To present this, we'll turn to a class video.
Here you'll see me, dressed as a monk.
Actually, I've lived in monastery three times in my life.
But only for short durations.
Never more than 10 days.
But I wanted to dress like a monk for this class and turn out the lights, so
that the students would feel that they had been transported elsewhere.
To a different time and place back to the middle ages.
Accomplished and generally speaking in the middle ages there was this tendency to
ascribe to a single or
a couple of male authority figures, a lot more than they actually did.
The point here is the Gregorian chant was being composed 500 years before
Gregory set foot on this Earth, and nearly a 1000 years after that.
What's the purpose of Gregorian chant?
What did it do?
Well, it did two things, one, it communicated the message of the church,
it allowed for the transmission of the word of God,
as they the faithful understood the word and understood God.
And it transmitted the theology, the message of the church.
Chant then, was a medium for the broadcast, literally,
the broadcast of the word, in a resonant acoustical environment, such as a stone or
stucco church, one can project, one can impel a text better.
If you sing it rather than just simply to claim it as usual.
I could say, for
example, now let us read the epistle of the blessed apostle Paul to the Romans.
But the text projects better if I sing it.
[FOREIGN].
In that fashion it goes out better, and it can reverberate better.