The community of forty-five nuns at the Abbey of Jouques and the fifty-three monks of the Abbay Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux live withdrawn from the bustle of modern life, in communion with nature and in quiet contemplation. Their life is regularized by the rhythm of ora et labora, prayer and work, the centerpiece of the Rule of St. Benedict. Their days are divided by the regular Offices of the Liturgy of the Hours and include daily Mass.

Their years follow the Earth’s seasons and the Liturgical Calendar, a cycle of feast days that celebrate the Church’s Saints through which they meditate on Holy Scripture. The complete Novus Ordo liturgy covers three years of recordings. It presents the entire Gregorian repertoire, including thousands of pieces (the equivalent of more than 7000 CDs). The complete Vetus Ordo cycle lasts one year, and will add well over two-thousand hours of chants.

The Chants are recorded in high resolution by engineers of Odradek Records, a non-profit, democratic, artist-ledlabelbased in the United States with astudioin Italy. The recordings in Le Barroux are made possible by the three-yearRepertoriumHorizon Europe project, operating under grant agreement n. 101095065, which began in January 2023.

In the course of Repertorium, the Neumz team is also responsible for the digitisation of the Solesmes archive and is helping to create AI tools to help study, transcribe, and identify previously uncatalogued chants. The entire archive will be publicly available through the University of Oxford’sDigital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM). A selection of rediscovered novel chants, perhaps unsung for over a millennium, will be added to Neumz in 2025.

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Testimonials

“… the recordings of clear unaccompanied voices are speckled with authentic sounds such as the creak of wooden benches, the occasional coughing or dropping of prayer books and bell chimes.”

“A bold idea that the American [founder] had during his music studies at Oxford. At that time he often visited his aunt, who lived as [a sister] at the monastery in Jouques, and experienced an atmosphere that all the theory at university could not convey: the mysteriously archaic, quiet and remote world of Gregorian chant. Today he wants to get the chant out of its sacred seclusion and bring it to everyone, so that they too can get to know the ‘basis of the western musical tradition’.”

“The nuns in the community, founded in 1967, hope that the revenue from the recording project will allow them to fund better their Abbey’s daughter-house in Africa, and [that the project will] give ‘peace, consolation, hope, and a sense of communion’ to those isolated by the coronavirus pandemic.”