How it All Started
Although my family was musical we didn't have any history of academic musical training, and I was the first of us to go to university to study the subject in 1982. After a few weeks wandering somewhat aimlessly around the corridors of University College Dublin I was asked to come in and audition for the college chamber choir. Even though I was nineteen years old, I had never sung in a choir before, and I can't emphasise what a profound effect the experience had on me.
After a few years of College choirs I began to feel that there was something missing from the experience for me. It appeared to me that all the choirs I sang in were just reflections of the latest choral trend picked up from England or from seeing a foreign choir at a choral festival. Despite the obvious talent that many of the directors and singers had, they didn't aspire to broadening an audience of exploring our own culture through their work.
In 1987 I set up An Uaithne*, and we began performing a highly eclectic blend of material, from Clannad covers to the works of living Irish composers and on to music from the 11th to the 14th centuries. I’d collected as much Irish related material that I could find and arranged anything that was fragmented.
Strange as it may seem, Irish music was seen as very much a minority interest in the suburbs of Dublin where I had been brought up, but in 1976 I had spent a year at the Irish-speaking college in Ring, Co. Waterford, and had been exposed to a year of traditional Irish songs. This had had a huge effect on me. I wanted to recapture some of that overpowering sense of place that I had felt while singing those old songs. I also felt a need to expose some of them to the audiences that were beginning to get larger with each concert performance we did.
I began setting Irish texts that attracted me, the first of these being a setting of the early Irish poems “Triar Laoch” [“Three Heroes”] and “Codail Begán” [“Sleep a Little”] in the later 1980s. These pieces combined the harmonic flavour of modern music with the strong, melody driven power of traditional Irish singing. My fascination with medieval music and history added the “ancient” colour to these early pieces. However, it was the texts that drove everything forward for me as a writer. Simple, but profound – ancient, yet still relevant to modern audiences.
RTE, 1991 : Pic Philip Gray
An Uaithne becomes Anúna
My exposure to classical singing was minimal growing up, which is probably a blessing in many ways. I was brought up to appreciate the untrained voice in all its forms, and the odd time I’d come across a voice that attracted me and fell outside of my usual listening. I developed a great appreciation of Benjamin Britten’s work through having heard his music in school, and fell in love with the voices of Heather Harper and Ian Partridge. Their voices were controlled, clear and wonderfully emotional in a way that classical singers I heard on the radio and T.V. usually were not. In 1979 I heard a singer that was very different. Her name is Annie Haslam, lead singer of the progressive rock group Renaissance. The music was pleasantly melodic, but the voice was unique. She could [and still can] hit the high notes while maintaining an immediacy in her lower register that I had never heard before. Reading her biography I noted that she had some classical training and I thought that maybe if I also had “some” rather than a lot of training it would allow me to do things vocally that eluded me in the choirs that I sang with.
The idea of combining classical training with the natural voice appealed to me greatly. The earliest incarnation of An Uaithne was made up of classically-trained singers, but it was very hard to get them to produce a sound that I wanted. The pieces I wrote and arranged were designed to allow this to happen naturally, but it was often very hard to get past their own deeply-ingrained ideas about singing.
In 1991 I changed the name to Anúna. John McGlynn officially joined the choir after years being on the periphery, and I think that it was the first time I had an ally who felt the same way as I did. I remember him giving a speech after a very exciting performance in the Project Arts Centre in Dublin that year. He thanked me in front of the singers for giving him the chance to perform this music, and said how privileged we all were to be part of something so amazing. I could see that this short speech was heartfelt, as could the other singers, some of whom tried to laugh off his remarks. It brought into stark relief the difference between our reasons for doing this and many of theirs. For many of them the group was simply an opportunity to gain solo experience and improve their performance skills. John focused me back on track at a crucial moment and I decided to move very firmly away from the rather stuffy classical ethos that had developed , and to find singers that I felt would appreciate that Anúna wasn’t simply a choir, nor was it a vehicle for soloists. It was a cultural statement, something organic and growing, something that we were all very lucky to be part of.
1991 marked the end of an era for the group. My presence as a conductor was becoming of less and less consequence, as many of the new singers were not chorally experienced, so there was little point in me waving my hands at them. One of the last performances I gave as a conductor was at the 1991 Cork Choral Festival. On the last night of the Festival it is customary for the main choirs to perform music from their own cultures. We performed three Irish songs I had arranged, “Deus Meus”, “Gol na dTrí Muire” and “A Stór mo Chroí” and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the reaction was staggering. Yes, the performances were passionate, lacking the control and poise of many of the visiting choirs, but we seemed to be doing something other than simply performing songs for an audience. We were exposing this audience to aspects of Irish music that they had never heard before. It was after this performance that I decided to concentrate the repertoire of Anúna on my own arrangements and original works and to see how that went.
When We Were Famous
Anúna suddenly became a “must-see” underground phenomenon in the early 1990s. The concerts developed with each one. John and I introduced movement. Any of you who attend a choral festival will have come across "choral movement". Sometimes it is a little effective, usually, however, it is unbelievably cringe-inducing. The reason that Anúna’s movement works is simply because all of it comes from the music itself. Some of the songs are created as quasi ritualistic pieces, and it is telling that we rarely move in non-spiritual works. I made our first album, simply titled ANÚNA, in 1993. Essentially it was a recording of a live performance in a small church with no audience, and while there are technical issues associated with it, it is very obvious from the album that something original is taking place.
Publicity Shot, Blessington 1993. Pic Nigel Brand
I have to admit that I was taken back by the buzz of interest that surrounded Anúna in the early 1990s. In retrospect I realise that something as original as this was very attractive to the music industry. Anúna were presenting a new face of Irish music - young, classically trained, sophisticated and stylish - very much as the new "Celtic Tiger" wanted to see itself, but more importantly, how it wanted to be seen by the international community. It was in this guise that we were asked to take part in the original Riverdance. Anúna recorded the Grammy Award winning CD and the 6 million selling VHS and appeared with the show until 1996.
At that stage I could see that all my work was in danger of being absorbed into what was quickly becoming a generic cash-machine, so I decided to pull out of it. Many of the performers were attracted to the glamour of being associated with the show, and loved the notion of being a star - I never was, and only performed twice in the show [both days that we recorded the VHS]. The music was not written by me, excellent as it was, and what we did on stage was a pale reflection of what we did in our own concerts. Understandably I lost enthusiasm for it. Virtually all of the singers who had joined in 1991 left the choir to tour with Riverdance under the imaginative title of “The Riverdance Singers”. Riverdance had begun as a passionate and original creation – a coming together of brilliant performers in a country suddenly waking as if from a long sleep.Today it is a faint echo, an image of Ireland captured in 1994, but not the country I see around me. It was a defining moment in the history of modern Ireland in so many ways, and I am very proud that Anúna played such a significant role in the original concept.
Riverdance at the Point : 1995. Pic Andrew McGlynn
Despite the roller-coaster ride of being part of the biggest entertainment phenomena in the world from 1994 to 1996, I managed to recorded three albums with Anúna , Invocation, two versions of Omnis [the album that spawned the choral mega-hit song "Dúlamán"] and Deep Dead Blue. And then it all calmed down…There was a long period of time when I was very much left alone to repair the commercial ravages and concentrate on my own aspirations for the group. It is understandable that any idea could lose its way under the commercial pressures that Anúna was under. The one thing that saved it was the music.
Beyond Riverdance
Because there was such a strong basis to the musical part of Anúna I forgot about the “morning after the night before" feeling and the best hangover cure was to record the album Behind the Closed Eye. Released in 1997 Behind the Closed Eye featured the Ulster Orchestra, led and directed by Lesley Hatfield, and was Anúna’s first orchestral collaboration. To be honest, it wasn’t just that. The choir and orchestra never met, and there are very few songs that feature singers and instruments. I needed to stretch myself as a writer and keep interested in what I was doing. The whole background to the record with its settings of the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge and pastoral atmosphere was a huge departure for me, and has resulted in a beautiul and unusual album.
Belfast Autumn 1996 : Pic Philip Gray
Unexpectedly, in 1998 Anúna signed to the Gimell/Universal label, and released Deep Dead Blue in the UK. Steve Smith of Gimell/Polygram thought that Anúna was original enough to be part of the same label as one of the finest choral groups in the world The Tallis Scholars. I was very pleased I must admit, and Steve worked very hard to make the association a success. Deep Dead Blue went top 5 in the UK Specialist Classical charts, was nominated for a Classical Brit award in 2000, and sold very well. However the industry was in a state of considerable flux, and the Gimell label [now revived] was folded up just before we could fully exploit the album. Coincidentally, we were invited to give the first ever Irish Prom at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Prom Series, the most important classical music festival in the world - undoubtedly the highlight of our performance career to date. In many ways I was very, very lucky to have been part of the upper echelons of the classical music industry for even that short time. I experienced the death-throes of a business where labels were run by genuinely artistic people as opposed to the situation today where most major labels are run by accountants.
The next year I began work on the most difficult Anúna album I recorded, Cynara, which entered a new and more complex musical world than its predecessors, interweaving complex choral harmonies with the trademark ethereal sound of the choir. The focus went away from the soloist and back on the choir. Anúna were traveling more and more, and at this stage we had thrown off the Riverdance albatross everywhere except in Ireland, where the association persists even today ad nauseum. Throughout the next few years I re-recorded or remastered all of the early albums. This was a huge undertaking. I added new vocals to some of the music, and some of the albums benefited enormously from the digital technological advances that have happened in the last few years. In 2006 we released our most radical musical statement Sensation. It took two year to complete and was our first new album in six years. I would compare it to the second album Invocation also very ground-breaking and consistent in quality, but the polar opposite in content. All the songs are originals of my own.
Anúna Today
Since 1996 Anúna have visited twenty-three countries including Japan, the USA, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Chile, Canada, Argentina, Italy and Belgium. In 2007 the group flew to Cleveland Ohio to record a special for American Public Television. Made by Elevation president Denny Young and Maryland Public Television, the TV special, entitled "Anúna- Celtic Origins", was broadcast nationwide in the USA on PBS [Public Broadcast Service] and the off-shoot CD and DVD did very well too, at one stage being the biggest selling world music album in the USA. The whole project was created and backed by Borders, one of the USA’s biggest retailers of CDs and Books. John McGlynn took command of the choir on a thirty-nine date US tour in late 2007, which has awakened a new audience to what we do there.
2008 has been a very special year for me. This year I finished my DVD Invocations. I filmed and edited this myself, and it will see the light of day in Europe in 2008 and elsewhere in early 2009. It has been a wonderful experience to try to put images to my music, and the choir have patiently stood on mountains, in rivers, in rain and snow attempting to look composed and ethereal while avoiding ant flies and cows. I’m also putting the finishing touches to Sanctus, an album of spiritual music that features a selection of my spiritual works, with a performance of the famous Allegri Miserere and Lotti’s Crucifixus. Most interesting of all is Christmas Memories…
"Angels are Singing" from Christmas Memories : Baltimore 2008. Pic Tom Weyburn
Christmas Memories was created by Philip Marshall backed again ably by Denny Young of Elevation, Borders and Maryland Public Television. This is a programme, CD and DVD that will be broadcast in the USA and hopefully elsewhere this Christmas. I can’t say very much about it, but it is utterly different to everything we have ever done, and features extensive choreography by Sammy Bayes.
I am immensely proud of the work Anúna has done and grateful for the opportunities that it has given me as a writer. The singers have been provided with crucial skills, performance and industry experience which has allowed them to exploit their gifts on the international stage. On a less high-brow note Anúna have been credited with single-handedly creating the entire "Celtic Soprano" genre of singing. This pure soprano sound we developed has been unexpectedly successful for those singers that have left us. However, leaving that aside, the greatest gift we can offer a young performer is the experience of professional performance and recording. No other Irish group offers anything similar.
Writing this brief history has been interesting. I don't feel any differently about Anúna 21 years after I set it up, so there must be something special going on...
© Michael McGlynn 2008