News

07-01-2008

Robert Aubrey Davis (Millennium of Music) reviews Chant: Music for the Soul

Chant: Music for the Soul

Robert Aubry Davis reviews Chant: Music for the Soul for The Bob Edwards Show:
The A & R guy for Universal Classics and Jazz in London was playing Halo one day…you know, that best-selling video game with the weird pseudo-Gregorian Chant soundtrack. “What we need here,” Universal’s Tom Lewis thought, “is a fresh new group singing this stuff”…so, he advertises in European papers for groups to submit videos—kind of like the early rounds of American Idol. . . .

Read the entire review at Millennium of Music

AND, bonus: interview with chant scholar and Fanfare reviewer Fr. Jerome Weber, also on the Millennium of Music website

10-10-2007

Champion of chant: Prof. William Mahrt of Stanford

Read Cynthia Haven's article on Prof. William Mahrt and his longstanding work with the St. Ann Choir in Palo Alto, California.

L.A. Cicero


William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a "fruitful interaction" with Stanford's doctoral students of musicology, who find it "a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history."

11-20-2007

Pope Calls for Return to Gregorian Chant

In an article for the Telegraph of London, Malcolm Moore reported on Pope Benedict's dissatisfaction with the state of modern Catholic worship music, as well as the Sistine Choir itself, along with the organ and organist.

This is seen as a call for a return to the purity of Gregorian plainchant, and other Baroque and earlier forms of sacred polyphony.

05-16-2008

Universal Music signs Cistercian monks to recording contract

It was a new-meets-old story. Earlier this year, Universal Records posted an audition notice on YouTube, looking for an ensemble to record Gregorian chant. They don't have a TV, but they do have a computer, and a choir of monks from the twelfth-century Cistercian monastery of Heiligenkreuz near Vienna responded with an audition video. And they snagged the gig. Now the recording has been released in Austria and Germany (worldwide release to follow shortly)  -- on the same label as Amy Winehouse and Eminem -- and the abbot is reeling at the miraculous turn of events. Read the Reuters article on Yahoo news.

Listen to samples from the recording, and get a free download at the recording's own website.