Tuned In: Chart-topping monks featured in new HBO documentary
-
The Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz are profiled in HBO2's "Top Ten Monks."
Share with others:
Just as pop music trends wax and wane -- hello, Backstreet Boys, goodbye, Backstreet Boys; hello, Jonas Bros., goodbye Jonas Bros. -- so it can be with classical music, at least when it comes to Gregorian chants.
Back in 1994 The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos had a hit in the United States with their "Chant" album and two years ago Austrian monks had a European hit with "Chant: Music for the Soul," and their success is chronicled in the new half-hour documentary "Top Ten Monks" (8 p.m. Wednesday, HBO2).
"Top Ten Monks" director Dana Heinz Perry, a former Pittsburgher unrelated to the famous Heinz family, lived in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill in the 1970s and attended second through seventh grades at The Ellis School. Ms. Perry produced/directed documentaries about music in the past, and that's how HBO documentary top executive Sheila Nevins came to think of her for a possible monk music project after she read about the monks' international success in a magazine.
Ms. Perry previously worked on "Motown 40" for ABC and a five-hour hip-hop series for VH1 in addition to other documentary films, including episodes of TLC's "Paramedics" that filmed in Pittsburgh in the late '90s.
"I've gotten access to rock stars more easily than these people," Ms. Perry said of the monks.
"Top Ten Monks" dispels preconceptions viewers might have about monks, showing them at work on the Internet and responding to tourists ("This is a form of prayer," a monk explains to an American tourist who requests a performance. "We don't do it as a show").
Making contact with the monks was not the hard part. Getting them to allow Ms. Perry to document their lives was the greater challenge. By the time she began to request access, the monks had already become a European sensation.
"I think perhaps they didn't bargain for what the result was going to be of making this record and have it be a giant hit," she said. "Journalists from all over Europe were knocking on their doors and they said 'Yes' a lot, and that created an invasion of their way of life."
In 2008, the album by the Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz sold 120,000 copies in Austria, far outpacing albums by Madonna (10,000 units sold) and Amy Winehouse (92,000 units sold). The album sold about 200,000 units in the United Kingdom, according to the film.
First Published December 17, 2010 12:00 am
