Why does a Gregorian chant still resonate with people?

Golden-hour sunlight poured in, transmuted to shades of blues and reds and greens by the stained-glass windows of St. Bernard’s Church. As hundreds of people packed into pews, haunting strains of organ music began to float through the church, a simple melody by Bach echoing among Gothic Revival stone columns and quickly multiplying, inspiring a hush among the crowd.

This wasn’t a typical Lenten mass for the church. On Wednesday, the Westminster Cathedral Choir of London, currently on tour in the U.S.



, stopped in Pittsburgh to sing. I’ll say this up front: I’m not Catholic. I was raised Protestant in Texas, though my family has always respected the Catholic faith.

For folks like me who have only passing familiarity with the liturgical mass, it’s a form of religious service with profound musical roots that date back more than 1,000 years. Over time, composers including familiar classical names like Bach and Mozart and Beethoven have injected nuance and color and complexity into portions of the music, which cycles between chant and hymns sung with the congregation and special moments of prayer and reflection sung by the choir alone. To this day, Gregorian chant remains at the bedrock of the Latin mass, as well as the development of Western music overall.

Meditative chant After the organist’s prelude and a hymn for the whole congregation, the choir sang a brief chant, and a priest concluded with the traditional opening prayer, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The congregation sings two pitches in unison response: “A-men,” a refrain that appears throughout the mass, along with the phrase “And with your spirit,” using the same two pitches. (A printed program with musical notation allows attendees to follow along with the mass.

) Later, in the choir’s first longer work, a Kyrie by composer Josef Rheinberger’s “Cantus Missae,” their sound was smooth, balanced with an ear toward softer low pitches that created a collective glow. The singers were precise and elegant in their phrases, their voices blooming under the church’s vaulted ceilings. The music is more ritual than performance, though musical expression and excellence are still mandatory.

I don’t know if there’s a metaphysical reason why this style of singing can help feel one closer to God than in other styles of worship. I do know that meditation, whether religious prayer or secularly reflective, has all sorts of documented physiological and mental benefits, and that researchers are continuing to probe the relationship between music and meditation. A 2015 paper written by a Benedictine monk and published in the International Journal of Arts Education explores the question in depth.

The study, “Gregorian Chant as a Practical School of Meditation,” concludes: “Even if Gregorian Chant is a religious art, it is also in danger of being taken out of its original context — like most art which more and more loses its spiritual roots in becoming more commercial and professional. The intention of re-linking art with spirituality is, perhaps, one of the last chances of making it socially relevant.” Put another way, this monk is acknowledging the spiritual potential of Gregorian chant while warning against decoupling it from a specifically Catholic liturgy.

Divine harmony Beyond Catholicism and other religions, there are thousands of holistic practitioners who proclaim the spiritual benefits to chanting. Some of the more, uh, enlightened practitioners argue that the specific frequencies of the notes chanted have distinct effects. It’s true that the human body vibrates at a general frequency of 5 hertz, give or take, and that the earth itself has a low frequency of about 7.

83 hertz. (Remember, a note is just a vibration in the air, and hertz is a measure of oscillations per second.) Both of these pitches are below the range of human hearing but can certainly be felt, which is why it is actually possible to be “in tune” or “out of tune” with the world around you.

Maybe. There’s also a common theory that listening to music tuned to a 432 hertz can help align and heal the mind and body due to the natural mathematical properties of that tuning system. OK, it’s easy to laugh at these claims and dismiss them.

I’ll never forget having a pair of tuning forks banged above my body to probe my chakra’s frequencies by a sound therapist while researching a story a few years ago. But there are anecdotes upon anecdotes from people who argue that attending sound therapy sessions or sound meditations made a real difference in symptoms of everything from chronic pain to cancer. These ancient practices are rooted in something, and the Catholic’s chants and their particular rules for melody and harmony would become the scaffolding for the entirety of Western music, influencing the symphonies of Beethoven and the idiosyncrasies of Radiohead.

Classical music long ago pushed beyond those tonal constraints, but in St. Bernard’s Church, singing along with hundreds of voices and that 124-year-old choir from London, it was hard not to feel a certain spiritual stirring. And for those who believe in a divine creator, how comforting it must be to participate in a music that aims to bridge the gap between the physical and spiritual.

“Go in peace,” indeed..