Wednesday, December 28, 2005 at 1:01am
Tibetan Buddhist and Gregorian chant
The Tibetan monks of Atlanta's Loselung Institute provide a program of Tibetan Buddhist culture called "The Mystical Arts of Tibet: Sacred Music, Sacred Dance for World Healing." They visit a given institution, such as a college, build a mandala over the four or five days of their presence, give lectures on Buddhist life and spirituality, and conclude with an afternoon dispersal of the mandala and a spectacular evening of costumed dance, chant and theater.
When they were slated for such a week at Spring Hill Jesuit College, it seemed to be a chance to set up a program of shared Tibetan chant and traditional Gregorian chant. The Gregorian chant group included several amateurs with lengthy experience in singing Gregorian, as well as several music professionals, one in voice and one in solo instrumental performance. We practiced together for about two weeks preceding the shared chant service. In one of the final practices, we asked the Tibetans to come to the chapel for an informal group practice, just to see what we could expect at the actual service.
There were about six in each group, the Tibetans singing their chant as they do daily. After they began a given chant, the Gregorian choir, with its leader listening and testing for a pitch, also began and concentrated on holding key against the very different scale/key of the Tibetan chant.
We in the Gregorian choir, as a matter of fact, had unintentionally been preparing for a s}performances}, with our unreflective dichotomy of secular as opposed to sacred, but at the first of the shared practices in the chapel, it became very clear that the Tibetans were not going to participate in a performance. They would be sharing in s}prayers}, literally calling prayer to sweep over and heal the earth. Suitably chastened, the Gregorian choir remembered to pray also, to pray only, to pray together, in song.
At the actual chant ceremony, the Tibetans prayed and sang for twenty minutes or so, followed by twenty minutes of Gregorian chant.
And then it was time to move the chairs across the sanctuary of the chapel to within several feet of the seated Buddhists, face to face. As at the combined practices, we asked them to initiate any given chant, and sing in a more recitative fashion if we were going to sing a more figured chant, or sing in a figured chant if we were going to sing in recitative. We again tried to listen very closely to one another and to pace our speed to the apparent speed of the Tibetan chant, and occasionally to be silent while our director sought to hear a key which would keep us at least partially synchronized.
Surely it was an informal disaster, or was it a series of unexpected harmonies and severely strained dissonances, which unpredictably resolved themselves into obviously polytonal music, a'la Darius Milhaud or Arnold Schoenberg? What may be the desire of the polytonal composers, may have been able to occur at least sporadically, but long enough to be stunning: an icy, fingernails-on-the-blackboard, iridescent, shimmering, astringent, translucent harmony which ebbed and flowed. What happened was surely aleatory, but we tried to synchronize the pace and key of given selections in ways which seemed compatible.
We prayed together, singing face to face with the Buddhist community in what was both a one-time-only theatrical occurrence, and yet also, most profoundly, shared prayer. We prayed in wondrous and manifold wise, and Wondrous and Manifold Wisdom minimally needs us to figure it out.
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George Gilmore is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College.
© copyright 2005 by George Gilmore
———
UPI Religion & Spirituality Forum is a big tent for all expressions
Of faith and spirituality, neither excluding nor favoring any.
All opinions expressed belong to the writer alone, and are
not necessarily shared by UPI Religion & Spirituality Forum.
When they were slated for such a week at Spring Hill Jesuit College, it seemed to be a chance to set up a program of shared Tibetan chant and traditional Gregorian chant. The Gregorian chant group included several amateurs with lengthy experience in singing Gregorian, as well as several music professionals, one in voice and one in solo instrumental performance. We practiced together for about two weeks preceding the shared chant service. In one of the final practices, we asked the Tibetans to come to the chapel for an informal group practice, just to see what we could expect at the actual service.
There were about six in each group, the Tibetans singing their chant as they do daily. After they began a given chant, the Gregorian choir, with its leader listening and testing for a pitch, also began and concentrated on holding key against the very different scale/key of the Tibetan chant.
We in the Gregorian choir, as a matter of fact, had unintentionally been preparing for a s}performances}, with our unreflective dichotomy of secular as opposed to sacred, but at the first of the shared practices in the chapel, it became very clear that the Tibetans were not going to participate in a performance. They would be sharing in s}prayers}, literally calling prayer to sweep over and heal the earth. Suitably chastened, the Gregorian choir remembered to pray also, to pray only, to pray together, in song.
At the actual chant ceremony, the Tibetans prayed and sang for twenty minutes or so, followed by twenty minutes of Gregorian chant.
And then it was time to move the chairs across the sanctuary of the chapel to within several feet of the seated Buddhists, face to face. As at the combined practices, we asked them to initiate any given chant, and sing in a more recitative fashion if we were going to sing a more figured chant, or sing in a figured chant if we were going to sing in recitative. We again tried to listen very closely to one another and to pace our speed to the apparent speed of the Tibetan chant, and occasionally to be silent while our director sought to hear a key which would keep us at least partially synchronized.
Surely it was an informal disaster, or was it a series of unexpected harmonies and severely strained dissonances, which unpredictably resolved themselves into obviously polytonal music, a'la Darius Milhaud or Arnold Schoenberg? What may be the desire of the polytonal composers, may have been able to occur at least sporadically, but long enough to be stunning: an icy, fingernails-on-the-blackboard, iridescent, shimmering, astringent, translucent harmony which ebbed and flowed. What happened was surely aleatory, but we tried to synchronize the pace and key of given selections in ways which seemed compatible.
We prayed together, singing face to face with the Buddhist community in what was both a one-time-only theatrical occurrence, and yet also, most profoundly, shared prayer. We prayed in wondrous and manifold wise, and Wondrous and Manifold Wisdom minimally needs us to figure it out.
———
George Gilmore is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College.
© copyright 2005 by George Gilmore
UPI Religion & Spirituality Forum is a big tent for all expressions
Of faith and spirituality, neither excluding nor favoring any.
All opinions expressed belong to the writer alone, and are
not necessarily shared by UPI Religion & Spirituality Forum.