World Stage

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Escape Article - Summer 1994

All the World's a Stage

Transcribed by Tracie Pascoe

With her long red hair and fair complexion, singer-songwriter and harpist Loreena McKennitt looks a little like Helen Mirren as Titania in the mid 80's BBC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And her current road show uses a favourite conceit of the Old Bard himself, the tale within a tale, or in her case, the tour within a tour.

McKennitt's concert tour is designed to take listeners on tour themselves to lands of Moorish castles, Moroccan mosques and Irish cottages, settings that inspired the international blend on her latest album, The Mask and Mirror. Using Celtic harp and a variety of ancient and modern instruments from around the world, McKennitt makes music to transform and transport.

Part of that journey can only happen in the mind, since much of McKennitt's inspirations and references come from ancient realms and literature. Even her stage decorations, with medieval tapestries and candelabra, evoke bygone ages. But the point of the whole package, she says, is that many of the traditions the music represents are still alive - if you look for them.

"I wove enough clues into the liner notes of the album that, if people are interested, they can find the things in the music," she explains. "The annual pilgrimage to Santiago (in northwest Spain), does it still happen? Yes, it does."

McKennitt, 37, says that she was 'born curious' and with the bug for travel, but it wasn't until adulthood that she actually ventured far from Morden, Manitoba, a town of just 3,500 about 80 miles from Winnipeg. The first real trip came in 1982, a solo two-month journey to Spain and Ireland. Her primary mission: to explore her Celtic ancestry, a study she'd begun with Irish history correspondence courses from the University of Waterloo.

Once she got to Ireland, she quickly realized that is was not the isle of myth and legend. "Initially, there was the romantic thing people go through in a foreign country, but I soon got past that," she says. "Once that subsides you examine the true characteristics there. Ireland is really a Third-World country."

She didn't find any leprechauns or fairies. "Gradually, I discovered that the Celts were a mad collection of tribes that came from the Middle East and all over," she says. The harsher realities, though, only intrigued her more. Her travels led to more research into the places she visited and ideas that would later emerge in her music.

McKennitt began her performing career in theater. She worked in the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Canada, and later played harp a street musician in Toronto. It was there that her Celtic-influenced material attracted enough attention that she was soon playing club dates around Canada. By the mid-80's, she had enough songs - and chutzpah - to record them for herself for her own label, Quinlan Road Productions. In the rare role of arts/entrepreneur, she managed to sell 30,000 copies of her first album, Elemental.

She recorded and marketed two other albums for her label, each expanding her audience, before hitting the big time and signing with Warner Bros. in 1991. With The Visit, she was suddenly global, selling over 200,000 copies in the U.S. and an equal amount in Europe.

At the core of McKennitt's lyrics and music are her wanderings in other lands and through literature.

The Irish experience was a big influence on her first three albums, helping her develop a sound that has an ethereal, Celtic quality in the Enya and Clannad vein. The Visit covered a wide range of influences stretching back centuries and included poems of Tennyson and Shakespeare set to McKennitt's original compositions.

The Mask and Mirror broadens the terrain to medieval Spain and modern Morocco. Several of the songs were inspired by studies of medieval Spanish history and a fascination with Spain as a crossroads for Judaic, Christian and Muslim cultures. Other tunes came from a trip to Morocco where she was delighted to find that, contrary to Western expectations, cultures do mix.

On one Moroccan trip she drove from Marrakesh into the desert and found a Frenchman in the middle of nowhere who had set up an auberge, complete with a great restaurant. He had many tales and told of two musical brothers who had an oasis cafe in the desert. Later, she started to drive back, but got lost.

"Just try following tire tracks in the sand in the dark," she says. "After driving around for awhile, we saw these lights ahead and made toward them. And as we got closer, we realized that it was the brothers up on the roof of their cafe. They'd seen that we were driving around lost and went up to signal us. So we joined them and wound up playing wonderful music for three or four hours."

Obviously, not all that is captured literally in her music. And not everyone has the musical skills to pry open the doors of sometimes guarded cultures. But McKennitt says it's merely a matter of taking the right attitude with you to earn the trust of the people and a peek at their vital folkways.

"It's not a spectator sport or Disneyland," she points out. "These are people's lives. It's too easy to go and feel the world is yours. It's not."

- Steve Hockman

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