The Man Behind The Choir

When Michael McGlynn answers the door of his Rathfarnham home cum office, I have to fight hard to resist asking if his Daddy is in.

Though fast approaching thirty, Michael has the appearance of someone closer to twelve years of age. Apple-cheeked, with a pink complexion totally unrelieved by any evidence of beard growth, he could almost be a cherub straight from central casting. This impression is considerably enhanced by his voice. Soft and high pitched, it sounds as if it has yet to break. There, however, any similarities between Michael McGlynn and an altar boy come to a crashing end.

“I am seen by most people as an absolutely pig-ignorant, arrogant bastard,” he says. “Even people who know me and have worked with me think that I’m an arrogant bastard. I don’t see myself as arrogant but I suppose I can be a bastard.”

As founder, director and manager of Anúna, the acclaimed choral group who specialise in the blending of medieval, traditional and contemporary Irish music, McGlynn has established himself as one of the country’s most gifted and innovative composers. Simultaneously, though, he has become a figure who is intensely disliked by some elements in the Irish music industry. Part of this boils down to nothing more than unadulterated snobbery and jealousy on the parts of purists of all persuasions. His single-mindedness and dogged determination to see his talents recognised have also raised hackles. His youthful appearance hasn’t helped either, and has led to a lot of dark muttering along the lines of ‘who the hell does this jumped-up little git think he is anyway’.

“They’re all frightened by the fact that I’m not scared to stand up to anybody in this industry,” McGlynn asserts. “It doesn’t worry me because all that really matters to me is the music. I’ve been told that that was the wrong attitude to have. I think it’s the right attitude. It’s irrelevant how it’s achieved, what’s important is that what is achieved is of the highest quality.

“In that respect, we have excelled ourselves. Anúna have gone from being typical of Irish performers: a bit laissez faire, really don’t care, turn up with hair not washed, not shaved, ah sure, it’ll be alright. I have transformed them from being like that to being one of the most professional outfits anywhere in this country. That’s why we react so badly to being treated badly. We expect professional treatment if we are to give a professional job. The industry here should really wake up to Anúna because the rest of the world has.”

Characteristically, when others ignore Michael McGlynn and his work, he believes that it is they who are the losers, not him.

“People in this country are constantly watching their back for the next new thing coming along,” he states. “They know that Anúna could well be the next big thing to come out of this country so the attitude is, ‘let’s keep it down as long as we can’. This attitude of mine isn’t arrogance. It’s worry. We’ve spent ten years producing this bloody sound. We’ve spent ten years working at it and then somebody comes in and tells me that they know more about creating this sound than I do.

“Jesus, what we have done has been phenomenal because we have survived against terrible adversity. It’s been knock, knock, knock all the way up and when we get a bit of success, oh, we’re arrogant. Yes, we’re arrogant, because we’ve been treated like shit all along the way.”

For Michael McGlynn, a life in music was not a choice but a compulsion. Since he was a very young child, he says, his head has been awash with “a river of sound” from which he could find no retreat. It was only when he began to study music at UCD and started performing as a tenor soloist with a variety of Early Music choirs that he found a way of coping with this torrent and of “channelling it into something creative.”

Checking himself and admitting that he knows how pretentious some of this may appear, he nevertheless ploughs on with his dissertation on the perils of being a ‘real’ composer.

“I always wondered why I woke up in the middle of the night with music running through my head and why I sometimes became transfixed to the extent that I couldn’t actually physically move,” he avers. “Real composers who tap into that flow of music, that river of sound, call it God or whatever, have always had this problem. People who tap into that live in a state of hysteria all the time. Mozart is probably the greatest example of that. Music just came out of him in waves but it’s not easy to live with. Beethoven killed himself from it. There are composers in this country who end up on drink and drugs and have nervous breakdowns because of this. I don’t think we’re supposed to do this. It’s not an easy way to live.

“You become so deeply involved in the music that you find it difficult to step away from,” he continues. “In that respect, medieval music and traditional music have been very useful to me. They acted as something to pin all of this on. I’m not being pretentious. I’m not saying this is a good thing because there are wonderful writers out there who don’t feel this huge need to write. They just write lovely songs.

“It’s just that some of us have this thing and it’s not pleasant. It makes life quite difficult. You become a complete pain in the arse. My girlfriend is always complaining about this. We’re having a conversation in the park or at a party and suddenly I’m gone for five minutes. You sublimate everything to the art. It’s a real drain on the psyche.”

To date, Michael McGlynn’s Anúna have produced two albums, an eponymous debut which sold over 4,000 copies (despite only the slenderest of promotion) and the newly released Invocation. The group in its present form grew out of An Uaithne, a more strictly classically oriented choir, and McGlynn’s longtime obsession with finding a medium through which the large store of exotic vocal music from the Middle Ages could be interwoven with traditional and contemporary pieces.

On paper, this may seem like a dry and musty agenda but in practice, I guarantee you that it’s anything but. McGlynn’s compositions as performed by Anúna are as invigorating as they are unique, a series of death-defying leaps betwixt heartrending choral elegance and good old-fashioned raucous revelry. Sorta like The Beach Boys meet The Bothy Band meet a shower of mad monks out of their heads on mead and lust. Or something.

“Anúna was formed to fill a gap,” McGlynn explains. “There’s a huge amount of medieval and traditional music out there which has an academic background and has been completely neglected. Traditional music is a very exotic form in itself. Because we’re all so close to it, we don’t see how exotic Irish traditional music is. Anúna emphasises that. Our stage show is of spectacular quality which I cannot, unfortunately, say of very many other Irish groups. My identical twin brother, John, looks after that. He’s the visual side of me.

“We’re introducing this amazing stuff to a new audience which is only crying out for it, a Dublin 4 audience which is not an easy audience to introduce anything to. Christy Moore is about as far as they’ll go into traditional music, Enya maybe. Even Clannad are considered outlandish to some extent. But we’re attracting their attention and giving them something new.”

During the past five years, upwards of 65 people have passed in and out of Anúna’s pearly gates though the personnel has now stabilised at around 20 members. With an average age of 25, the line-up is an eclectic social mix, comprising teachers, computer programmers, business executives, a couple of unemployed people and a few others of indeterminate occupation. According to McGlynn, however, no one particular cast of characters is bigger than the Anúna concept itself.

“To be honest, some of them will get married and move on,” he says. “Some of them will get into other commitments but there’s so many people out there, so many young singers who approach me asking if there are any vacancies in Anúna. It’s a web of people and while they’re still interested they’re welcome. When they lose interest they can move on. What we do demand of the people is not classical training, what we want is enthusiasm and love of the music.”

Commercially, the biggest problem faced by Anúna has been the simple fact that no-one has ever successfully mass marketed a choir, in this country or indeed anywhere else. McGlynn believes that the media here have shied away from the group because what they do isn’t easy to categorise. He was especially disappointed that despite Anúna’s contribution to the ‘Riverdance’ single, they didn’t reap any of the publicity benefits that others (most notably the dancers) garnered from its phenomenal chart success. However, he reserves his greatest ire for Irish record companies.

“I’ve had record company people in this country offer me crappy little deals while saying things like, ‘Get rid of the Latin. Why don’t you put drum beats on it? Why not keyboards?’ They’re as ignorant as sin these people. ‘Let’s make something that small children will enjoy. Let’s treat the Irish public as thicks’. That’s basically what they’re saying. There is a love of the trite in this country that is at its strongest among record company people.”

Though still holding out for a deal with a major label that will allow Anúna to develop at its own pace, McGlynn does have a definite gameplan to which he is closely working. The latest album, Invocation, is very much a part of that.

“No-one has ever made an album like this before,” he declares. “It pushes the form forward, the integration of the untrained voice with the trained voice, the integration of the soloist with the choir.

Our first album is an amalgamation of many years work and performance but the recording was done in six hours. That shows you the skill of these performers. It would take The Rolling Stones twice that length to do one overdub. Many of the takes are single takes. We could record another album within a week. The material is there. We could do two more in the space of a month but I’d rather not churn them out.”

To paraphrase St. Augustine, Michael McGlynn wants the Lord to make him a superstar, but not yet.

“I’m not a commercial musician and I never have been,” he asserts. “I have a great respect for people who can be commercially successful and still do something good. Clannad are the greatest example of that. Even Enya to some extent. She does push the boundaries a little bit. But we’re not starting off trying to be commercial. We want to produce something wonderful first. We’ll worry about the million sellers later. I will compromise to a certain extent but not now because this music needs to be heard in the form it’s in.

“In five years time, I’ll ease up on this. Our fourth album will be a very commercial album. It’ll be based around texts of mythological Ireland and it’ll be very much in the realm of the New Age Celtic revival. Our first two albums and probably the next one are more exploratory, exploring things that haven’t been explored before. It’s like a child. A child can’t suddenly pretend that they can speak to everybody. A child has to learn the language first and then they can communicate. We’re still learning. We want to be able to say, ‘look at what we’ve done, look at the quality of what we’ve produced’. Then, we’ll stand back and simplify it so it’ll be more commercial.”

Inevitably, there is a large religious dimension to what Anúna do. The original sources for much of their material are the chants and hymns written by Irish monks as far back as the 12th Century. This is not to say that the beauty and majesty of their work cannot be appreciated even by black atheists such as myself. For Michael McGlynn, however, the spiritual (he prefers that word to ‘religious’) roots of the material are central to his personal devotion to it.

“There is a powerful artistic impulse in composing,” he insists. “If you don’t believe that that comes from somewhere then you believe that it comes from yourself and if you believe that then you are an egomaniac. If I believed that what I create comes from myself then I would have no reason to live. What’s the bloody point in that? It has to come from somewhere whether it be a God or an untapped energy that runs through every living creature.

“Nobody claps when a dragonfly takes off but it’s the same thing. Nobody claps when they look up at the sky in the evening. It’s all about having a spiritual attitude but, in terms of the music, the less specific the better. We’ve got Protestants and Catholics in the group. We take the mickey out of each other’s religions all the time. We don’t consider religion itself to be important.”

Personally, McGlynn has become disillusioned with the Catholicism in which he was raised. He misses the good old pre-Vatican 11 days, specifically the Latin mass and all the pomp ‘n’ circumstance that went with it.

“My attitude to the Catholic Church is that they’ve lost the point for me, and the point for me is mystery,” he asserts. “Anúna recreate that mystery in the music. I love the trappings of the Catholic Church pre-Vatican 11. I’m very much a Papist in that respect. I love the chant, the robes, the incense. By making it accessible, they’ve killed it. The pomp is gone, the ceremony, the mystery, the distance. That’s why people are turning away from the Church.”

But doesn’t that argument only suggest that there was nothing behind all of this pomp in the first place? When the sense of mystery was removed, it was exposed as an empty sham.

“No, the mystery is still there but if you don’t do the ceremony properly it doesn’t work,” he replies. “If you don’t put the jigsaw together in the right way, it’s nothing. The music added to it, drew out the mystery. The music today in the Catholic Church does not add to the mystery. So what if the people sing along with it? In the Protestant churches, they sing along with it in four parts. Get Irish people to sing along in even two parts and you’ll be lucky. The Monks of Glenstall manage two parts, at a scrape. Anúna sing in twelve parts. All that polyphonic music was written to glorify God and that glory comes out through the audience whether they know it or not.

“When you watch Pavarotti sing, you can feel the energy coming off him. Whether you call it religious energy or not is another thing. I’m only relating this to the music because I have no interest in the religious observance itself. The music is good stuff. It’s sexy stuff too. These monks had no other way to channel their sexual energy so it went into the music. But I also love the Greek Orthodox ceremony. I love Buddhism. I love the wonderful colours of what the Hindus do. I love the sense of joy in creating something beautiful that is bigger than you as a normal human being.”

Catholics being the queer fish they are, however, nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Many traditionalists regard the ancient monastic music drawn upon by Anúna as sacred in itself. There was the case of Anúna’s patron, a wealthy woman from the West of Ireland who commissioned a number of works from Michael McGlynn (including one which ultimately grew into the Invocation album). This woman’s largesse supported McGlynn at a vital time in the development of the Anúna project and, throughout that period, she seemed more than happy with the quality of what was being produced.

Then, some weeks ago, in a Sunday newspaper article about Anúna, words like “sexy” and “pagan” were used to describe one of their concert performances. The very next day, McGlynn received a stinging legal letter from solicitors acting on the woman’s behalf demanding that her name never again be publicly associated with Anúna or their work.

There was also the intriguing tale of the Catholic hierarchy and the Bulmers’ Cider ad. The opening track on Anúna’s first album is ‘Media Vita’, a piece based on a chant written in the 12th Century which was rarely performed for hundreds of years because its lyrics were considered by the religious savants of the time to bring bad luck and even death itself.

Bulmers approached Anúna about using their version of the composition in a cider ad. The commercial was made and broadcast but, almost immediately, RTE began receiving communications from various members of the hierarchy about the “distasteful and blasphemous” use of this hallowed hymn in an ad designed to flog booze. Quietly but quickly, the commercial was dropped. “Unbelievable crap,” says Michael McGlynn now of the whole incident.

For very different reasons, McGlynn has his own objections to the use and misuse of monastic music. He is not, it is fair to say, a big fan of the current so-called medieval music revival or of the Spanish monks chant albums which have become so popular during the past year.

“The thing that irritates me a lot about this medieval music revival is the fact that people just pick and choose,” he protests. “They hear something nice so they sample it and put it on a dance record or they want a bit of atmosphere so they stick on a little chant. You really have to study it before you know how to handle it. The fact that I’ve studied it means that, when I have an idea for piece, I have ten years of experience of studying it and singing it.

“I don’t like people just putting in a medieval colour thinking it will sell because the Spanish monks sold. Anúna is not about that. It’s an attempt to relive and revitalise this wonderful Irish music. To be honest, we don’t care about the rest of the world. It just so happens that the rest of the world seem to care more about what Anúna do than Ireland does. Our stuff will have to sell abroad before it will sell here.”

Nevertheless, Anúna themselves are not beyond adding a little “medieval colour” to other people’s recordings if the circumstances, and the price, are right. In recent times, they have worked with such luminaries as Sinead O’Connor, The Chieftains with Sting and Máire Ní Bhraonaín of Clannad. They have also had the honour of working with Barry Manilow, on the soundtrack for the animated film, Thumbelina, which was recorded in Windmill Lane and which remains for McGlynn one of his favourite collaborative ventures.

“It’s one of the rare things that retained our sound,” he insists. “Barry was very quiet for the first three quarters of an hour of the session. It turned out he was saying excessively nasty things in the control room about us. But as the thing progressed and we started to get used to what he was doing, we turned on the full Anúna sound, and he was going ‘Wow, that’s great guys’. You learn a lot from working with people like Barry Manilow. He is a genius. You can dislike what he does but he knows his stuff.

“And, if people think I’m arrogant, they should spend a bit of time with Barry. There were all these record company executives in the studio and they were walking around shaking, literally: ‘He doesn’t like it, he’s not happy. Oh my God, Barry, what do you need?’. Barry would only have to say one word and the whole place would be in uproar. He didn’t interfere at all with me and that’s the sign of a professional. He just let me get on with what I do. I was only the hired lackey but he still listened to what I had to say which is more than I can say for some of the others.”

A two hour audience with Michael McGlynn can be an exhausting business. To grab a little breather, I ask an autopilot question about what sort of music he listens to in his spare time. I come to twenty minutes later and catch only the end of his enormous litany.

“. . . Debussy, Pentangle, Altan, chant, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Tibetan chant, Chinese music, Grace Jones. I also have a very, very soft spot for punk, particularly the Sex Pistols. Secrets Of The Beehive by David Sylvian is another great favourite.”

On the wall above his desk, Michael McGlynn keeps a large colour photograph of George Michael emerging earlier this year from the High Court in London. Is this to remind him of how risky a record deal can be and how the whole thing can go horribly wrong?

“George Michael is up there for two reasons,” explains McGlynn. “For a start, he’s a consummate artist, a fabulous singer and his arrangements are quite fabulous. Secondly, he wears really snazzy clothes. I don’t need him to remind me of the dangers. We’re not going to get ourselves signed to someone for ten years. When we sign to a major label, it’ll be with a deal that works.

“If I had planned it, I couldn’t have thought of a worse industry to get into and I couldn’t have thought of a worse genre than choral music. We’re not accepted by the traditional music field, by the popular music field, by the crossover people, the folk people. We have to create our own little niche. What I do is very much more complex than what my contemporaries are doing in the ‘serious’ classical world from which I am completely ostracised.

“I want to be commercial, you see, and you have to be totally uncommercial and inaccessible to be accepted in that world. I know the cards are stacked against me. That makes me all the more determined to succeed. I have no intention of doing anything else.”