NEWS FEATURE: French Monastery Keeps Gregorian Chant Alive

c. 2003 Religion News Service SOLESMES, France _ This tiny village abutting the river Sarthe boasts a single homestyle restaurant, several sleepy stone farmhouses and a tangle of apple-tree-studded country lanes as picturesque as anywhere in central France. But it is Solesmes’ massive monastery that draws hundreds of scholars, religious clerics and lay visitors each […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

SOLESMES, France _ This tiny village abutting the river Sarthe boasts a single homestyle restaurant, several sleepy stone farmhouses and a tangle of apple-tree-studded country lanes as picturesque as anywhere in central France.

But it is Solesmes’ massive monastery that draws hundreds of scholars, religious clerics and lay visitors each year, to hear what is arguably one of the world’s purest renditions of haunting, medieval-era Gregorian chants.


More than a century ago, the monks of Solesmes helped resurrect Gregorian chant from the dustbin of liturgical history. Today, the chants offer a rich new repertory for choral groups and early music scholars. In the early 1990s, they even struck brief commercial stardom, topping European and American pop music charts in a coup of marketing mastery.

But the success has largely bypassed the Catholic Church. The chants have spawned no floods of novices to monasteries like Solesmes, experts say, no rush to adopt the Latin liturgy in Sunday services. If anything, the use of Gregorian chant has declined since Vatican II, as churches turn to vernacular “pastoral” music instead.

“The revival of Gregorian chants today is outside the monasteries. It’s almost exclusively within the secular world,” acknowledged Father Daniel Saulnier, who heads Gregorian research at Solesmes. But, he added, “Gregorian chants have always survived independently of monks. So far, nothing has stopped the Gregorian chants.”

Certainly, the chants face no danger of extinction at Solesmes, where they are seamlessly woven into a tapestry of prayer, meditation and work followed by the monastery’s 70 Benedictine monks.

The day begins at 5:30 a.m., with a simple, single-note psalmody, and ends with compline, the last service, at 8:30 p.m. A new chant is added weekly _ daily during Lent and religious holidays. For novices, the repertory appears all the more daunting when Latin studies are thrown in.

During a recent Lenten visit, Solesmes’ parish church was filled with a mostly elderly congregation, who grasped canes and kneeled painfully in prayer. The monks strode in, two by two, clad in flowing dark robes.

“To the sick, health; to the indigent, help; to the afflicted, consolationâÂ?¦” The Latin verses floated across the quiet, sunlit church, decorated with statues of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene.


“All the monks sing,” said choir director Yves-Marie Lelievre. “Whether or not they come in knowing about Gregorian chants. Whether or not they have beautiful voices. Even those who are very old, and hardly have any voices left, sing.”

Father Lelievre trains the monks only a half-hour weekly _ there is no time for more _ although he works separately with new students and with the schola, a group of eight “soloists.” But with five hours of music chanted daily, there appears to be little need for more practice.

Slight and soft-spoken, the 38-year-old monk from Brittany once played viola professionally, traveling as far as Guadalajara to work in a Mexican orchestra. He watched Mexicans mix their faith lightly, almost unconsciously into daily life, and began contemplating monasticism. In 1993, he took his first vows at Solesmes.

“The choice wasn’t difficult, because of the music,” Lelievre said. “I knew if I gave up the viola, the music would remain in the liturgy. Even before I knew about Gregorian chants.”

But many other monks arrive at Solesmes with little knowledge of music, or of the monastery’s Gregorian legacy. That was the case of Hartford, Conn., native Michael Bozell, who arrived as a young man to Solesmes 25 years ago.

“The Gregorian chant grows on you,” said Bozell, now 49 and the only American monk at the monastery. “Over the years, you think certain parts of the scripture musically. We all feel it’s a conduit, helping us enter the meaning of the text. But it’s not essential.”


“You can never enter the monastery because of the chant,” he added. “And if you did, you wouldn’t stay.”

Scholars believe the first Gregorian chants were sung as early as the fifth century and passed down orally for generations. Their namesake _ sixth-century Pope Gregory the Great _ in fact had no hand in the marriage of Latin liturgy and Gallican chant. Rather, the chants blossomed under a later political alliance between the Vatican and Frankish rulers, who controlled the vast Carolingian empire of northern Europe.

Tenth century monks began transcribing the music, just as it headed toward decline. Over the centuries, particularly during the Renaissance, the melodies were embellished and corrupted. By the 19th century, few traces remained of the original chant.

Monastic life, too, waned in northern Europe, following the 16th century Reformation and the French revolution of 1789. Soon after, the monks of Solesmes were forced to scatter. For the first time, the 11th century monastery lay abandoned.

Only in 1833 did a new abbot, Prosper Gueranger, restore monastic life to Solesmes and launch an ambitious effort to research and rehabilitate the original Gregorian chants. The Vatican ultimately adopted Solesmes’ chant interpretations in its official editions.

“When I was a student in high school, I read about Solesmes,” said Tom Dansak, a jovial, 56-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Pittsburgh, attending a three-day retreat at the monastery. “All our books of chant were printed by Solesmes. If you wanted to know about Gregorian chants, you had to know about Solesmes.”


In recent years, Gregorian fever has spread far beyond the Catholic Church. Choral groups, singing plainchant and other early music, have captured a small but faithful following.

“The chants respond to a certain spiritual thirst within society,” said Sylvain Dieudonne, head of the medieval music department at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. “They appease a stressful population.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

Even a rock music record executive, vacationing in Spain just over a decade ago, was smitten by the chants. In 1993, EMI-Angel recordings of the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos topped international charts, ultimately selling 4 million copies.

“It was an impressive success in terms of money and marketing,” said Saulnier, the research head at Solesmes. For a while, he said, the monastery’s own recordings also sold like hotcakes. “But it was a small blip, which lasted only a few years.”

Indeed, Solesmes is among the last monasteries singing the entire Gregorian liturgy. Even here, only one monk _ Saulnier _ still researches the chants, working with a lay assistant to painstakingly compare hundreds of old scores. The academic debates to define Gregorian chants, and which versions ring truest to the originals, have moved elsewhere.

“Solesmes is no longer the point of reference for scholarly research,” said John Harper, director general of the Royal School of Church Music in England. “But the way they perform the chant still provides a model for many people.”


The Catholic Church, too, is searching for a modern-day successor to its oldest surviving body of music. A crop of folk and other pastoral melodies written since Vatican II has scored mixed success. The worst, critics argue, are ugly and vacuous.

“The challenge is to find a music for today with the same spiritual values as the Gregorian chant,” Dieudonne said. “So far, we haven’t found it.

“Perhaps,” he added, “we never will.”

DEA END BRYANT

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!