Rediscovering Ancient Church Music - Medieval and Renaissance

The Washington Times reports Gregorian chants by the Cistercian monks of the Stift Heiligenkreuz monastery have shot to the top of the classical music charts, perhaps because players of the video game Halo have gotten hooked on Gregorian chants. It may not just be the game.

There are movements within both the Catholic and Protestant churches to return to ancient liturgy. In the video below, this Gregorian Chant on Youtube.com. Below that, you may want to check out Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli - apparently it looked as if the Church was going to permanently abolish anything but monophonic music in Church services. Authorities within the church during the Renaissance then heard Palestrina's Missa, and they said - Oh, well that's OK...





Chant picture

Summer!

Summer around our house is pretty eclectic, and we will be away from the blog too as we still have some traveling planned for our daughter. We will be outdoors more, swimming, and reading lots of books, but we also have a tradition of doing more science experiments and computer programming over the summer because both kids are home and they enjoy doing this together. Our son will also be taking a writing course from Scholars Online over the summer and assorted electives from Lukeion.org.

Computers are not a staple of classical education, but definitely wanted to include it for our kids. Computer technology has helped bring back a resurgence in classical education (online Latin and Greek courses, online Great Books discussions), and as a medium, it can make difficult material more fun and accessible.

From MythWeb.com, check out animated stories of Bellerophon (above right), Theseus, Jason, Hercules, Odysseus, and Perseus.

Also the kids are following a tutorial and example games for the free program Gamemaker 7.0. This is a free program that has extensive helps via tutorials, forums, and school-based sites like this. Already we can see that programming provides good error detection practice, and appreciation for what goes into a good game.

Our kids have only been working on their tutorial games for the past 2 weeks, but if you'd like to see some of their work in-progress, download one of their fully executable games here. They are also learning how to edit sprites and the final assignment is to convert their mazes into a classical theme (like Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth).

For more games on classical themes (most very simple, tells you of the need for more tech-saavy young classical scholars...)

Ancient Greece Olympics at BBC
Ancient Games at Winged Sandals
Who Wants to Be an Ancient Greek Millionaire? (Quia game)
Battlefield Academy: Ancient Romans vs. Britons

We'll be traveling more this summer, so our posting will be more erratic, but we'd like to be back weekly in the coming school year.