Among the smaller of the many benefits of marriage I'm enjoying is access to my wife's music collection. This past week I've been listening to a CD of hers entitled The Book of Secrets, by Canadian songstress Loreena McKennitt. I posted a tweet on my Twitter page about listening to her music on Sunday night, although I misspelled her first name; I classified her style as "traditional Irish music with a New Agish twist." McKennitt's website describes her music as "eclectic Celtic," while her Wikipedia article notes that her music "has generally been classified as World / Celtic music even though it contains aspects and characteristics of music from around the globe and is sometimes classified as Folk music in record stores."
I've enjoyed the CD a great deal this week. The Celtic influence is certainly the strongest, yielding such things as traditional Irish instruments like the fiddle, pennywhistle and ethnic percussion, and songs that are often in natural minor (e.g. D natural minor: D, E, F, G, A, B-flat, C-natural, D). There is also Middle Eastern influence in some of the rhythms and other stringed instruments. But she also uses synths and atmospherics to lend her music a timeless, mystical feel. There are plenty of people who create hacked Celtic music nowadays, but McKennitt stands above the fray with a high-quality and eminently listenable product. I've noticed that a lot of the music on The Book of Secrets is pretty repetitious--a progression and melody line will often repeat four times without any variation--but that also adds somewhat to the mystical quality of the music.
Apparently, McKennitt is self-managed, self-produced, and the head of her own record label (called Quinlan Road) which has released all twelve of her albums (The Book of Secrets falls right in the middle of her discography, released in 1997). She's written original music for several Shakespeare productions in Canada, as well as contributing songs to Hollywood feature films (Highlander III and The Santa Clause) and TV soundtracks (TNT's miniseries The Mists Of Avalon, Due South, and Northern Exposure). A pretty impressive CV.
Eleanor has several other McKennitt CDs in her collection, besides The Book of Secrets. I have a feeling I'll be checking them out soon.
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