Gregorian Chant Experience

For Nóirín Ní Riain, Gregorian Chant is an everyday happening. For may years she has had chants as intimate experiences, friends of the heart, to be sung and held close in times of joy and sorrow. These 40 are her favourites which have accompanied her through thick and thin, a source of meditation and healing. She shares this now, inviting you into her private space through these performances. These heartsongs will tug the memory strings for many who learned plainchant as schoolchildren. They will introduce a young generation to what is for them a new experience. These are the religious songs of the ancients, now breathed into new life for our own time. They bear with them the wisdom and the serenity of centuries of meditation and attunement of the spirit. Nóirín Ní Riain performs these chants sometimes on her own, sometimes with the gathering of student priests from St Patrick's College, Thurles. She accompanies them on Indian instruments - the surpeti and the shruti box - providing a continuous drone, sometimes breathy, sometimes plaintive, always anchoring the voice with an earthly sound.