Word: chanting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...court to revoke the tax-exempt religious status of the group and ask that it be disbanded for engaging in "serious antisocial activities." Althoughguru Shoko Asahara and other top leaders remain behind barsfacing murder charges in theMar. 20 gas attack on Tokyo's subways, Aum members continue to chant prayers and hand out flyers on the street. Prosecutors are now seeking disciplinary action against Asahara's lawyer for smuggling out a tape-recorded message from the guru. The tapeinstructed members to bury all evidence against the cultand to protect members from arrest. Taking his cue from Mafia dons the world...
Life for the singing monks of Santo Domingo de Silos has never been the same since they became recording stars. Last spring Chant, their Latin-language recording of medieval Gregorian sung prayer, achieved the nearest thing to a record-industry miracle: it ascended to No. 3 on the pop music charts, lodging next to hits by Snoop Doggy Dogg and Nine Inch Nails. Soon the ancient walls of their remote monastery in northern Spain were besieged by tourists and paparazzi. Even more troubling, the monks came to feel that their record company had given them a raw deal...
...Though Chant sold 6 million copies worldwide and grossed more than $50 million for EMI Records (whose stars range from Sinaad O'Connor to Digable Planets), Laurentino de Buruaga, the group's choirmaster, complains that the monks have earned a paltry $40,000 from it--hardly enough to patch the leaking roof over their medieval cloister. In response, the monks have followed the example of secular recording stars from time immemorial: they've switched labels. Their new CD, The Soul of Chant, was released last month by Milan Records, a smaller classical label...
According to Buruaga, Chant was a disenchanting experience for the monks even before it soared on the charts. First, EMI blundered by putting a painting of brown-robed Franciscan friars on the CD's cover instead of black-robed Benedictine monks-the ecclesiastical equivalent of putting a Yale man on the cover of the Harvard yearbook. Then, as Chant's sales took off, an overeager EMI executive flew to Silos to talk to the monks about a follow-up album. Suspicious of the machinery of stardom--and the private helicopter whirring overhead--the monks greeted the exec through a peephole...
...Soul of Chant, in any event, has risen to No. 10 on the classical charts--not a blockbuster like Chant, but enough to make Milan chairman Emmanuel Chamboredon rejoice. Signing the robed hitmakers, he says, was a "gift...