Gregorian Moods

It’s Pure Moods Week at Dirt! Yesterday, Zach Schonfeld wrote about the strange link between the Pure Moods franchise and horror soundtracks.

Today, Becca Schuh writes about Gregorian Moods and chasing the fugue.

Five years ago, at a college reunion, my best friend told me that her current roommate was in a Gregorian chant choir. I attached myself to this information like a tick in a dog’s coarse coat. I had never heard of Gregorian chants before, at least not in any memorable way. First, it was a bit; my friends and I began playing Gregorian chants off our phones in the corner of a room, waiting for the others to hear the strange guttural noises, have a momentary perplexed look, and then begin to laugh. 

But what began as a joke between friends became, for me, no laughing matter. What was it about the chants? Actually, I never asked myself this. I didn’t care what it was about the chants. I just knew they were for me. I wanted them deep in the crevasses of my brain, and I have been working on embedding them ever since. 

In 2020, Mina Tavakoli wrote about Pure Moods for Pitchfork in a Sunday series that revisited significant albums which weren’t reviewed upon their release. Even though the Pure Moods CD dedicated entirely to Gregorian Moods was the fourth volume of a spin-off series, the chants were integral to the collection from the very start: a Gregorian chant is heavily sampled in “Sadeness - Pt. 1” by Enigma. 

In the review, Tavakoli wrote that the album “seemed engineered to induce a ridiculous sort of fugue state.” There, it all made sense. I’ve been chasing a ridiculous sort of fugue state my entire life.

A few months back (years? I can’t tell time at this point), during that Twitter discourse about how some people have an inner monologue and some don’t, I grew increasingly jealous at those who do not experience the inner monologue. My brain loves nothing more than screaming at me. 

When I was young I dreamt of cliffs, of underground meetings, of treehouses and accidents in a prairie. I’ve always loved sleep, because it was a place where instead of thinking so damn much, I could vibe in the cliffs and underground caves. The main way to escape from The Thoughts was reading, of course, but other ways cropped up too: Fantasia, horseback riding, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, The Tree of Life, the ocean. Twin Peaks, of course, whose theme song is also a Pure Moods staple. 

(My parents watched Twin Peaks while I was in the womb, dubbing me Agent Cooper before they learned my gender, which is the type of connection I’m not inclined to believe has any meaning but in the face of these ethereal obsessions, I’m forced to admit maybe does.)

I was in my mid-twenties when I decided to become more aggressive about engineering the escape from too many thoughts via the bottomless noises of the chants. I’m too sensitive for hard drugs, the thing that most of my peers throughout college utilized, so I took a two-pronged route: soft drugs (an overdue Prozac prescription) and self improvement. 

I used to give blood frequently, before I got too weak. The donation center was far away from my apartment and I was always late. I already have a naturally high heart rate, so between that and rushing from the subway in the west forties of Manhattan, it would sometimes be too high on the first reading. The heart rate too high to give blood is above 100. They give you fifteen minutes to slow it down and try again. I listened to my chants with my head in my arms on the table. When the man checked again, he was shocked at how I'd lowered my heart rate so quickly. I told him about the chants.

The next summer, I lost my voice for over a month. I went to the doctor, took antibiotics. I talked to singer friends who suggested it might be a broken vocal cord. I went to the chiropractor and took Chinese herbs. One day it came back, but it was different than before. Friends now say it has dropped an octave.

I began taking barre classes. People deride women who go to exercise classes during the day, but I immediately loved these women. All of them. I decided to assume that the other women, standing in second position in front of the barre, were like me, trying to fix themselves, not performing a vanity project. And if they were simply being vain, well, I decided not to care.

Vanity is a higher god than wallowing. 

Gregorian chants were a love affair, but they were also a strategy. I used them to change. Like the Pure Moods commercial’s “mild aesthetic lunacy” (Tavakoli again), I envisioned a different reality for myself—I collected things to take me there. Change your mood, change your life. Change your surroundings, change your innards. As above, so below. I wanted to transfer my mind into being a different mind, and, as though god intervened, I was drawn to Gregorian chants as the portal.

There is another one of these college reunions coming up in a few weeks, but I’m not going this time. I know how diffuse I am, how easy it is for things to get inside me. I have to carefully regulate my environment. I love the past, but I don’t live there anymore.