To learn about Gregorian chant, check out these Web sites

By Father Paul Bombardier

Special to the Observer

"In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum et in fines orbis terras verba eorum." psalmus 18:5(RSV 19:5)

This is what greets you when you log on to the chant Web page: www.Princeton.edu/chant_html/. And this is about as fancy as it gets.

There are no graphics, no background music, just a white page with text.

I suppose I should have taken this as a warning, but intrepidly on I went. I quickly discovered that this was the base of operations for scholars, not those who are curious about chant, its history, etc.

All of the text here is in outline form, no full sentences to be found. This, I suppose has its own value, but to the average parish musician who is looking, you will want to read further to find a much better resource.

But, to those who want a scholarly research area, this is about the best place you are going to find. There were several disappointments, which, you are assured when you go through the links, will be corrected in the near future. When exactly that is, is a very good question.

The chant conference that is advertised took place in the spring of 2000.

There was one link that I very much was eager to look at, in hopes of seeing a corpus of chant either in manuscript form or transcribed to "modern" chant notation. I was assured that it would be there "very soon." When I did go to some of the archives, etc., that I hoped would have some amount of chant illustrations, I discovered that there were only inventories of what is in a given manuscript.

As I said at the beginning, this is a site for scholarly research. What one does is look up the city code for the manuscript, write to said city’s research facility and one can obtain a copy of the manuscript.

But on to the site you will want to go to for some good information on chant!

Begin with the URL, <http://listen.to/plainchant/>. That is correct. There is no www in this address. You are asked here to choose a language, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese or Brazilian Portuguese. Below this is the "chant of the week." When I visited the site I was treated to "Psallite, Deo nostro, psallite." From here I was able to negotiate to quite a bit of information at this site.

"The Sound of Silence" is what Willy Schuyesmans, our Web master, calls chant, and he explains this in his own story of how he became interested in chant.

If you want to know a brief history about chant through the modern age, this is the place to go. Willy treats you to a fast tour, and I mean fast, of approximately 800 years or more of music history.

We are also given the origins of musical notation, reasons for regional variations of given tunes, and the origins of the modern age’s revival of interest in chant.

Links. We all love links. There are plenty of them here, let me assure you. When you go to "Chant on the Web," I hope you have time to explore. The headings here are: Gregorian chant, Gregorian Choirs, Liturgy, Bible, Manuscripts, Calendars, and Miscellaneous.

Go to "Gregorian Chant" and have a look at, perhaps the most famous monastic institution with regard to chant, Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. A quick look at Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes was fascinating. This is the monastery where the renewal of chant got its big start. The history of chant on the Web page we started on here gives you some of the story that took place here.

You are given a great pictorial tour of the monastery, including areas of the cloister, where guests normally are not allowed. You can also view specific areas of work/interest that take place at Saint-Pierre.

There are also more than 60 other links here, ranging from other monastic institutions, to associations for chant, to informational pages, including on those mys-terious things known as the modes.

The link to choirs gives 70 or more (I lost count) links to choirs including one site on how to start a Gregorian Chant choir.

The Liturgy link gives an even two-dozen links. We go to churches where the Latin Mass, known as Tridentine, takes place. We also can go to a site where the text of this Mass, with an English translation, can be found.

Well, I think this is enough for you to get the idea that you can find just about anything you want here that has almost anything to do with Gregorian Chant.

Back to the main page, and under the heading, "Gregorian chant in our day" there are links to abbeys where chant is still sung as a matter of course (the double monastery in Petersham is among only eight listed here for the United States), listings for choirs who sing chant, and the list goes on.

A bibliography and discography also are found here. The discography is particularly useful because it also includes a quick review of the quality of the voices/ensemble on the recording. It was here that I discovered a recording of Mozarabic chant, the chant of the (Latin) Mozarabic Rite of Spain, found mainly in the Catalunya region, the area around Barcelona. Fascinating, simply fascinating.

Many of the disks reviewed have at least one track that you can listen to. A very useful item indeed.

Overall, Willy Schuyesman’s site is the best place I have found to find information on chant. It is comprehensive, intelligible, well organized, and colorful without being gaudy.

Happy research.

(Father Paul and Carol Pirog, authors of Word on the Web,

may be contacted at

wordontheweb@aol.com.)