The Sound of Heaven - Canto Gregoriano

Sometime in 1995 I read that some raves were sending the crowds home to the sound of Gregorian Chant. I wasn't a raver, so I had no idea if it was true, but I went to a small record shop in a nearby high street and asked if they had the album. On cassette. They did. I played it and immediately understood why this was good music to chill everyone out at the end of a long night of dancing to loud music.

Hymn singing assumes you can read. Not many people could read in 800AD, and Church services were conducted in Latin. That is not as daft as it sounds. Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire, and when that fell, the Catholic Church carried on, using Latin. Many ordinary people would have had some basic spoken business and religious Latin. They would have understood the words.

Gregorian chant is one tune sung by many voices. The choir sings a chord that moves up and down with the tune, but does not change within itself. The harmony does not change. Churches echo, so the notes change slowly, and the tune moves to nearby notes, not jumping around as tunes will much later. The tunes are also long and curving incorporating a number of phrases, far more than a modern song. The words often disappear into the echoes and the voices. All very different from the songs that the congregation would have sung at home or in pubs, and deliberately different: religion and its feelings are one thing, ordinary life is another. Gregorian chant was and is the sound of heaven.

(You can read about Gregorian chant in Wikipedia, and that article lists some fearsomely learned studies of the music.)

Why did this collection of songs take off - it went triple platinum - when so many others do not? It's the sound of the monks of the Monastère de Santo Domingo de Silos. A reviewer said: "the ensemble is not always perfect, but if these are not professional singers, they are, and they sound like, truly professional monks." It's the sincerity we respond to.

 

Settle in and enjoy.

So why do I play it? Because it is terrific background when I want to feel calm, maybe to focus on what I'm writing, or do something that is best done without a mind wanting to jump to something else. It removes distractions and is not itself distracting.

And sometimes because I want to chill out.