Traditional Chant in Popular Culture
Chant is a popular component of film scores, such as The Lord of the Rings film trilogy by Howard Shore, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace by John Williams, Ghost in the Shell by Kenji Kawai, and Man vs. Godzilla by Akira Ifukube, and video game scores such as the Halo series by Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori.
While authentic traditional chant has occasionally figured into modern popular music in brief intros, interludes or atmospheric background usage, one of the earliest notable, fundamental uses of traditional chant in modern pop came from Enigma, who sampled Gregorian chants over trance beats for a successful series of albums and singles. Their 1990 debut single "Sadeness (Part I)" became one of the biggest dance and pop music hits of the year, topping charts around the world, while their song "Return to Innocence" uses a chant in the Taiwanese Aboriginal language Amis.
Read more about this topic: Chant
Famous quotes containing the words traditional, chant, popular and/or culture:
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and
lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)