Buying into the monastic experience: Are chant recordings the real thing? (original) (raw)

2014, The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World, ed. Russell Cobb

Everyone knows about monks and nuns: they shut themselves away in monasteries and convents, they wear habits and they sing plainchant. This perception can be confirmed with a quick shuffle through the hundreds of chant recordings in your local megastore, which often feature cover images of ‘proper’ monastics in medieval-style habits, and are heavily marketed as the music sung daily by ‘real’ monks and nuns. However, the author’s research has revealed that the music currently being played, sung and composed by monastics is not confined to the chant genre, but actually extends into the folk idiom and even into soft pop, and this poses the question of whether, through chant recordings, we really are being sold the genuine article, or simply our received ideas of how monastic music should sound. So whose are the criteria for authenticity? Does a perception of authenticity deepen the musical experience? And does it really matter? Monasteries and convents in the Western world have always needed to produce saleable goods and services in order to support themselves financially and to fund their valuable social work across the globe. Their goods have traditionally included food products and alcoholic beverages, but their income streams are increasingly supplemented by commercial recordings of their music for which, through the internet, they now enjoy a global market. They have long found the promise of both tradition and authenticity to be their most effective selling point, viz. the assertion of the Abbot of Nièges that “la meilleure force de vente est ‘la tradition et l’authenticité’,” but to what extent does the drive to produce high-quality recordings impact on this promise? And how does such commodification of the musical product affect the representation – and reception – of authenticity? This interdisciplinary article, based on ethnographic research among twenty-first-century monks and nuns in Canada, the USA, Great Britain and Ireland, opens with a narrative of the commercial means by which present-day monastic communities function in, and present themselves to, the wider world through their products, and in particular explores the marketing of their music as an important signifier of authentic monastic identity and values. A detailed examination of recording technicalities (e.g. multi-tracking and mixing) challenges the promise of the ultimate authentic monastic experience; the article also demonstrates that the marketing of monastic music through not only religious and classical outlets but also world music and ‘chill-out’ labels is evidence for the many reasons why people buy into it, and questions whether the intended effect can always be guaranteed. Given that the reasons given by monastics for selling their music do not always tally with those of the distributors, the article therefore concludes with a discussion of the producers’ responsibility for satisfying the consumer’s expectations. This exploration of the idea of buying into the authentic monastic experience proves to be a complex one, as the producers of the musical product strive to reconcile their own wish to disseminate a spiritual message through commodification of their musical life with the purchaser’s expectations of cultural authenticity.