About Chant Village

ChantVillage.com is a cross-cultural project created by Susan Hellauer of Anonymous 4. It was inspired by her participation in the 2006 US tour of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, featuring the great Hindu Carnatic singer Aruna Sairam, the Moslem Sufi Daqqa ensemble from Morocco, the Moroccan-American singer/guitarist Gerard Edery, Palestinian multi instrumentalist Zafer Tawil, and world-music percussionist Jamie Haddad. The musical, spiritual and personal interactions, the friendship, respect and support among the performers both onstage and off, were an inspiration to continue this work, and to use music to create a level of respect and understanding that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.

Our mission: to create and foster respect and understanding of different cultures’ spiritual traditions, by looking for what unites us (while not ignoring what divides us) through the language of music, as performed by the greatest performers, live and on recording. Although ChantVillage.com explores the connections between the music of sacred traditions, it has no religious affiliation and is not supported or influenced by any religious organizations.

How we will accomplish our mission: By making information available to members of the community about live performance and educational events; amateur ensembles that you can sing with; discographies, performer and scholar profiles, with soundclips and downloads, reviews, events, interviews, and links; news articles about chant from many cultures; study materials for Susan Hellauer’s Chant Camps; bibliographies and descriptions of books, magazines and articles about chant; links to other chant-related sites; special offers and giveaways of featured cds and concert tickets.

Future plans: ChantVillage.com hopes to be able to present concert performances and tours of the world’s great chant performers, and to develop a radio program/podcasts to help introduce a wider audience to the many sounds of traditional chant of the world; and to help to discover and bring to the world little known but worthy chant performers, wherever they may be.

As a founding member of the American vocal quartet Anonymous 4, Susan Hellauer has witnessed the “chant effect” firsthand. Millions of listeners, with or without a personal religious connection to Gregorian Chant, and generally no experience of medieval music, have heard Anonymous 4 sing medieval plainchant, live in concert or on cd, and have become believers in the power of chant to transform and transcend ordinary experience. ChantVillage.com is a continuation and extension of this work, initially inspired by Susan’s role in the U.S. tour of the Fes Festival of Sacred World Music in 2006.

Susan Hellauer has transcribed, edited and arranged almost all of Anonymous 4’s medieval chant sources for their numerous chart-topping cds of medieval music. In recent years, Susan has begun to lead Chant Camps for both amateur and professional singers wishing to learn more about chant – its modes, forms, structures and uses – and how to sing it in the free-flowing, rhapsodic style used by Anonymous 4 and many other wonderful modern chant performers. ChantVillage.com contains many resources for those who attend these camps, and wish more background information and material for further study and singing.