Recessional Music

THE MUMMER’S DANCE

LOREENA MCKENNITT

Selecting the recessional music was not as easy as selecting the processional music. There was much debate, but The Mummer’s Dance finally won out over Ray Lynch’s Celestial Soda Pop. Here are Ms. McKennitt’s commentary, and the song itself.

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Over a number of years spent ruminating on the distinctive characteristics of the Celts, I began to wonder if their legendarily nomadic ways arose from an inner need. An involuntary response, rather than a pragmatic one; a restlessness that had its roots in an insatiable curiosity.

In casting your inspirational net as an artist, you become familiar with the humility that comes with watching your best-laid plans veer sideways, and recordings becoming something other than what you expected. So, you set out to travel to Rome…and end up in Istanbul. You set off for Japan…and you end up on a train across Siberia. The journey, not the destination, becomes a source of wonder.

Mumming usually involves a group of performers dressing up in masks (sometimes of straw) and clothes bedecked with ribbons or rags, and setting out on a procession to neighboring homes singing songs and carrying branches of greenery. It’s primarily associated with springtime and fertility, and it has a cast of stock characters, like the Fool, which recurs in some form or another from Morris dancing to the shadow puppet plays of Turkey and Greece and even the morality plays of the Middle Ages. – Loreena McKennitt

When in the springtime of the year

When the trees are crowned with leaves

When the ash and oak, and the birch and yew

Are dressed in ribbons fair

When owls call the breathless moon

In the blue veil of the night

The shadows of the trees appear

Amidst the lantern light

We’ve been rambling all the night

And some time of this day

Now returning back again

We bring a garland gay

Who will go down to those shady groves

And summon the shadows there

And tie a ribbon on those sheltering arms

In the springtime of the year

The songs of the birds seem to fill the wood

That when the fiddler plays

All their voices can be heard

Long past their woodland days

And so they linked their hands and danced

Round in circles and in rows

And so the journey of the night descends

When all the shade are gone

A garland gay we bring you here

And at your door we stand

It is a sprout well budded out

The work of Our Lord’s hand

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