ARTS,MUSIC:Enya: Paint the Sky with Celtic Notes

By Zhou De

Athair ar Neamh, Dia linn
Athair ar Neamh, Dia liom
m'anam, mo chroí, mo ghlóir,
moladh duit, a Dhia.
Switching on the radio, I sit still. The haunting melody floats over, and permeates the cabana as blowing up a balloon. Along with the scattered paper, dog-eared dictionary and dozing flowers, I am bathed in the sound of nature, and overwhelmed by an unutterable power.
The first time I came to hear of Enya, it was six years ago when the teacher chanted the preface to Wan Loon’s Tolerance, set by Enya’s Athair Ar Neamh. The melody gurgles out from the cassette, and exerts on me an indescribable magic. All of a sudden I found myself shed all the vexing thermodynamics formulas, principles of motions and long, headache verses with lush dictions, armed with but ignorance and a sincere severance to the nature. I closed my math book and that is one of the rare occasions where I did nothing other than pooling my attention in my Chinese class.
Fada an lá, go sámh,
Fada an oích', gan ghruaim,
aoibhneas, áthas, grá
moladh duit, a Dhia.

Móraim thú ó lá go lá.
Móraim thú ó oích' go hóich'.
Having no idea of what the lyrics tell（until last year when I came to catch the Gaelic words）, I was just sitting still as what I am, feeling the flow of Enya’s unique voice, stirred in the deepest heart.
The lapse of time does not wear away its fascination for me. When the wretchedness melts into tears, when the smiles play around the lips, the heaven-touched, choral-like melody, alongside the classical motifs would often leave me speechless. It’s really difficult to parallel the amazing and tranquilizing songs with a battery of praise adjectives. There’s no need to do so, actually.
As the rabbit leads Alice into her dreaming wonderland, it is Enya’s unique voice that guides me into the wonderland of Irish music, a miracle of the world’s music treasure trove. Secret Garden, U2, West Life, Mary Black, etc. a galaxy of transcendent singers and bands of the Irish music stride over, all carrying their own projections of life and interpretations of the unique culture in their motherland. I was then getting more and more acquainted with the looming melancholy in Secret Garden, a matrix of confusing and passion of U2, and lachrymose, high-pitched let-out from West Life.
But Enya always stays as my first choice for her delicate and penetrating voice, simple yet sincere melody, and her impressive temperament, bewitching rather than tempting, impossible to imitate.
Enya is not beautiful, in worldly sense. But she has cavernous eyes, as deep as the starry night. She has breathtaking voices, not to carry you away but to pacify and purify the mind.
She often gets sensitive, just as the songs she sings and composes.
“Music is located in relation to an imagined geography,” writes Andrew Blake, “and often expresses that geography.” Enya’s projection of the geography is her interpretation in the authentic Irishness, a continuing pastoral and simple Irish countryside identity with sacredness and misty melancholy, a slight different version from the ideological construction of Ireland by river dance.
“Behind Ireland fierce and militant, is the Ireland poetic, passionate, remembering, idyllic, fanciful, and always patriotic.” Yeats, the poet laureate of Ireland showed his confidence of Irishness in his Popular Ballard Poetry of Ireland. And Enya’s songs are also teemed with such confidence and passion. Her songs are strongly concerned with the symbiotic relationship which locks landscape and humans, and quite often God and Goddess. In her poetic songs, such scenes could be often discerned just as the description of Irish beauty by Anon——“richly covered with woods, delightfully situated houses, the oars of a majestically moving boat and the sounds of which ravish the senses.”
The traditional “bright and green” Irishness is interwoven with misty melancholy in Enya’s songs. She is not like “a sprightly lark with a song in her little mouth”, nor a beautiful thrush “stretching out in melodious song”. And in her music we can often discern the misty melancholy even from the briskness of her music. She sings as nightingales, seeing off the senile sun and embracing the dark blue sky painted with stars, awaiting the rebirth of the days and brightness. She tongues out neither sheer melancholy, nor mere delight. She always sings the blending——solemnity, joy and infinite piety to the almighty heaven, the rejoices of the people after a handsome reap and the reverence to the awesomeness of nature.
The melancholy is shared by Secret Garden and Bono, the lyricist and soul of U2, who interprets the Irish melancholy this way, “in a much more mysterious way it’s very Irish, the ache and the melancholy in it uniquely Irish.”
Enya’s humming is not likely to leave us on wires or to exult insanely, either could we weep or shed tears just as many do after viewing the sensational, tear-gas-like Korean MV Kiss. But Enya’s songs have an ineffable glamour, reflecting the search of peace and simplicity of life and free from the mobbing hubbubs and bustling worldliness.
When her debut Watermark in 1988 achieved a faraway success and established the heights for the gifted Irish vocalist and pianist, many doubted the endurance of the glamour of simple Celtic style she represents. However, her following albums followed suit and introduced her to the world’s music hall. Shepherd Moons, the Celts, the Memory of Trees, Paint the Sky with Stars and a Day without Rain each “romantic name” chalked a new sales record. While she sticks to the Celtic elements in her music despite that the international taste is much more pronounced.
Along with the hits of Enya, she became a frequenter to the Grammy ceremonies and almost each time tipped as favorites to awards. Her name soon became internationally house-hold, and Enya manias make presence and garrison one by one in a multitude of corners of the globe with a quite broad milieu of audiences, in Europe, in the US, in China, in Africa, etc. Abreast with the Enya rushes, the Celtic folkloric worldwide strikes the globe with its fresh style and heart-felt gratitude to life it presents.
Bono deemed art, especially music, as “a search for identity” in a conversation with Richard Kearney. In Irish singer tradition, local success to any degree was usually by a swift relocation to London and other metropolises on the globe. While Enya always stresses her Celtic identity despite an international fame in music, specifically in the New Age arena. She spares no efforts in the promoting of the fragrant Celtic music, the fresh notes with the fragrance of the grass and woods, and is fully in the position to be the prolocutor of it. In her albums, Enya relates the ancient Celtic myths, allegories and fairy tales in her choral style to the globe inhabitants. Her performance of How Can I Keep from Singing invigorates the traditional Irish psalm and in Aldebaran Enya traces to the migration of the ancient Celtic. The Celtic, the opening track of Enya’s debut writes her gratitude to and strong identification with the Irishness, especially the Celtic culture which nurtures her inspirations.
When English becomes the dominating “lingua franca”, Enya insisting on her passion and devotion to the local Gaelic, and many of her songs, including my favorite Athair Ar Neamh, are performed in it. The little knowledge of the language would not be an impediment, because we can feel the soul of the songs in our deep heart. 　
The songs of Enya are imprinted with the Irish, especially the Celtic elements which conceives her continuous inspirations. She never thought of denying that.
“I think my inspirations would come from people, people that have passed on, memories of them, but it can also be landscape. I came from the North West of Ireland, county Donegal and its very rural area: mountainous, beaches, rushes and it is somewhere I love to go. I feel I like I need to get back to my roots, back to who I am. There is nowhere better than to go home because I find the people there know me as “Eithne” and they don’t treat me any differently. They are proud of the success, but it’s so lovely that they talk to me as if only I just left yesterday! That keeps me very grounded and that’s very important to me.”
Enya, the New Age laureate, is more like a minstrel singer, wending the way at the dewy dawn into the valley or sitting by the typical Irish bar and witnessing the civilian’s dance in joy.
Paint the sky with stars, Enya gilds the selections of her best songs with this poetic and romantic verse. Singing sincerely for her Irishness, Enya is also painting with the Celtic notes in a sky free from hostility, hubbub and the vices of life. All the sparkling notes hanging and dangling in the sky-ceiling relates to us the peace, delight, piety and gratitude to the heaven, in a language we all understand.