The mystery and timeless beauty of the world's ancient traditions of chant has finally, at the end of the 20th century, caught up with us. The recent explosion of interest in Gregorian, Tibetan, and other forms of sacred chant is not the real surprise; to anyone who is familiar with the power and the passion of this music, the surprise is that it took so long. The development of recording technology has at last made it possible for Westerners to hear the sacred chant of Tibet, Armenia, and the Islamic world, and for a new world of listeners to hear the glorious sounds of ancient Rome and medieval Europe.

Anthology of Chant presents all of these traditions in one compilation, and what is most striking about this collection of sacred chants are the similarities between the music, though separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. From Perry Silverbirds' peace pipe chants of the Native American traditions to the great Miserere of the Renaissance composer Gregorio Allegri, from Carl Orff's musical setting of the earliest Christian text in the German language to the call of a Turkish muezzin, Anthology of Chant creates a context in which the spirituality and the intent of these disparate pieces can be felt more than heard. Even as your years tell you the music has changed dramatically, something deeper in these works, something fundamental, remains unchanged.

What magical music it is! It has taken us eight centuries to rediscover the unique sounds of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who is also represented on this Anthology of Chant, but her works are now extraordinarily popular. The monks of Tibet have toured to sold-out audiences around the world. Given the chance to hear this music, listeners respond to it with a fervor that crosses, or even ignores, the boundaries of time, distance, and language.

In keeping with the music itself, the performers on this compilation range from highly-skilled professionals (the Early Music Ensemble of Augsburg, for example, or the members of the Harmonic Choir) to a security guard at the Taj Mahal (Saad Ullah Khan, who performed on Paul Horn's classic Inside the Taj Mahal 2 (11085) recording).

What they all share is a deep, often lifelong commitment to the chant tradition they represent. In some cases—Perry Silverbird, David Hudson, and Omar Faruk Tekbilek—the performers are helping to forge a continuing link to the ancient traditions of the Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, and the Islamic world, respectively, by taking advantage of today's recording and instrumental technology. In other cases, such as the Haissmavourk Choir of Armenia or the Tibetan monks of Dip Tse Chok Ling Monastery, the sounds echo through sacred monasteries in much the same way as they did in centuries past.

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