Loreena McKennitt infuses Celtic tunes with global sound

Loreena McKennitt’s work, as she describes it, is “musical travel writing.”

Certainly, her multiethnic take on traditional Celtic music has earned her fans around the globe. She’s won album-sales awards from places as far-flung as Argentina, Turkey and New Zealand.

The Canadian singer-songwriter is best known in the United States for her album “The Book of Secrets,” and its single “The Mummers’ Dance,” both of which hit the Billboard Top 20 in early 1998. The song proves a good synopsis of McKennitt’s style, with influences covering a good chunk of the planet.

“Celtic history, geographically, spans all the way across Europe and into Asia Minor,” she said during a recent phone interview.

The other thing “Mummers’ Dance” highlights is McKennitt’s arresting clarity of voice, which she’s been developing since age five, when a piano teacher recruited her into a children’s choir.

McKennitt lives in Stratford, Ontario, home of a world-famous Shakespeare festival for which she once served as a crew member. The format of her concerts — two sets with an intermission, and no opening act — comes from that background. The influence goes all the way to her custom lighting plot.

“The first thing the audience hears is this exotic Greek instrument called the lyra, and (the player is) lit in a dramatic way,” she said. “For a lot of people it’s evocative.”

After a musical hiatus spurred by the death of her fiance and two close friends in 1998 in a boating accident, things are looking up for McKennitt. In September 2006, she played at the historic Alhambra castle in Spain. Two months later, she released “An Ancient Muse” to general acclaim.

She says she doesn’t mind if she never regains the notoriety she had before the hiatus — and that in any case, she’s not in the business of pop music.

“It is a kind of a world music,” she says, “in the very most literal sense of that term.”

WHAT IN THE WORLD?

Loreena McKennitt’s nine-member band packs some familiar instruments, like guitar, cello, violin and drums, but identifying the others may require some music classes and an atlas — or this handy guide.

Bouzouki: A longnecked, fretted stringed instrument, similar to a mandolin, that dates to ancient Greece.

Hurdy gurdy: A western European stringed instrument with a distinctive hand crank. The crank turns a wheel, which rubs against the strings. Notes are played on a mechanical keyboard.

Lute: A stringed instrument with a large pear-shaped body and a short, wide neck. Its origins are the subject of debate, but are generally assumed to be Middle Eastern.

Lyra (also lyre): A harp-like instrument played with a plectrum. According to legend, it was invented by the Greek god Hermes.

Oud: A fretless ancestor of the lute, to which it gave its name and shape. Purportedly invented by Lamech, the sixth-great-grandson of Adam. The Arabic name just means “wood.”

Tabla: Hand drums from India, popularized in the West by their inclusion in several Beatles songs.

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Loreena McKennitt

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Pikes Peak Center, 190 S. Cascade Ave.

Tickets: $35-$75 at the box office or ticketswest.com