Search - Paul Horn, Carl Orff, Islamic Chant :: Anthology of Chant

The mystery and timeless beauty of the world's ancient tradition of chant has finally, at the end of the 20th century, caught up with us. The recent explosion of interest in Gregorian, Tibetan, and other forms of sacred chant is not the real surprise; to anyone who is familiar with the power and the passion of this music, the surprise is that it took so long. The development of recording technology has at last made it possible for Westerners to hear the sacred chant of Tibet, Armenia, and the Islamic world, and for a new world of listeners to hear the glorious sounds of ancient Rome and medieval Europe.Anthology of Chant presents all of these traditions in one compilation, and what is most striking about this collection of sacred chants are the similarities between the music, though separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. From Perry Silverbirds' peace pipe chants of the Native American traditions to the great Miserere of the Renaissance composer Gregorio Allegri, from Carl Orff's musical setting of the earliest Christian text in the German language to the call of a Turkish muezzin, Anthology of Chant creates a context in which the spirituality and the intent of these disparate pieces can be felt more than heard. Even as your years tell you the music has changed dramatically, something deeper in these works, something fundamental, remains unchanged.What magical music it is! It has taken us eight centuries to rediscover the unique sounds of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who is also represented on this Anthology of Chant, but her works are now extraordinarily popular. The monks of Tibet have toured to sold-out audiences around the world. Given the chance to hear this music, listeners respond to it with a fervor that crosses, or even ignores, the boundaries of time, distance, and language.