Enya

The Irish singer Enya Brennan (or, more correctly, Eithne Ni Bhraonain) began her musical career in 1980 with Clannad, a historic group of the Irish Gaelic folk revival. After two years she left the group to devote herself to compositions marked by a vocal style that was at once solemn and noble, lyrical and ethereal, and by synthetic harmonies (inspired by classical music) that were as austere as they were majestic and otherworldly, close to the meditative tones of new age music.

On her first album, Enya (BBC, 1987), reissued as The Celts (WEA, 1992), Enya devised the technique that would make her famous: using traditional Irish instruments, electric guitar, synthesizer and bass, and above all layered vocalizations in multitudes of echoes and counterpoints, to evoke magical and archaic landscapes.
The Celts is the track, taken from a television series, that made her famous in Ireland. In these childlike refrains (the most explicit being Fairy Tale, but also Boadicea, hummed with closed lips) the art of lullabies, ring games and music boxes is sublimated, but with the austere tone of classical music. The proximity to the madrigal, the vesper and the Renaissance song is evident in solemn airs such as I Want Tomorrow, Triad, and To Go Beyond.
The most original and personal aspect of Enya’s art arises precisely from “slowing down” those madrigals until they become abstract sounds in slow, majestic motion. The melodic quality then dissolves and resurfaces only after long pauses of pure ecstasy. Meditative watercolors such as Aldebaran (vocals drifting among the clouds compose angelic melodies), The Sun In The Stream (with piano and bagpipes in the foreground), and Portrait (a piano sonata with a synthesized string section) propose a soft, smiling intimacy that has something humble, rural and Franciscan about it, in sharp contrast with the noisy music of her time.
Enya composes all the music and plays all the instruments. Nicky Ryan assists her with the arrangements.

Watermark (WEA, 1988), rich in meticulous and intensely chromatic ballads, at times almost symphonic, always epic and impalpable, represents an effort that is more classical than pop. Enya senses that her abstract folk has a far greater appeal than her cultural background alone. By structuring her compositions in a more orchestral way, accentuating the minimalist component of the harmonies, slowing the rhythms even further, and stretching her vowels in an even more angelic manner over the softest instrumental sounds, Enya ends up embracing the (spiritual, contemplative, adult) philosophy of new age music, but from a perspective that is at once more metaphysical (insofar as it is full of references to the supernatural) and anthropological (insofar as it overflows with echoes of the past).
The album thus displays pianistic romances such as Watermark, which serve as overtures to fairy-tale landscapes, and solemn hymns of almost religious intensity such as On Your Shore, sung with a lyrical and austere tone in her clear medieval contralto register. The slow, ecstatic lullaby of Longships brushes against Buddhist trance.
The paradisiacal quality of her sound triumphs in the march of African percussion and celestial solfeggi of Storms In Africa, a masterpiece of melodic progression that exemplifies how Enya manages to secrete the maximum emotion with the minimum harmonic effort.
The commercial side of her operation takes over in the growing chant of Cursum Perficio, an example of the application of minimalist techniques to Gregorian chant, reminiscent of the mass choralism of Atom Heart Mother (Pink Floyd).
Even more spectacular is the jungle-rhythm crescendo of Orinoco Flow, destined to remain her most famous piece. The rhythm is beaten by the keyboards rather than by percussion. The choir repeats, as always, a very simple refrain, making very elementary use of counterpoint. The sense of driving progression is created by rapid piano figures and the roar of the tom-toms. Enya’s music is very little polyphonic; it is a form of singing that almost does not know counterpoint. And yet it enchants.

Shepherd Moons (WEA, 1991) does not fully recapture that magic, even if the celestial opening of the title track, the pianistic sonata of Lothlorien, the Renaissance madrigal of Marble Halls (one of the few traditional songs she has unearthed), the medieval hymn of Afer Ventus (an unusually complex vocal experiment for her), and the triumphal march of Ebudae (a more ethnic version of Orinoco Flow) recycle her arranging tricks and her art of airy counterpoint. Her airs nonetheless retain a deep pathos, at times as solemn as an “Ave Maria,” at other times as subdued as a children’s lullaby. The orchestrations are often classical (including harp, cello, and piano).
Enya finds her finest form again in the waltz of Caribbean Blue, one of her liveliest compositions and one of the melodic peaks of her divine nursery rhymes. The orchestration is ingenious: the double bass keeps the waltz time, while the string instruments burst into a tinkling that imitates the Baroque harpsichord and the violins press forward like in a Vivaldi concerto. The vocal progressions, floating in clouds of angelic choirs, complete the spell. Another brilliant melody is Book Of Days, one of her most regular songs, propelled by imposing scansions of electronic keyboards ā la Vangelis.
Overall, a more angelic tone further blurs the core of her compositions.

The Memory Of Trees (Warner Bros, 1995) smells even more of second-hand material. The Memory Of Trees and Athair Ar Neamh, though formally impeccable, add nothing of substance, merely reshuffling techniques already exploited several times. Too many tracks live only by reflection, by memories, by déjā vu. On My Way Home is yet another revision of the progression of Orinoco.
The album’s high points are instead the more unusual compositions: the swaying chant of Anywhere Is (with a minimalist string-orchestra accompaniment reminiscent of Michael Nyman’s chamber music), and the funeral march of Pax Deorum (a spell sung in a macabre tone against a stormy backdrop of Egyptian temple drums and a Greek-tragedy chorus), and the gentle aria China Roses, which swims in harpsichord gleams and violin mists. The orchestra steps aside when her crystalline contralto intones pure hymns such as Once You Had Gold in the style of the Renaissance madrigal that has always been one of her greatest inspirations. The delicate pianistic romance From Where I Am perhaps reveals a hidden ambition: that of a composer of instrumental new age music. The partnership between Nicky Ryan and Enya reaches its Baroque peak here. The arrangements are perfect, but often there are no emotions to justify them.

Enya’s floating vocal flourishes lie on the border between the most ancestral folk and church music, thus exploring a range of registers rarely frequented in the history of popular music.

Her nursery rhymes (mindful of centuries-old traditions of lullabies, spells, ring games, and lullabies) seem to come from another universe, from a magical and dreamlike world in which the earthly laws of gravity do not apply. Enya often hums sotto voce, practically devoid of emotion. The melody repeats mechanically, as in the strictest minimalism. And yet from such simplicity Enya manages to exhume the remains of something ancestral and profoundly “human,” something that tastes of archaic rituals and primordial emotions, of something rooted in the collective psyche of the human race. Enya has rediscovered music as it was before being “invented” by musicians: a pure expressive act, a pure abstract sound, prior even to thought and word.

Paint The Sky With Stars (1997) is an excellent anthology, which also offers two new tracks: Paint The Sky With Stars, a radiant hymn that ranks among her most appealing Renaissance-style songs, and Only If, a music box repeated over an insistent counterpoint of Baroque orchestra (harpsichord and violins), which may remain her greatest masterpiece.

A Day Without Rain (Reprise, 2000) is an album about how Enya makes music. It has the sophisticated, manic electro-classical arrangements, and it has her soft, mesmerizing, acrobatic vocals. Unfortunately, it doesn't have music to match the medium. The single, Only Time, merely recycles a handful of sonic stereotypes from her career.