Biography
In the mid-1990s the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo De Silos drew widespread notice beyond monastic settings after a collection of their sacred Gregorian chants unexpectedly scaled the upper ranks of the American popular-music charts. The Spanish abbey had already adopted the Roman liturgy’s Gregorian melodies in place of earlier Hispanic chant traditions by the eleventh century. Benedictine houses continued performing the Gregorian repertoire uninterrupted except for a brief interval in the 1800s. At the request of the Seminary of Logroño, also in Spain, the monks recorded the chants expressly to circulate the music among parish congregations. The recordings nevertheless reached a far broader public. Early in 1994 the monks’ debut release, Chant, issued on the Angel label, attained major commercial success by entering the Top 5 of the U.S. Pop charts and attracting coverage that extended from music journalism to television appearances on the Tonight Show and Good Morning America. Subsequent albums of monodic chant followed, among them Chant 2 and Chant 3 on Angel, Soul of Chant (Milan, 1995), Gregorian Chants (Music Club, 1996), Gregorian Book of Silos (Milan, 2000), and seasonal titles such as Chant Noel (Angel, 1994).