Chant: Mode, Mantra, and Meditation

Warm your winter with chant, eight Wednesdays beginning January 18th, 7:00 – 9:00 pm at St Luke’s (760 Somerset West) and running every Wednesday except the first one of each month which is reserved for Come Sing.

This series of eight workshops offers an opportunity to experience the profoundly centering and grounding influence of meditative chant through chants drawn from many traditions — Buddhist, Hindu, Aboriginal, Jewish, Christian, Sufi, Pagan, etc.

Usually, in the winter term, we stick to short, mantra length chants and save the longer, text based chants for the spring term. But the profound experience of many who volunteered to help in chanting the Psalms, “O” Antiphons, Magnificat, and prayers for seven evenings of Vespers at St Luke’s just before Christmas has persuaded Barclay to include longer chants in the series that begins this month.

He’s calling it Mode, Mantra and Meditation. As usual, the class will explore the deeply centring and calming effect of mantras drawn from a variety of traditions of both the East and West. We will also explore ancient modes and Gregorian “tones,” the formulas used in chanting the Psalms, and we will apply these, not only to psalms, but to texts drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, poems and other sources. As in all Barclay’s chanting classes, participants will be encouraged to make chant out of their own day-to-day experience and share their chants with others.

2012 Dates: Next series begins Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 and continues weekly, 7:00 – 9:00 pm, except for the first Wednesday of each month which is reserved for Come Sing.

Where: St Luke’s Church, 760 Somerset St. W. (at Bell), Ottawa

Fee: $150