The Monks of Norcia

Benedicta: Marian Chant from Norcia

by C. Michael Bailey
June 13, 2015

The mid-1990s so-called “new age" or “ambient" music discovered the Plainsong, leading to the release of Chant (Angel, 1973/1994) by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. Such a spike in popularity in all things mystical was nothing novel at the end of the Twentieth Century (or any other post-civilization century, for that matter). Judging from the fact that recordings twenty years old at the time, by a non- descript group of cloistered clerics reflects that only the shallow ...