ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 explores the essential role of music in community dynamics, and as a crucial element in communal health and the resolution of social conflict in modern-day monastic communities. Chant has long proved an ideal medium for supporting a life of prayer, but it also has considerable agency in the psychosocial structure of monastic communities. This chapter explores the role of communal singing, and specifically chant, as an integral part of twenty-first-century monastic life, and its impact as a source of both conflict and reparation, division and cohesion.
