March of the Celts

Album version

3:15

Gaelic

1987/1992

Liner notes

…echoes from the past…

notes by Roma Ryan
The Celts album booklet, 1992

Quotes about the song

Enya: We were approached by a BBC producer called Tony McAuley and he rang up one day asking if we were interested in writing music for a TV series called The Celts. And he said there were various composers who were writing for it, but the director was looking for something very different. So myself and Nicky Ryan, who works with me, decided to, uh, write a piece that would be appropriate for The Celts. So we came up with the piece ‘The March of the Celts,’ and spent a few days arranging it, and sent it away. And they accepted it and then we were commissioned to write all of the music for The Celts.
TV Interview: To Go Beyond, BBC, 1987
enyabookofdays.com

Enya: They’d been working on The Celts, researching for two years, and they decided it was about time they started getting the music in. They had lots of tapes from different composers and didn’t like any of the music and so Tony McAuley rang and said, ‘Are you interested in this project and if so, could you write us a piece of music and send it yesterday?’ So myself and Nicky went into the studio for five or six days and came out with ‘The March Of The Celts’. We just went to town and decided to do what we liked. Nicky said, ‘Let’s do multi-vocals, let’s try this’ and we just tried everything we wanted and sent it off. There was silence for a few days and the next thing we heard they all loved it. What they were gonna do initially was have a composer for each program, but when they heard our piece of music they commissioned us to write the whole 70 minutes of music.
Watermark press release, Geffen Records, 1989
enyabookofdays.com

Gaelic lyrics

Translation

lyrics by Roma Ryan
EMI Music Publishing Ltd, 1987