Although McKennitt has recently decided to take some personal time away
from her busy recording and touring schedule, she speaks with Renaissance
Magazine about the inspiration behind her music.
Q: There are people who are convinced that you are Irish. Where,
exactly, are you from?
LM: My great grandparents came from Ireland in the 1830's, although I grew
up in Morden, Manitoba, Canada for the first 17 years of my life. But I
have spent a lot of time in Ireland over the years, particularly since the
early 1980's, when I became smitten by the Celtic sound and felt a
necessity to travel to its place of origin.
Q: What drew you to the "Celtic Sound"?
LM: There's something in the older structure of the music - the rhythmic
patterns and the drone aspect of it - that I find engaging. I first became
exposed to Celtic music through a folk club in Winnipeg in the late 70s.
Its casual nature was attractive to me - how people took turns playing -
so that when I ultimately went to Ireland and sat in a pub or went to
somebody's home, it wasn't uncomfortable for me to encounter this kind of
informal example of people's self expression.
Q: What do you find most interesting about traveling?
LM: The fascinating thin about traveling is that it allows you to pick up
far more information on a sensual level. For example, when I was in
Marrakesh doing some research for The Mask and Mirror, I would
sometimes go into a market during Ramadan when people had been fasting all
day long. In the evening when the fast was broken, the market would spring
into a cacophony of sight, sound, and smell. To travel to these types of
places fills my wood stack, so to speak, in terms of painting a picture
musically; in essence, the goal of my music is to rearticulate this
sensual energy.
Q: What was your goal in recording The Book of Secrets?
LM: With my previous CD, The Visit, I learned that the Celts were
much more than a mad collection of anarchists from Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales. Rather, they were comprised of a vast collection of tribes from
middle and eastern Europe, dating as far back as 500 BC. This pan-Celtic
history became a kind of creative springboard for The Book of Secrets
But I also wanted to get an even further eastern glimpse of the Celts
after I read How The Irish Saved Civilization, which explained how
for centuries, medieval Irish monks had been copying ancient classical
religious and historical texts into illuminated manuscripts. In fact,
Irish monks were the ones who reintroduced classical material back into
Europe, and if it had not been for the monks, these important works might
have been lost to us forever.
According to what I've read, the first Irish community established in
Italy was in the North in a place called Bobbio, and when I found this
out, I made a trip to this region. I remember thinking that if one was
looking for the equivalent of the isolation that the Irish monks
experienced on the Skellig Islands, this was the mountainous equivalent of
it. Hence, The Book of Secrets picked up on a thread of how for
some, isolation is desirable - or even necessary - to enhance one's
connection with the essence of God.
Q: Do you need to be alone to come into your deepest contact?
LM: No; I agree more with the Sufi perspective that you should not remove
yourself from the world, but participate in it; that the opportunities we
experience in life are the things that cause us to grow. But isolated
situations are good for different stages of one's development.
Q: What is the meaning behind the Sufi quotation in your liner notes
of The Book of Secrets, that music and singing do not produce in
the heart that which isn't in it?
LM: Insofar as there are hidden jewels - hidden strengths (and often
people are unaware of their own inner goodness) - my interpretation of
this quote is that music, with its invisible and yet powerful forces, can
stir up primal feelings that are lying dormant in everyone.
This is also connected to the Sufic concept of "polishing the mirror
of your soul," that as you go through life trying to refine your
self, strengthening your connection to God, and working towards
perfection, one's hidden strengths are all just mechanisms of looking at
oneself differently or working one's way through life. So we should not
remove ourselves from engagement, or even confrontation with the world.
Instead, we should use each of those opportunities to do something good
for somebody else.
Q: So you've discovered a connection, then, between Celtic and
Eastern philosophy.
LM: When I was reading From The Holy Mountain, author William
Dalrymple touched upon the question of illuminated manuscripts coming from
the east, and the migrations through Europe and North Africa, describing
how we have lost so many threads of those historical connections, and why
the illuminated manuscripts that we now associate so strongly with Ireland
and Scotland - The Book of Durrow and The Book of Kells, for
example - actually had their historical roots in the East.
Q: What are some of the more specific inspirations for the songs on The
Book of Secrets ?
LM: The Lyrics to "Skellig" tell the story of an elderly Irish
monk in the seventh century, who spent most of his life in the isolated
religious community of Skellig Michael, on the west coast of Ireland. The
setting of the Skellig Islands is unbelievably harsh, and even now, to
take a boat over there is a risky endeavor. The monk of the song finds
peace only after "many a year perched out at sea." In
this song I wanted to capture this sense of isolation as the contact point
with that essence called God.
Then in 1995, I traveled by train across Siberia. Though my intention was
to find a solitude which would allow me to work out the themes for this
recording, I was drawn in and distracted by the tableau of humanity which
passed my window. At the same time, I had begun to make my way through
Dante's Divine Comedy. Something about all those souls I had seen
and met seemed connected to Dante's words, and became the inspiration
behind the song "Dante's Prayer."
The "Mummers' Dance," on the other hand, links the work of a
marionette-maker I met in Palermo, Sicily, with the hobby horse of May Day
celebrations in Padstow, Cornwall, and the teachings of a Sufi order in
Turkey. All of these tangents came together around the folk custom of
mumming.
Likewise, "La Serenissima" was inspired by Ian Morris' dazzling
description in Venice of the extraordinary pageant that greeted
Henry III of France as he arrived in the "most serene" city in
1574. He described how the king was greeted by floating arches, rafts of
glass-blowers creating figurines, paintings, and all the pomp of the
period, the imagery of which I recounted in this song.
Q: You have also mined English literature beautifully for a number
of your songs - "The Lady Of Shalott" on The Visit and
"The Highwaymen" in The Book of Secrets, for instance.
What inspired you to put classic verse to music?
LM: Classical material gives my recordings weight and a different
perspective than my own; I've never felt that my lyric writing was the
strongest aspect of what I do, so that has been my inspiration for using
the poetry of sophisticated writers such as Shakespeare, Blake, or Yeats.
Q: Have you ever been in a place where you felt that you had been
before in another lifetime?
LM: Reincarnation certainly comes up in the material from time to time,
particularly with the Celts, whose philosophy was similar to the Native
American's feeling that the souls of their ancestors where inherent in
every living thing, and, as a result, respect for the natural world was
paramount. But I can't say that there's been any place where I have felt a
special connection, nor have I felt that I ever wanted to live at another
time, especially when you consider what life was like 500 years ago. It is
easy to romanticize the past, but life was hard back then, and its
duration was relatively shore compared to one's life expectancy now.
Although I feel blessed to live at this time, there is a lot to be learned
from the past, such as finding the strengths in history that we might have
lost in our highly technological society. This struck home for me in the
past three years, as I now believe that I need to reconfigure how my time
is spent, and allow more time for reflection and for digesting all the
information that modern life throws at you. You can't just absorb all this
information without the time to interpret and digest it.
Q: What inspired the title of The Book of Secrets?
LM: Science And The Secrets of Nature, a book which discusses the
history of science and the Islamic brotherhoods in North Africa, also
tells how the medieval Arabic culture was studying astrology, astronomy,
mathematics, and alchemy in order to identify a harmonious balance within
substances, as well as in the self. But according to the book, as this
information came west, people became more careful about how these secrets
were handled. One can extrapolate this dilemma to our day and age. Do we
want to give out recipes for atomic bombs on the internet or in the
newspapers? How should this type of information be handled, and who should
have control of it? It was from that book that I first landed upon the
title of the CD.
Q: However, some may read the title of The Book of Secrets as more
personal.
LM: I've chosen not to document myself in my music because I feel that
history is far more important than I am. The Book of Secrets is
rather a personal document of my own exploration, and were I not to sell
one recording, in one sense this wouldn't bother me because I've learned
so much about myself and have grown so much in the process of creating the
album. My personal growth is far more important to me than worldly
success. In fact, have begun to realize that the world is far more complex
than I have ever imagined. When you examine the history behind situations,
you begin to find that you cannot disconnect yourself from the culmination
of our collective histories, and, as a result, there is much to bind
together as a race.
