Adiemus (pronounced /ædi'eməs/) is the title of a series of albums by British composer Karl Jenkins. The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet can be used to show pronounciation in English. ... Karl Jenkins (born February 17, 1944) is a Welsh musician and composer. ...

• Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary (1995)
• Adiemus II: Cantata Mundi (1997)
• Adiemus III: Dances of Time (1998)
• Adiemus IV: The Eternal Knot (2001)
• Adiemus V: Vocalise (2003)

• The Journey: The Best of Adiemus (2000)
• Adiemus Live (2002)
• Adiemus New Best & Live (2002)
• The Essential Adiemus (2003)

(Adiemus is also the title of the opening track on Songs of Sanctuary.) 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A 1997 album by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, part of the Adiemus series of albums. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Ademius III: Dances of Time is a 1998 album composed by Karl Jenkins as part of his Adiemus series. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Adiemus IV: The Eternal Knot is a 2001 album composed by Karl Jenkins as part of his Adiemus series. ... 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ... For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Concept

Each Adiemus album is a collection of song-length pieces featuring harmonised vocal melody against an orchestral background. There are no lyrics as such, instead the vocalists sing syllables and 'words' invented by Jenkins. However, rather than creating musical interest from patterns of phonemes as in scat singing, the language of Adiemus is carefully stylised so as not to distract the listener's attention from the pitch and timbre of the voice—for example, as in African languages, syllables ending in consonants are rare. The core concept of Adiemus is that the voice should be allowed to function as nothing more than an instrument, a post-modern approach that has become something of a trend in recent choral writing, for example Vangelis's score for the film 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). The word Adiemus itself resembles a Latin word meaning 'We will draw near', though incorrectly formed; Jenkins claims to have been unaware of this. This article is about musical harmony. ... Harry Belafonte singing, photograph by C. van Vechten Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, which is often contrasted with speech. ... Look up melody in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A philharmonic orchestra An orchestra is an instrumental ensemble, usually a fairly large instrumental ensemble with string, brass, woodwind sections, and possibly a percussion section as well. ... Lyrics are the words in songs. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Scat singing is vocalizing either wordlessly or with nonsense words and syllables as employed by jazz singers who create the equivalent of an instrumental solo using only the voice. ... Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. ... In music, timbre, also timber (from Fr. ... The term African languages refers to the approximately 1800 languages spoken in Africa. ... In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. ... A musical instrument is a device that has been constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... A choir or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers. ... // Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (Ευάγγελος Οδυσσέας Παπαθανασίου) [IPA: É›væŋɛlɪs ɔðɪsɛɪæs É”pæpæθænæsiu], artist name Vangelis Papathanassiou (Βαγγέλης Παπαθανασίου) or just Vangelis (Βαγγέλης) [IPA: or ], is a world-renowned new age and electronic composer and musician, best known for his Academy Award winning score for the film Chariots of Fire, and scores for... 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a 1992 American/Spanish adventure/drama film. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ...

Instrumentation and performers

The session singer Miriam Stockley performed the vocal parts on the first four albums. Additional vocals were provided by Mary Carewe on all but Dances of Time, which saw the introduction of the Finnish Adiemus Singers (who would later reappear on Vocalise). Extra vocals and the chorus effects were created by overdubbing multitracked recordings of the singers (in some cases up to forty times) and varying the speed of the tape. Stockley was described by Jenkins as central to the Adiemus project due to her range and intonation, however for reasons that remain unclear she was not re-engaged for Vocalise. A session singer is a singer who is hired for a single session of recording, as opposed to being a regular member of a band. ... Miriam Stockley is an English singer, born (ca. ... Overdubbing is a technique used by recording studios to add a supplementary recorded sound to a previously taped musical recording. ... The Tascam 85 16B analogue tape recorder can record 16 tracks of audio on 1 inch (2. ... Intonation is a term used to cover particular uses of tones in linguistics and music. ...

The Songs of Sanctuary orchestra consisted of a string section augmented by various ethnic percussion instruments, with occasional further additions such as bells, a recorder and a quena. Mike Ratledge, with whom Jenkins had played in Soft Machine, contributed to the first album as well. Jenkins added brass and woodwind for Cantata Mundi, and continued to add more diverse instruments such as acoustic guitar on later albums. From Songs of Sanctuary to Dances of Time, the London Philharmonic Orchestra was used; Jenkins later formed his own Adiemus Orchestra to perform on The Eternal Knot recordings, returning to the LPO for Vocalise. An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. ... A percussion instrument can be any object which produces a sound by being struck with an implement, shaken, rubbed, scraped, or by any other action which sets the object into vibration. ... A bell is a simple sound-making device. ... Various recorders The recorder is a woodwind musical instrument of the family known as fipple flutes or internal duct flutes—whistle-like instruments which include the tin whistle and ocarina. ... The quena (quechua: qina, sometimes also written kena in english) is the traditional flute of the Andes. ... Michael R. (Mike) Ratledge (born Maidstone, april 1943) is a British musician. ... The Soft Machine were a pioneering British psychedelic, progressive rock and jazz band from Canterbury, Kent, England, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. ... Image of a trumpet. ... A woodwind instrument is a musical instrument in which sound is produced by blowing through a mouthpiece against an edge or by a vibrating reed, and in which the pitch is varied by opening or closing holes in the body of the instrument. ... A classical guitar, also called a Spanish guitar, is a musical instrument from the family of musical instruments called chordophones. ... The London Philharmonic Orchestra (frequently abbreviated to LPO), based in London, is one of the major orchestras of the United Kingdom. ...

The Adiemus Singers

• Pirjo Aittomäki
• Mervi Hiltunen
• Anna-Mari Kähärä
• Merja Rajala
• Säde Rissanen
• Hanna-Riikka Siitonen
• Mia Simanainen
• Nina Tapio
• Riikka Timonen

Nina Tapio (born 1972) is a Finnish singer, songwriter, musical actor, and session musician. ...

Musical style

Though there has been considerable evolution over the course of the project, the musical language of Adiemus draws heavily on classical and world music. Jenkins follows conventions of tonality up to a point—his harmony is derived from gospel and African music, decorated with functional dissonances such as suspensions and with greater freedom of movement between loosely related key areas. He often employs unusual time signatures, with a slow 3/2 being very characteristic along with 6/8, 9/8 and even 5/8 (Cantus Inaequalis from Songs of Sanctuary). The percussion section, when used prominently, typically gives the pieces an upbeat, tribal-like rhythm. Classical music is a broad, somewhat imprecise term, referring to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of, European art, ecclesiastical and concert music, encompassing a broad period from roughly 1000 to the present day. ... World music is, most generally, all the music in the world. ... Tonality is a system of writing music according to certain hierarchical pitch relationships around a key center or tonic. ... Gospel music may refer to the religious music that first came out of African-American churches in the first quarter of the twentieth century or, more loosely, to both black gospel music and to the religious music composed and sung by predominately white Southern Gospel artists. ... Africa is a large and diverse continent, consisting of dozens of countries, hundreds of languages and thousands of races, tribes and ethnic groups. ... In music, a consonance (Latin consonare, sounding together) is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance, which is considered unstable. ... In music theory, a suspension is a nonchord tone that occurs when the harmony shifts from one chord to another, but one or more notes of the first chord are held over, suspended, into the second but then resolved to a chord tone. ... In music theory, the key identifies the tonic triad, the chord, major or minor, which represents the final point of rest for a piece, or the focal point of a section. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... http://www. ...

The underlying mood of Adiemus is energetic and uplifting, complemented by pieces with what Jenkins describes as an ecclesiastical mood. Many listeners identify the sound of Adiemus with New Age or Celtic music; indeed The Eternal Knot is an explicitly Celtic-themed album that formed the sound-track for the S4C documentary The Celts. In classical music circles Adiemus has struggled to distance itself from the chill out quasi-genre, but the earlier albums are considered important crossover works nonetheless. This article should be transwikied to wiktionary Ecclesiastical means pertaining to the Church (especially Christianity) as an organized body of believers and clergy, with a stress on its juridical and institutional structure. ... New Age music, is a vaguely defined style of music that is generally quite melodic and often primarily instrumental. ... Celtic music is a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe. ... S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru, which is Welsh for Channel Four Wales) is a television channel in Wales. ... Chill out (sometimes chillout), a term derived from a slang injunction to relax, emerged in the early and mid-1990s as a catch-all term for various styles of relatively mellow, slow-tempo music made by contemporary producers in the electronic music scene. ... In music crossover is a term used to describe artists of a certain style or genre whose popularity crosses the considered boundaries of where the music of that style or genre is normally found. ...

Audience

Songs of Sanctuary was a huge commercial success, topping classical album charts. It is considered by critics to be the quintessential album, on which Jenkins' vision succeeds to the greatest extent with the fewest resources. Though none of its successors has achieved the same critical acclaim, Adiemus acquired a cult following and maintained a place in mainstream consciousness through its use in TV commercials, in particular the track Adiemus in a Delta Air Lines commercial (for which the project began ), and Cantilena from Cantata Mundi in a recent Cheltenham & Gloucester commercial. The Adiemus track is also used as the soundtrack behind the Kubla Khan pillar show at the end of the big room cave tour in Kartchner Caverns State Park in Arizona. Additionally, Adiemus was used in the trailer to Invisible Children's documentary movie. It is also used in the New South Wales Tourism TV commercials (Australia). The Adiemus track was also used as an unofficial soundtrack to the Italian tv program Stargate, a weekly La7 and former TMC documentary on archaeology and mystical topics. In South Korea, Adiemus was used to showcase the world phone service of SK Telecom in 2004. This article is becoming very long. ... Mainstream is, generally, the common current of thought of the majority. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Delta Boeing 757-232 at Los Angeles International Airport in August 2003, showing the livery the airline instituted in 2000. ... Kartchner Caverns State Park is an Arizona state park, located nine miles south of the town of Benson. ... This article is about the film. ... SK Telecom (hangul:SK텔레콤, 에스케이텔레콤) is a leading South Korean mobile telecommunication operator, controlled by the SK Group, one of the countrys largest chaebol. ...

External links

• Adiemus on MySpace
• Adiemus Unofficial Homepage
• Adiemus on Last.fm