title: Chant: The Origins, Form, Practice, and Healing Power of Gregorian Chant
author: Katharine Le Me
description: The album Chant, recorded by the Benedictine monks of the small Spanish monastery, Santo Domingo de Silos, is one of the biggest recording hits of the year., . Here, to accompany and explain the phenomenon of such worldwide appreciation of the medieval music, recording artist Le Mee discusses Gregorian chant itself and suggests some astute, if unproven, theories about why this music is so compelling; about why this previously esoteric form of devotional music has so taken the Western world by storm; and about what there is about the present historical moment that has made this recording by little-known monks so powerful and so accessible. Perhaps more significantly, she gives us some fascinating tools by which to fashion our own answers to these questions, as well as an important resource for listeners curious about this extraordinary music. BOMC Quality Paperback Club alternative selection. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: Performance Practice and the Politics of Transcribing Byzantine Chant1 
  Alexander Lingas2 
  Transcriptions of Byzantine chants into staff notation, despite their proven utility,3 have been 
  generating controversy ever since the first Western European attempts to apprehend the intervallic and 
  rhythmic information conveyed by medieval Byzantine neumes.4 These early efforts not only sparked 
  debates among Western academics as to whose interpretation was more correct, but also provoked a strongly 
  negative reaction from certain Greek scholars and cantors who saw all of the transcriptions as musically alien 
  to the received tradition of Byzantine chanting. By the mid-1920s, Western musicologists and Greek 
  traditionalists had each achieved a modicum of internal consensus, leaving the two sides arrayed against each 
  other over issues of tuning, rhythm, chromaticism, and ornamentation. These positions hardened in the next 
  decade as the debates became focused on the transcriptions issued by t