Many cultures have developed practices to help "accompany" the dying both physically and spiritually.

Jacques Pantaléon was an unlikely candidate for the papacy, being neither a cardinal nor Italian, since he was the son of a French cobbler. 

One might think that something called "plainchant" or "plainsong" would not furnish much to talk about; after all, its very name says it’s plain and it's chant.

Today, I will discuss what makes chant distinctive among musical forms, and then recommend my favorite chant recordings.

I often hear that since most of what is produced in any age is garbage, the quality of the hymns in a compilation such as the Hymnal 1940 is partly an illusion, because the earlier bad stuff would have been tossed aside.

I'm sometimes accused, when I write about bad hymns, of wanting to impose a single style upon everyone.

One summer when I was twenty-four, I traveled alone in Italy, on a shoestring, as a young man can who doesn’t mind sleeping in the occasional train station. 

In these wistful autumnal days when the liturgical commemorations of All Saints and All Souls set the theme, that melody of "Nimrod" and the lines of Gerontius give a confused world a dose of reality. 

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), French, composed the "Quartet for the End of Time" while a German prisoner of war during World War II.

A new book offers a listener's guide to the recovery of modern music.