Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years

Lis­ten­ing to music, espe­cial­ly live music, can be a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. These days, most of us say that fig­u­ra­tive­ly, but for medieval monks, it was the lit­er­al truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much clos­er to God, but espe­cial­ly the times when every­one came togeth­er and sang. For Eng­lish monks accus­tomed to that way of life, it would have come as quite a shock, to say the very least, when Hen­ry VIII ordered the dis­so­lu­tion of the monas­ter­ies between the mid fif­teen-thir­ties and the ear­ly fif­teen-for­ties. Not only were the inhab­i­tants of those refuges sent pack­ing, their sacred music was cast to the wind.

Near­ly half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, that music is still being recov­ered. As report­ed by the Guardian’s Steven Mor­ris, Uni­ver­si­ty of Exeter his­to­ri­an James Clark found the lat­est exam­ple while research­ing the still-stand­ing Buck­land Abbey in Devon for the Nation­al Trust.

“Only one book — rather bor­ing­ly set­ting out the cus­toms the monks fol­lowed — was known to exist, held in the British Library.” But lo and behold, a few leaves of parch­ment stuck in the back hap­pened to con­tain pieces of ear­ly six­teenth-cen­tu­ry music, or rather chant, with both text and nota­tion, a van­ish­ing­ly rare sort of arti­fact of medieval monas­tic life.

Just this month, for the first time in almost five cen­turies, the music from the “Buck­land book” res­onat­ed with­in the walls of Buck­land Abbey once again. You can hear a clip from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Exeter chapel choir’s per­for­mance just above, which may or may not get across the grim­ness of the orig­i­nal work. “The themes are heavy — the threats from dis­ease and crop fail­ures, not to men­tion pow­er­ful rulers — but the poly­phon­ic style is bright and joy­ful, a con­trast to the sort of mourn­ful chants most asso­ci­at­ed with monks,” writes Mor­ris. For lis­ten­ers here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, these com­po­si­tions offer the addi­tion­al tran­scen­den­tal dimen­sion of aes­thet­ic time trav­el. The only way their redis­cov­ery could be more for­tu­itous is if it had hap­pened in time to ben­e­fit from the nine­teen-nineties Gre­go­ri­an-chant boom.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See the Guidon­ian Hand, the Medieval Sys­tem for Read­ing Music, Get Brought Back to Life

A YouTube Chan­nel Com­plete­ly Devot­ed to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gre­go­ri­an Chant, Byzan­tine Chant & More

The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tri­tone”: Debunk­ing a Great Myth in Music The­o­ry

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Bring Medieval Chants Back to Life: Project Amra Will Fea­ture 300 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts and Many Audio Record­ings

A Beat­box­ing Bud­dhist Monk Cre­ates Music for Med­i­ta­tion

The His­to­ry of Clas­si­cal Music in 1200 Tracks: From Gre­go­ri­an Chant to Górec­ki (100 Hours of Audio)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.