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Adiemus is a series of vocalise-style albums by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. It is also the title of the opening track called “Adiemus” on the first album in the series, Songs of Sanctuary.
Each Adiemus album is a collection of song-length pieces featuring harmonised vocal melody against an orchestra 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, or in numerous classical and crossover compositions), the language of Adiemus is carefully stylised so as not to distract the listener’s attention from the pitch and timbre of the voice. Syllables rarely end in consonants, for example. In this respect it is similar to Japanese and several other languages. The core concept of Adiemus is that the voice should be allowed to function as nothing more than an instrument, an approach that was a trend in some New Age and World Music choral writing in the mid to late 1990s[citation needed] (compare, for example, Vangelis’s score for the film 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), or Dogora, a symphonic suite by French composer Étienne Perruchon).
The word adiemus itself resembles the Latin word adeamus meaning “let us approach” (or “let us submit a cause to a referee”), or, is sometimes regarded as the future tense of the same verb, meaning “we will approach” or “we will take possession”. Jenkins has said he was unaware of this. The song title also resembles two forms of the Latin verb audire (“to hear”): audiemus (“we shall hear”) and audiamus (“let us hear”).
Their British Hit Singles, years, and top positions are:
- Adiemus – 1995 – 48
Info from Wikipedia
