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Woman's Hour
Interview on BBC Radio
Broadcast on "Woman's Hour", BBC Radio 4, UK, 30th
September, 1996
Transcribed By Robin Hall
"As promised, the transcription of the LM interview on Woman's
Hour on BBC Radio 4.
For those of you who want some background, Radio 4 is the "voice"
channel of the national radio
service. Woman's Hour is a premier discussion program, celebrating its
50th year. The
program on this day included items on battered immigrant wives, the value or
otherwise of
inoculations, a review of a poll into listener's 50 most important male figures
and a reading from "Anna
Karenina". Plus an interview by the main presenter, Jenny Tucker with our
own Loreena."
Notation:
Jenny Tucker = JT:
Loreena McKennitt = LM:
[...] denotes musical interludes
*...* include non-speaking additions
[Exert from All Soul's Night]
| JT: |
Long red hair, pale skin with freckles, a
traditional Irish voice and a reputation as a tough businesswoman, Loreena
McKennitt is especially well-known at home in Canada, but her
international renown is spreading. She is a master of the Celtic harp and
sets the lyrics of Tennyson and Shakespeare to music. But her family
emigrated from Ireland as far back as the 1830's. So why a continuing
fascination for the mythical, mystical Celts? |
| LM: |
There are people who ask that question thinking
you must, you know, have to come from Ireland, or Scotland or Wales. The
Celts were people who came from Middle and Eastern Europe as far back as
500BC and crossed Europe and I feel in a sense that I am an extension of
that Celtic evolution - that as history never stops playing itself out I
am part of the more contemporary side of that. |
| JT: |
Now as you research for the songs that you
write, what have you learned about the Celts in musical terms? |
| LM: |
There seems to be a lot of conjecture involved
in the process. *laugh* First of all, starting back, the Romans
never really made it to Ireland in a major way. You can take some of the
Irish music and find glimmers of similarities to say an Indian music and
the tabla kind of rhythmic patterns are very similar kind rhythmic
patterns you can get from the Bodhran in jigs and reels or shanose
singing. |
| JT: |
Now, how do you combine the Celtic, the North African, the Middle Eastern,
the Indian - how does it all fit together musically? |
| LM: |
Well, *laugh* for me it's like a
musical chemistry experiment where I do research either by reading,
listening to documentaries, certainly traveling to places, talking to
people getting impressions of the configuration of the culture. And then I
use that as a creative springboard so that the pieces become more
impressionistic musical paintings. I am interested in weaving the
similarities of, for example in Indian music you have a drone that would
come from a tambour, so I would then go to in the Celtic tradition what
functions of the drum may go to the highland pipes - there is a drone in
the pipes. So I might replace the pipes with the tambour or vice versa. Or
trying to blend the dumbeg rhythms of the Middle East with the patterns of
the Celtic. Sometimes they blend better than other times. *laugh* |
|
[Snippet from All Soul's Night] |
| JT: |
You started your career busking. Why? |
| LM: |
*laugh* Well, I, I, sort of took my
destiny into my own hands feeling that I didn't want it thrust upon me. I
was interested in the Celtic music. I borrowed some money from my family
to make my first recording, and after I had done that and produced about
thirty cassettes, I found that busking in the street was a way to sell
them and make a bit of money. As it turned out, I found that it was a very
important point of independence, not just financial independence, but
saying that even though I wasn't doing commercial top-40 kinds of
material, there seemed to be a lot of people who were actually interested
in what I was doing. |
| JT: |
But how did you turn it into a profitable
business, which it became? |
| LM: |
I took the money the money I was raising on the
street and put that into my second recording, and then my third recording.
I started to produce my own concerts, hired a publicist, hired the venue,
the sound equipment and so on. Sold the recordings at those performances,
then started touring across Canada. So, it was that - the money that can
be made if you are manufacturing and then selling to the people, there is
quite a substantial profit margin. When you have all the rest of the
retail and record company and so on, it diminishes. So at that point of
the game I was going directly from a producers standpoint. |
| JT: |
It's unusual, though, to find an artist who has
such business acumen. Where did the business acumen come from? |
| LM: |
Well, I would attribute that to working in my
father's office. He was a livestock dealer, in Winnipeg in the middle of
the Canadian Prairies. I would go into his office in the morning and I
would do basic secretarial and accounting skills, and then at three
o'clock I would head out to the Auction Ring, and round up the cattle and
sort them into pens. So I was exposed to an office environment and budgets
and that kind of thing. |
| JT: |
Now, the lyrics of one of the songs,
The Dark Night of the Soul was written by, I think, St. John of the Cross,
a fifteenth century Spanish mystic. What attracted you to him? |
| LM: |
In the course of assembling the music for The
Mask and Mirror, my last recording, which seemed to be focused on
Spain and the 15th century, I wanted to find a poems from that period that
examined some of the broader philosophical things about that period. St.
John of the Cross, being a mystic, also influenced by another mystic
called Teresa of Avila, - he took a more direct approach to connecting
with his God, which was very much discouraged within the Christian Church
at that time. It's a beautiful metaphorical love poem and if one didn't
really know the background you would interpret it as that. |
|
[One verse of The Dark Night of the Soul
and the end of the interview] |
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