It was how people notated music before modern staves were invented, some hundreds of years later.įor most people, Anderson says, listening to the chants is a powerful exercise because “it’s the right music for vacating yourself of a sense of time and pressure”. In theory, neumes tell you whether the pitch goes up or down from the previous note. Neumz is named after the scratches you’d find above the text in a Gregorian chant score: neumes (see a modern version in the image above) which literally mean ‘breaths’. Read more: 23 times classical music embraced quarantine in a wonderful way > It’s like one long song, and it’s a good lesson for people always,” he adds, joking: “The nuns are expert at quarantine.” And they do this every day of the year, for their entire lives. “The nuns spend half the day in the church, praying and singing.

You lose perspective of where you are in time. “Everything is regular, and while one day can feel very long, three months can feel like a week. “The sense of time in a monastery, and in the chant, is rather like we are experiencing in this period,” he says. The nuns press “record” every time they enter the church and “stop” when they leave after each service.Īnderson, whose project will raise money for the abbey’s sister monastery in Benin, west Africa, says the launch has come at a strangely pertinent time. The French Benedictine nuns live a simple life of ora et labora (prayer and work).Īfter negotiating with the nuns, Anderson, who is also a record label owner, had eight microphones installed in the chapel which recorded into a device that saves the music to SD cards. It’s a prayer that they offer on behalf of all humanity.” It’s not western classical music in that it’s not an individualistic story.

“It’s music which is not an individual soloist showing off their vocal process. When they sing these chants, they’re doing it for us.” Their life is in prayer for all of us, the salvation of mankind. “Yes, they are cloistered and cut off from the world, but they are here for us. “These aren’t the personal prayers of the sister,” he says. Gregorian chant isn’t for the nuns, Anderson realised during his visit, but a prayer for humanity. “I grew up always hearing about these stories of Gregorian chant, of medieval Europe and this mythical aunt that I’d never met,” he tells Classic FM.Īs a young man, the summer before moving to Oxford University to study Music, John visited his aunt in Provence for the first time and, he says, “it opened me up to this entire world”.

In Neumz, the chants are gathered together in one resource alongside the scores, Latin texts, and translations of the complete Gregorian chant.Īnderson says the idea for the project was sparked by a fascination with his “mythical aunt”, who ran away the morning after her brother – Anderson’s father’s – wedding, to become a nun at the Jouques abbey. The abbey is closed to the public due to coronavirus rules. The rest of the chants are now all live on Anderson’s web and mobile app, Neumz. Instead of welcoming a congregation at Easter, the nuns instead agreed to the release of a week’s worth of chants for Holy Week, the highlight of the liturgical year. The abbey is currently closed as a result of rules applied to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

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