Music is the only expression that is close to the spirit, Michael McGlynn, director of the groundbreaking choir, Anúna, tells Arminta Wallace
'Come on, come on - give it a bit of welly . . ." It's not, frankly, what you expect to hear at a rehearsal of the ethereal Anúna. But then there's more to Anúna than girly voices and candles - or so, at least, says the choir's founder-director, Michael McGlynn. "It's not about sweet little rock-singer voices. I believe every singer should explore every avenue of vocal music, and we do," he declares. What Anúna is about, above all, is survival. In its 15 years of existence, some 130 singers have passed through the group, which has released 11 albums, played with Elvis Costello, toured with Riverdance, represented Ireland - twice - at the World Sacred Music Festival in Morocco and sung at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the first Irish BBC Prom. Not bad, as McGlynn wryly points out, for an amateur choir which doesn't receive a penny of state support.
The name Anúna comes from the old Irish An Uaithne, the collective term for the three traditional types of Celtic vocal music: suantraí, geantraí and goltraí; lullabies, happy songs and laments. It's a pretty comprehensive canvas, and the new album Essential Anúna includes a 10th-century dirge, complete with blood-curdling drum, medieval Norse music from the Orkney Islands, a love-song from Co Down, settings of poems by Yeats and Francis Ledwidge, and a gorgeously sinuous Paternoster. This last is one of the pieces being put through its paces at the rehearsal - a process of such painstaking detail that, even to the untutored ear, its obvious choral ethereality is considerably harder to achieve than it is to listen to.
In an upstairs room of Walton's School of Music on South Great George's Street, the music is unpicked note by note and put back together again by 15 singers of astonishingly youthful appearance. "So it's Pah-teh-nos-teh, is it?" McGlynn teases. "Well, cheers to you, mate." Exaggerated diction is not, it seems, part of the Anúna sound; a relaxed Irish "r", on the other hand, is. Snatched comments are batted back and forth across the room, some so technical they wouldn't be out of place in a submarine command centre.
"You're a semitone above it, soprano one," notes a tenor, shaking his head. "What line are you on?" somebody asks. "Well, there's an upper moving line and a lower moving line," comes the implacable reply - and off they go again, with Panem nostrum quotidianum . . .
"Do you want this for your corporate gig?" McGlynn consults his brother John, who, besides singing, designing CD covers and providing guitar accompaniments, sorts out Anúna's performing commitments. "Yeah, right - the Our Father in Latin. They'd love it." The corporate gig in question will, he announces, be a Gothic horror night.
Then it's back to work. Hard work. An Appalachian spiritual; a folk-song in Irish. Five minutes devoted to the singing of the single word "eleison". And some of these singers have driven to this rehearsal from as far afield as Limerick, Mullingar and Carlow.
"I'm very hard on them," McGlynn admits, after he has shooed them all home. "But we are a tyrannical democracy. I get the final say, but if they don't agree with me they won't button their lips - and they don't. They're a wonderful vehicle to work with, because their enthusiasm keeps it going. And their loyalty is tremendous."
Where does he get his singers from? "Everywhere," he says. "But I wish I was getting more singers of high quality. What I'm getting are these naturally gifted, hugely enthusiastic young singers - but there aren't enough hours in the day to train them. There aren't. The problem with Anúna is, there's me and then there's the singers as they come in; and they come in very raw - or sometimes they come in highly over-trained." And the biggest problem with over-trained singers? He sighs. "Attitude. Vocal training in Ireland is all geared towards opera. They don't do anything except opera. Everything is geared towards going to an opera house, going into an opera chorus. There are some teachers who are open-minded; they send me singers all the time. But why am I the only outlet for singers who want to do something different? Why is there not a chamber choir that specialises in 16th- and 17th-century music? Or contemporary music? I don't want to be negative about it, but unless that problem is addressed . . ." He shrugs. "I had this naïve idea when I set up Anúna that Irish choirs would develop this style of singing - that people would copy the sound. It never happened."
McGlynn started singing and conducting choirs while studying for a music degree. "At the time there was nobody singing Machaut and Purchell, which was what I wanted to hear. And I had a particular love for certain songs - not just Irish traditional music, but English traditional music, American traditional music, Eastern music. I wanted to explore that, but I set up Anúna primarily as an outlet for my own music."
As for the famously ethereal sound, he says, it was always in his head. "I always heard the sound - and the proof of that is, I discovered recordings the other day which were made in 1989 and the choir sounds identical, even though there are only two members in common. But the sound was there. It's all based on the sound of the human voice - but only if it's natural. John and myself and my younger brother Tom used to sing together as children - and then when I went to college I'd go out to a gig in a pub or something, and hear a voice, and want to steal it away."
When it comes to influences, he cites Clannad and Nóirín Ní Riain. "But Debussy is the greatest influence on my music, and Gesualdo on my choral music. I never listen to classical music at all, and by classical I mean 19th-century music. It bores me to death. I've never heard one piece by Verdi that I wanted to hear again, ever, ever."
Instead, he listens to Berg, Björk, Bossa Nova, Jeff Buckley and Hildegard of Bingen. He's a fan of Paul Herriott on Lyric FM, and the ESB jazz festival. No need to ask about Anúna's eclectic material, then. But what about the spiritual element, especially in live performance? Does McGlynn regard that as a bonus or a responsibility? "What we give to the audience is a panoramic view of their culture - and also of themselves," he says. "An Anúna show is full of humour, movement, lights, costumes. People are in tears at the concerts, often. I wonder is it spiritual, though? I think what it is, is that people are made to slow down and virtually stop. People have to stop and listen. It's not necessarily spiritual, but on the other hand, music is the only expression we have that is close to the spirit."
Right at the other end of the spiritual scale - from God to Mammon, as it were - was Anúna's brief involvement with the Riverdance roadshow in the mid-1990s which, McGlynn says now, had its good and bad aspects. "It raised our profile hugely - although in a way, it knocked us off kilter because we weren't created for Riverdance," he says.
"When we went into the show there was a huge buzz. We knew that what we were doing was something culturally significant. The Celtic Tiger was appearing for the first time and there was this sense of moving forward. The Famine commemorations were crucial, and people like Sinéad O'Connor were celebrating their Irishness, their culture.
"Riverdance came out of that. It was pure serendipity - a happy accident - although history will rewrite it differently. In terms of Anúna, John and Moya let us do what we wanted. They spoiled us totally. And then after about a year it turned into a money-making exercise and I lost interest. I wish it had stopped there. I wish we were left with - Do you remember Riverdance? Instead of Riverdance in Estonia."
McGlynn's own career as a composer continues apace, with several projects in the pipeline including an album for the oboeist Matthew Manning, further collaborations with the Finnish six-voice ensemble Rajaton and an Irish-language opera with Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill.
But the lack of official recognition for Anúna in Ireland clearly irritates him. "The classical music infrastructure in Ireland is modelled on that of Germany and the UK and America and Japan. Then something like Anúna comes along - which, in my opinion, is Irish classical music, serious music - and there's no place for it. Maybe if we spent less time gazing at other people's navels and turned around and gazed into our own and said, 'What is it that we actually do that is better?', we'd be getting somewhere."
After 15 years, you'd think he'd be ready to throw his hat - or maybe his cloak - at it. "No: I'll fight to the bitter end to ensure that things are better for singers. And my time will come," he says, only half joking.
"Eventually people will say, 'Listen, he's being saying this for 20 years. Maybe we should do something about it . . .' "
Anúna's Christmas concert is at Christ Church Cathedral on Friday. Booking: 01-6793664. Essential Anúna will be released on Universal Records in late January