Music like Adiemus

Adiemus is a series of new-age music albums by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. It is also the title of the opening track on the first album of the series, Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary, recorded in 1994 and released the next year.

Each Adiemus album is a collection of song-length pieces featuring harmonised vocal melody against an orchestra background.

The vocal parts are not written in an actual language, despite some of the lyrics bearing a passing similarity to Latin. The 'words' were written phonetically by Jenkins to match the orchestral parts, with the intention being to have the voices act purely as another instrument.

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 shall approach" or "we shall take possession". The title also resembles two forms of the Latin verb audire ("to hear"): audiemus ("we shall hear") and audiamus ("let us hear"), although Jenkins has said he was unaware of any connections to real Latin words.