Gregorian chant enjoys a renaissance

It doesn't have much of a beat, the kids can't dance to it and it's sung in a dead language. But Gregorian chant seems to be the hottest thing in sacred music right now.

Consider the following:

• The wildly popular "Halo" video games use Gregorian chant (sometimes called plainsong) as background music.

• Universal Music Group, the record company best known for such acts as Amy Winehouse and Snoop Dogg, recently signed a group of Viennese monks to record an album of Gregorian chant.

• The Middle Ages chants can even greatly reduce stress, British researchers have reported.

After a public relations push by Pope Benedict, who wants Gregorian chant restored to its "pride of place" in the liturgy, a plainsong renaissance is percolating among U.S. Catholics, as well.

Nearly 200 scholas -- choirs that sing plainsong -- have popped up nationwide, many in the past five years, according to the Church Music Association of America (CMAA).

Meanwhile, religious publishers are stocking -- and selling -- large collections of plainsong books and music. One such publisher, Paraclete Press of Brewster, Mass., has sold more copies of its "Gregorian Melodies" CD in the first five months of 2008 -- 5,000 -- than it did all of last year.

"There is such an exciting resurgence around Gregorian chant," said Jim Jordan, a musicologist and Paraclete consultant. "We have the great privilege of watching it be reborn."

Gregorian chant hasn't been dead that long, at least compared with its deep history.

The style of chant is named for the sainted Pope Gregory I (circa A.D. 540-604) in what was probably an early exercise in brand marketing. Musicologists say the pope most likely didn't invent plainsong, but his name was used to help it spread from monastery to monastery in medieval Europe. Written records of Gregorian chant date to the 10th century, but many Catholic experts say it was probably transmitted orally for several centuries before it was notated.

Over the years, plainsongs' unadorned melodies, sung in Latin to an uneven meter and somehow suggestive of high religiosity, became a staple of Hollywood soundtracks, if not always Catholic churches.

"It has an inner pulse like a heartbeat, but it doesn't have a regular rhythm," said Tucker, a plainsong proponent. "The effect is like musical incense. It's always sort of floating and rising."

Chants' seemingly timeless melodies and Latin lyrics also connect Catholics throughout centuries and space, Tucker and others said.

But after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which allowed mass in local languages, Gregorian chant fell out of favor in U.S. parishes. In came guitars and tambourines, out went plainsong.

Thomas Day, a professor of music and author of the book "Why Catholics Can't Sing," said Gregorian chant became too ponderous and funereal for Catholics then accustomed to John Denver and the Carpenters. It was so slow, in fact, that it was conducted with a large stick used to pound time on the church floor, he said.

"It was very badly mangled ... and it practically disappeared," said Day, a professor at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I.

"It is now two generations since 'folk music' was introduced into the liturgy," said Mahrt. "Much of that music is ephemeral, and it has run its course; it is time for a change."

The Rev. Jay Finelli, who hosts an iTunes podcast on Gregorian chant, said his parish in Tiverton, R.I., began introducing plainsong into the liturgy several years ago.

At first, he said, it was difficult and older parishioners resisted. There are tens of thousands of Gregorian chants (Tucker calls it the world's single largest body of music) and few of them are easy to master.

But after gradually mixing plainsongs into the mass -- an Agnus Dei here, a Sanctus there -- many of his more than 2,200 parishioners began to respond.