this process of creating a document that speaks in this way. And in so far as this life is a journey with all its joys and sorrows and hardships, that it’s a never-ending journey, it’s a never-ending road. And that as conscious as I am of the far greater talent and vision of those who have inspired me, this song is really a modest gesture to that tradition