But amongst all the goodies I came back with (material as well as spiritual) was a dvd: Le Chant mystérieux du Silence. It's a documentary, just under an hour in length, about life at the Abbey there, with a particular focus on the place of Gregorian Chant in the community's life (if you know anything about the background of the Solesmes Congregation you'll know how central it is - and if not, get on and do some googleing!!). There's also a couple of clips with the nuns of St. Cecilia's down the road (quite literally - well ok, down the road and turn left).
Then on the "Bonus" bit there's all kinds of fun stuff.
It's all in French, no subtitling, but I would hazard to guess that even if you didn't have any French you could be impressed by it. It wasn't made by the monks themselves I don't think - if it were it would have been a bit more down to earth in places. But it's still lots of fun.
EJames, have you seen this dvd? I wonder if there are extracts of it on *Tube or something.
Anyway, just a heads up for those who might be interested. You can probably get it on amazon, or maybe through the Solesmes monastery closest to you, or perhaps from Solemes itself: http://www.solesmes.com/
(And the tutor for my course is on there and he's speaking French!!!! Which is of course a DUH moment as...well...you know...he's French. But I spent the entire week hearing him speak in English and Spanish, saying Mass in Latin, with an odd "merci" thrown in here and there when I could convince him that my French was good enough to carry on a conversation
)(And as a complete aside: imagine. You live in the town of Solesmes. There are two monasteries, both of which have the full monastic office, differing from each other by 15-30 minutes (the girls are generally earlier than the boys). Can you imagine what it must be like with all those church bells going throughout the entire day?)
