Chant on Radio 4

[jean]

How did a not particularly good recording of monks singing plainsong achieve such huge popular success?

In Chant, Richard Coles delves into the 1990's when a recording of Benedictine monks singing became so popular it sold in the millions around the world. If an album of classical music sold anywhere near one million copies at that time, it was considered unusual. For one to sell more than that was unprecedented. Adding further to this phenomenon was the fact that this was unfamiliar music at the time, Gregorian Chant, performed not by celebrity artists who might attract a large following, but by monks from a remote corner of Northern Spain. EMI marketed this album Canto Gregoriano, or Chant as it was named in America, as a unique antidote to stress.

Richard Coles with former EMI employees Kick Klimbie and Jane McCann, retrace EMI's marketing tactics in the promotion of Canto Gregoriano. Professor Adrian North will also be providing insights throughout the programme into the psychology of marketing, exploring what drives people to buy certain things, and how music can impact upon us physically and emotionally. Richard Coles also takes a trip to the Isle of Wight, where Gregorian Chant is still an important aspect of life at both St Cecilia's Abbey and Quarr Abbey, and questions whether such music is still capable of having any meaning or impact upon our lives in the twenty-first century.

[french frank]

Was the programme itself interesting, or does the introductory information tell us all we need to know? i.e.

In the 1990s a CD of Gregorian chant sung by monks was a massive hit with the public.

It was marketed by EMI as an antidote to stress.

The presenter goes to the IoW to find out whether Gregorian chant (which is still sung) can have any impact on 'our' lives.

Not knocking the programme, just asking.

[Serial_Apologist]

How did a not particularly good recording of monks singing plainsong achieve such huge popular success?

Plainchant offers a music "not going anywhere" or narrative-driven, close in spirit if not "letter" to the meditational/devotional musics from Buddhist traditions (if not older), as distinct from Western musics since the time when the diatonic system with its harmonic and rhythmic emphasis on departing from and to a tonic for resolution or reaching a new one symptomatic of civilisation's evolvement of competition-based social and economic models. The appeal of plainchant rests in this reminder of times when individuals identified with community and the natural cycles, which we rather lost sight of with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and rise of the alienated individual consciousness - which is not to praise the Noble Savage or claim things were better when life was short and brutish.

[Miles Coverdale]

How did a not particularly good recording of monks singing plainsong achieve such huge popular success?

A triumph of marketing over content, principally.

[ardcarp]

Where do we find the programme. Jean? Can we have a link?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Where do we find the programme. Jean? Can we have a link?

I think the whole of jean's post is a link - click on the red rext and it takes you to the former Communard.

[jean]

Yes, that's right. Except the bit about the monks not being very good

But perhaps that was part of the appeal - perhaps what the chant meant to the monks came through somehow.

.

[jean]

I think I must apologise to the monks. I remember the phenomenon of their recording but I did not buy it or even listen to it because I already had lots of recordings of chant - mostly the Archiv ones of the monks of the Abbey of St Martin in Beuron (I always found the French accents of the Solesmes monks a bit offputting, not to mention some of their editorial tics).

I was unthinkingly going by what was said at a recent plainsong workshop I was at, but I think the person who said it was referring to the Silos monks' lack of scholarship, particularly Solesmes scholarship.

I've just looked them up on YouTube, and they're not so bad.

I enjoyed the programme, but I was called away in the middle and must LA.