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David Eben's passionate affair.

Article Excerpt
If today Gregorian Chant is no mere empty phrase for much of the Czech public, but means a kind of music they have actually heard, then most of the credit must go to David Eben. The Schola Gregoriana Pragensis ensemble, which he founded and now directs, has been giving concerts at home and abroad since 1989. The Schola was in fact founded two years earlier, but before the Revolution it could perform only during church services. David Eben (*1965), who originally studied Clarinet at the Prague Conservatory, developed an interest in medieval music at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles Uniersity, where he studied music from 1986. He only studied the direction of Gregorian Chant once the Schola had been established, going to the Conservatoire Nationale Superieur de Musique de Paris, from which he graduated in 1991. Eben's theoretical, musicological work has been as essential to the project as his practical skills. The repertoire presented by the ensemble requires an understanding of the original sources, not just a basic ability to "decipher" them, but also a wider knowledge of the way specific chants were actually sung, and the techniques (endless questions) needed to produce the particular sound of the Schola. Eben has acquired this theoretical basis mainly on his visits and consultations at the Benedictine Monastery in Solesmes in France. The resulting combination of theory and practice is evident above all in the ensemble's repertoire. Its extensive discography, comprising ten CDs released over ten years (1993-2002) is testimony to a very well thought out conception of thematically distinct wholes that draw on the original sources. In addition to his teaching activities (currently he works at the Charles University Institute of Musical Studies), David Eben is the author of a number of programmes for the Czech Radio's Vltava Station focused on Medieval music--above all the ambitious cycle The Liturgical Year in Gregorian Chant.

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Quite apart from these medieval interests, Eben has been making a successful name for himself in popular music as well. The Eben Brothers Ensemble, which is hard to classify and is somewhere on the borders of rock, jazz and folk, has already released three CDs at quite lengthy time intervals, the last album Ja na tom delam [I'm Working on It] in 2000.

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You started to get interested in medieval music and Gregorian chant when studying at the Philosophical faculty, and you founded the Schola Gregoriana Pragensis in your second year. Tell us something about your first experiences...

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