Here’s one of the Delta ads featuring “Adiemus,” which began appearing in 1994:Īnd here’s the celebrated 1989 British Airways commercial known as “Faces:” I think it’s possible to know what they loved in particular. We presented the agency and the client with a demonstration tape of one of my completed compositions. At this time, Jenkins Ratledge were commissioned to come up with the music for an airline commercial. Said Jenkins: ‘I’d been toying with a new idea, completely separate to my work in advertising. A page featured on Jenkins’ website until at least 2010 explains: “the Adiemus project ‘got off the ground’ initially due to a television commercial for an airline. The reason for this explosion in Adiemus activities is a tale in itself. So it’s entirely reasonable that many of us, recalling a swatch of melody or the soothing soprano from “Adiemus,” would ascribe it to the most notable figure in the ad, the prima donna of New-Age vocals.įor Jenkins, this one composition would spawn a much larger project that took on the Adiemus name (five albums numbered I through V, one live record, one “best of,” and Essential Adiemus to date), which was also used to denote the ad hoc group of musicians who recorded and toured his music. ![]() Meanwhile, Enya was by far the most famous artist collected on the CD. Importantly - confusingly - the ad credits as the track’s artist not Jenkins, but rather some entity also called “Adiemus” Whence, perhaps, the mix-up Jenkins’ name appears nowhere in the spot. Just as that transition occurs, a scrolling track list rises from the bottom of the frame. The ad first features Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” before seguing into Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” which in turn gives way to “Adiemus.” (A UK version called just Moods preceded Pure Moods by a few years.) “Imagine a world where time drifts slowly,” the voiceover begins. In the mid-90s, a commercial hawking the record was ubiquitous on afternoon cable TV in the US. The cause of the Enya–“Adiemus” conflation, however, is easy enough to locate: the 1994 new-age compilation CD Pure Moods. ![]() ![]() If Freud thought he could access the human subconscious by studying psychological misfires and accidents - neuroses, dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue - we denizens of the internet age have these kind of digital errata as our own index of a larger undiscovered country: that collective unconscious home to conventional wisdom, hidden assumptions, and widely held beliefs that turn out to be all wrong. ![]() In a world with fewer and fewer record-store clerks, it’s as if we’ve come to sort music like the Pandora algorithm run amok: “Prominent female vocalist?” “Relaxed, New-Age feel?” Must be Enya! Search YouTube and you’ll find plenty of uploaders who - somehow despite possessing a copy of the recording (thanks MP3s) - also credit Enya with the song. Google the title of said piece and neck-and-neck with Jenkins, auto-complete wonders if you’re looking for “Adiemus” plus “Enya,” the Irish New-Age singer-songwriter. As the first sentence of Welsh composer Karl Jenkns’ official “ biog” (that’s what his website calls it) reads, “a recent exhaustive survey shows that Sir Karl Jenkins is now the most-performed living composer in the world.” But a funny thing about Jenkins is that you’re very likely to think that “Adiemus,” his most famous piece, wasn’t associated with him at all. There is one composer, however, who’s pretty sure that he’s the globe’s favorite. Do you know who the most-performed living composer in the world is? That’s ok - neither do I.
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