Chant.

It is inevitable, I suppose, that only a few of us church music troglodytes can still sight-sing Gregorian Chant from the neumatic notation on a four-line staff. All the more remarkable, then, has been the success of the album, Chant," sung by the Spanish monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. It has sold 4 million copies in CD and cassette form. A double CD, the original issue in 1993, was moderately successful, but the single went over the top in the United States and worldwide.

I have heard (and sung, and conducted) some good chant in my time, in the minor and major seminaries in Saint Paul, as director of the cathedral choir in Corpus Christi, Texas, and as professor of music history and literature at Del Mar College, also in Corpus Christi. Rarely have I heard anything to match the performance of the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. Their intonation is almost always perfect, their singing is carefully nuanced, and it is done with a conviction that fairly breathes their love of what they do, as a reflection of their profound faith.

Of the performances, more below. First, some context.

It is entirely fitting and proper (dignum et justum est, as we used to say) that it was a choir of Benedictines that brought about this musical tour deforce. Only a choir of men or women dedicated to the chanting of the Divine Office seven times a day, with one or two Masses besides, and with a tradition of years adding up to centuries, could possibly achieve the artistic and devotional splendor of this very unexpected, but most welcome, musical offering.

It was their founder, Saint Benedict himself, who, about A.D. 500, gave the great impetus to the monastic movement, which established the critical structure of the church of the Middle Ages. This included the institution of the scriptorium, derived from the Roman administrator Cassiodorus, where all manuscripts, pagan and Christian, were sedulously copied, and where the chants of the early church were preserved for posterity. Besides, Benedict's Holy Rule prescribed the daily public chanting of the Mass and the Divine Office.

Immediately after Benedict, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who scholars generally agree followed the Benedictine Rule, took broad initiatives in the administration of the Western church, including collection of the manuscripts of the chant which now bears his name. Although we may doubt that Gregory--a very busy man, pope, pastor, preacher, at times a general--wrote any of the music, he deserves the credit for collecting and preserving it.

Hardly any of the extant chants date from earlier than the ninth century, when Charlemagne, first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and a great lover of all learning, including music, decreed the forms of the chant to be used throughout Europe. But while we cannot date with certainty anything before 800, it must be assumed that there was a continuum from the chants in Benedict's monastery at Monte Cassino--indeed, even from the synagogue music sung by Christ and the Apostles--to such popular chants as the Requiem Mass (thirteenth century) and the Mass of the Angels (fifteenth-sixteenth century).

It is axiomatic that old forms, whether of art or technology, give way to newer forms in the irrestistible march of history. About the year 1000 the austere unison chant began to be harmonized, possibly quite by the accident of some sleepy monks singing Matins below pitch, in the style we now call parallel organum. However it may have started, many-voiced music, the Western world's greatest contribution to music, gradually developed over the course of five centuries to the glories of Renaissance polyphony created by Palestrina and his contemporaries. And, though they continued to base many of their compositions on the Gregorian melodies, by 1600 the new music had, for all practical purposes, displaced the chant and it lay in dormant manuscripts in dusty monastic and cathedral archives for 200 years.

Again it was the Benedictine monks--notably of the Abbey of Sainte Pierre in Solesmes, France--who, through their scholarly researches in the Paleographie Musicale, brought back to the light of common day the vast treasury of the chant (some 3000 melodies, according to Dr. Willi Apel's latest edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music), and the proper way to notate and sing it.

Sadly, in our day the chant has suffered another period of decline, almost unto death. The cause was a misreading of the first document published by the Second Vatican Council, the "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy" [Sacrosanctum concilium, December 1963]. In it the council fathers urged greater participation by the laity in the Mass through use of all the world's vernaculars. Most pastors in the United States took this encouragement of the vernacular as a commandment to discard the whole treasury of Catholic church music up to that point. As a result, we gradually abandoned not only the Gregorian Chant, sung at least passably in many of our churches, but also the Cecilian Latin Masses which abounded before the council, and--with apparently few regrets--the great classical and romantic orchestral Masses, which, by the way, still enhance the liturgy in Austria, Southern Germany, and various isolated spots elsewhere in Western Europe and the United States. At the same time, we abandoned the contemporary Latin Masses and motets that had only begun to reach us from Europe, notably from Holland, Belgium, France, and Italy.

We have had more than a generation now to try the new English-language music, with mixed results: some success in some parishes, and perceptible improvement in participation by the laity in the liturgy; but with a general lowering of musical standards.

Now that the dust of old arguments between church musicians and liturgists has settled, and we can sing, or speak, pretty well what we please, or whatever we are capable of, in Latin or the vernacular, it seems high time for a new renaissance of sacred music, including the now familiar hymns and responses and ordinaries in English, as well as much Latin music, for chorus, for chorus and organ or orchestra or both, which we have not heard for a long, long time. And (need I say it?) the Gregorian Chant. The overwhelming success of the "Chant" album by the Spanish monks can point the way to a new millennium of good music of all kinds.

Now, back to the recordings. The original double disc was recorded in the monastery church and is now available in the United States from Musical Heritage Society (P.O. Box 1408, Asbury Park, N.J. 07712, listed as No. 5233698K). The single disc was released by Angel Records as CDC 7243 5 55138 2 3, and is available everywhere records are sold.

The performers--the monks who sing the chants--retain their medieval and monastic anonymity. Only the directors' names are known: Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta and Francisco Lara.

The single, best-seller CD includes nineteen separate chants, selected from the thirty-two on Musical Heritage's double CD. It presents examples of all chant styles, from the purely syllabic--i.e., one note (occasionally two or three) per syllable of text--to the highly melismatic, in which a syllable of text may carry a melisma (Gr.: song) over numerous notes. Also represented are seven of the eight modes of chant, early scales from which our modem major and minor scales evolved.

Several major feasts of the church year are represented, including four chants for Christmas, two for Pentecost, and four for various days in Holy Week. Unfortunately, in most cases it's difficult for anyone but a Latinist familiar with the liturgy to identify which feasts go with which chants. I cannot fault the people at Angel for this lacuna in their album insert; most people in the vast audience they visualized would not be interested in the arcana of the chant. But I would feel within critical bounds to scold the Musical Heritage people for their similar neglect.

Help was on the way, however; somebody in the Angel organization saw to it that Dr. Katherine Le Mee, a lover of all things medieval, wrote a fine little book for Bell Tower (titled, like the album, Chant) to appear simultaneously with the Angel release, identifying the feasts and providing translations of all the texts. It also has a good brief history of Gregorian Chant, and quite a lot of interesting information on the physical and psychological benefits to be derived from listening to this kind of music.

So if you have $15 for the book, after already laying out another $15 for the Angel, and a further $26 if you go for the Musical Heritage double, you're all set to enjoy, probably charge-up your psychic batteries, and possibly throw in a modicum of devotion as you listen to this sublime chant.