On a clear day this spring, I attended Mass at the Abbey of Keur Moussa, a Benedictine monastery about an hour’s drive from the Senegalese capital of Dakar. It wasn’t Sunday, and I’m not a Catholic. Rather, I’d come to hear the music, a fusion of Gregorian chant with local languages and instruments that has earned the community worldwide acclaim. Its gray-and-white-frocked frères filed into church at a quarter after eleven, taking their seats on either side of the airy chancel. Perforated walls let in breezes and birdsong; above the altar, Black figures in red adorned a striking modernist fresco of Biblical scenes. The monks cleared their throats and paged through their breviaries. Then, breaking the silence with a few soft alleluias, they led a small congregation in an arrangement of Psalm 118. “Your hands have shaped and strengthened me,” the cantor sang, to the sound of bright arpeggios. “Enlighten me, that I may learn your will.”
The raylike accompaniment emanated from a long-necked harp called the kora, plucked by a brawny monk in the choir’s front row. Comprising twenty-one strings that arch, like the cables of a suspension bridge, over a halved and hollowed calabash, it is the emblematic instrument of Mandinka jelis, or griots, a hereditary caste of singer-storytellers renowned as keepers of collective memory. Since the mid-twentieth century, scions of the great jeli families have guided the kora’s emergence onto the global stage, from the stately duets of the Malian virtuosos Ballaké Sissoko and Toumani Diabaté to the late Guinean singer Mory Kanté’s dance hit “Yeke Yeke.” Nevertheless, a pivotal step in its rise occurred at Keur Moussa, whose founders’ quest to Africanize their liturgy revolutionized the instrument. If the kora is now a fixture of world music, lauded by the London Symphony Orchestra and inspiring Donald Glover, it’s partly because of the monks who took it to church.
Brother Epiphane N’tab, the accompanist, has been at the monastery for three decades. After Mass, we met in its sunlit cloister, where cells with dark-green doors surround a dusty courtyard of flowering trees. Thirty-two monks live at the abbey—mostly from Senegal, but also France, Gabon, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, and Guinea. The community’s diversity has helped to spread kora music far beyond its origins, as well as to those who don’t belong to jeli families. N’tab was born in Casamance, Senegal’s southernmost region and one of the areas where the kora developed. But he grew up farther north, learning to play only as a novice at Keur Moussa. “It’s here that I discovered the kora and its particular sonority,” N’tab told me. “One might say that it was truly made to accompany the Divine Office.”
Retrieving a kora, he gave me a demonstration in the courtyard. Holding the body by its two wooden handles, which protrude from the calabash like antennas, he plucked the nylon strings with his thumbs and forefingers, teasing out a gently climbing series of scales. The kora has a timbre midway between a banjo’s and a harp’s. (Musicologists classify it as a “harp-lute.”) Ethereally delicate, it can also twang. In a Christian setting, it’s tempting to see its blend of grit and grace as a mirror of the Incarnation—not the Word made flesh but the Note made fruit and hide. The monks manufacture their koras on the premises, purchasing gourds, leather, and rare, resonant barwood at a nearby market. But not everything is local. “The tuning pegs come from Japan,” N’tab admitted, laughing. “So that really makes the kora a universal instrument.”
The monks pray at least six times a day, in accordance with the canonical hours of the liturgy. Their psalmody is in French, but hymns and masses are often sung in Diola, Serer, Portuguese Creole, and especially Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca. (Keur Moussa, which means “House of Moses” in Wolof, takes its name from the largely Muslim village that surrounds it.) A similar range is reflected in their instruments, which include djembe and sabar drums, a xylophone with gourd resonators called the balafon, and a huge hollow calabash that is struck at moments of particular solemnity. But there is little doubt as to which reigns supreme. N’tab described the kora as having an “angelic” sound, which “naturally carries the African soul to song.” François Diabel, a Keur Moussa monk teaching in the United States, praised its contemplative aspect; whereas the organ dominates, the kora encourages inwardness. “It puts us in constant movement as monks and as listeners,” he told me, describing its gentle rhythms. “Because we are on a journey, and we don’t have the luxury to stop.”
The Benedictine motto is Ora et labora, or “Pray and work.” In the abbey’s orchards, monks work daily alongside hired local laborers, growing bananas, mangoes, kumquats, and three varieties of grapefruit. But much of their income derives from making, teaching, and playing the kora. A row of modest guesthouses welcomes students for yearly retreats; a busy workshop dispatches koras to monasteries, musicians, and jelis across the world. The monks are also successful recording artists, whose discography has earned, among other distinctions, the Albert Schweitzer International Prize for Music. Their more than a dozen albums collect masses and psalms alongside instrumental works of startling beauty: “Banehu Len,” an intricate suite played by seven koras; “Dimanche des Rameaux,” a spidery dirge to mark Christ’s entry into Jerusalem; and “Quand Renaît le Matin,” a searching evocation of mortality and resurrection. Their sound is as hard to forget as it is to categorize—and unlikely as their origins in the heady nineteen-sixties, when Négritude met Vatican II.
The nine monks who founded Keur Moussa didn’t set out to become world-music pioneers. They came from the Abbey of Solesmes, a thousand-year-old monastery in the Loire region of France renowned as “the mecca of Gregorian chant.” Once in Senegal, they carried on singing in Latin—much to the delight of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Francophile ex-seminarian who attended the monastery’s opening in 1963. It might have remained an island of medieval plainsong were it not for the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which was in session that year. The conference ordered churches to “inculturate,” or adapt, to the societies around them, particularly by tailoring their liturgies to the “native genius.” The monks opened their ears.
They began in a spirit of pure obedience. The young choirmaster, Dominique Catta, was uncomfortable with African rhythms—they felt, to him, like “stepping into the void”—and he started by arranging Wolof psalms that strictly observed Gregorian conventions. Gradually, though, he and the other monks fell headlong into Senegal’s musical culture, studying radio broadcasts, frequenting village festivals, and attending concerts in Dakar. An early breakthrough came from listening to a traditional singer of the Serer people, whose plaintive melody reminded Catta of a Renaissance motet. He started braiding local music into the liturgy, borrowing motifs from vernacular songs that welcomed the harvest or beseeched Marabouts for spiritual assistance. Rather than simply Gregorianizing what he heard, he began using the Church repertoire as a “key for deciphering African music.”
At the start, this hybrid liturgy’s only available accompaniment was a secondhand harmonium, whose “crybaby sounds” so irritated Catta that he pawned it off on a neighboring congregation. Then, in 1964, the monks heard an unfamiliar strumming on the radio. The locals didn’t recognize it, but a friend in Dakar identified it as a kora and donated a spare instrument to the monastery. At the time, knowledge of the instrument was tightly controlled by jelis, two of whom were persuaded to visit Keur Moussa and sell their teachings. A course of weekend lessons culminated in a landmark session at the monastery’s church, where the jelis played a Mandinka refrain as the monks chanted a psalm in Latin. Their concord was miraculous.
Within a year, Senegal’s Gregorian griots were accompanying themselves. In 1966, during the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, a Paris radio station broadcast a Mass at the monastery; not long after, Keur Moussa secured a record deal with Decca. “The sonorities of ‘kora’ and tam-tam mix, in a sort of soft and supple carpet, with the pure voices of the monks (blacks and whites together),” one critic wrote of their début, “whose melismas appeal to a double tradition, without ever betraying one for the benefit of the other.” The release joined a wave of vernacular liturgies across the world, from the Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez’s “Misa Criolla” to Father Guido Haazen’s famous “Missa Luba,” recorded in 1965 by a choir in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the monks followed up with research trips across the continent, working to create a truly pan-African liturgy.
A greater challenge was reconciling monastic life with the technical demands of the instrument. Traditional koras can take nearly an hour to tune, relying on a delicate system of leather rings that bind the strings to the neck. Changing keys requires retying them all—impossible for monks who must not only pray a half-dozen times a day but constantly rotate through the twelve canonical psalm tones. One early stopgap was creating a floor stand for the kora, which enabled a player to toggle between two or even three differently tuned instruments. But the lasting solution was the addition of wood and, later, steel tuning pegs, in the seventies and eighties. The evolution culminated, in the early two-thousands, with a “chromatic kora,” which used a system of levers to add semitones to the harp’s range. By standardizing the tuning system, as well as creating alto, tenor, and bass variants, the monks allowed the kora to be played more easily in concert with Western instruments.
At times the abbey’s innovations were met with resistance. A Paris luthier tasked with building Keur Moussa’s first kora described the instrument’s calabash body as “a simple pumpkin.” On a return visit to Solesmes, the monks faced frosty accusations that they had sold out the Gregorian chant. Senegalese traditionalists were equally skeptical, with several averring that a kora with tuning pegs wasn’t a kora at all. Eventually, though, the monastery won over its critics. Keur Moussa’s modified kora was widely embraced by jeli families, some of whom replicated (or, more accurately, reappropriated) the monks’ design. In the nineties, Soriba Kouyaté, who helped bring the kora into jazz, played one of the monastery’s instruments in a video with Youssou N’Dour, one of the biggest pop stars in Africa. Solo Cissokho—another customer of the monastery’s workshop—began a series of collaborations with folk musicians in Norway and Lithuania, echoing the syncretic spirit of the monks. And, when Pope John Paul II visited Dakar, in 1992, a delegation from Keur Moussa serenaded him with their harps, signalling the monastery’s newfound influence within the Church.
Africa was home to the first Christian monasteries, which emerged in third-century Egypt. Yet the communities soon became a largely European phenomenon, and, when Keur Moussa was founded, in the early sixties, it was one of very few monasteries on the continent. Now, though, the center of gravity is shifting. A recent study noted that even as European monasteries experience a “crisis of vocations,” aging and shrinking out of their ancient abbeys, their African equivalents are youthful and multiplying. They also exert a cultural influence: if, in the sixties, European monks sought to bring the Gregorian chant to Africa, today African monks are giving music lessons to their peers abroad. Monasteries in France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Hungary have all experimented with integrating the kora into their liturgies; in 2004, the Vatican recognized Keur Moussa’s galvanizing work with the Annual Prize of the Pontifical Academies.
They have accomplished even more in Africa. On the day of my visit, the abbey was deceptively empty—not because of any inactivity but because of how widely the monks travel. Some had meetings in Dakar. Others were giving kora lessons at monastic communities in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. (A group of monks from Keur Moussa also founded a monastery in Conakry, Guinea.) The abbott, Olivier-Marie Sarr, was in Rome, presenting at a colloquium on the liturgy—a fact that I learned from his popular post about the event on LinkedIn. The abbey’s koras, Sarr wrote, are a “#fruit of #benedictine #charisma.”
We caught up later via Zoom. Sarr, a cherubic forty-five-year-old with a shaved head and a silver ring inscribed “PAX,” has run the monastery for a decade. Growing up in Dakar, he discovered a religious vocation early but never thought he’d become a monk. “You had to get up early, and I loved to sleep,” he told me. “You had to stay where you were, and I was very active. So I told myself, ‘No, it’s beautiful, but not for me.’ ” A series of return visits changed his mind. Sarr has big plans for the monastery: later this year, the monks will record two new albums, one dedicated to the Virgin Mary and another showcasing original compositions. Plans are also in the works for a museum of the kora. Most important, Sarr wants to arrange a complete psalmody in Wolof. Although the monks have held Mass and recorded songs in various local languages, their daily liturgy is still conducted in French. “Inculturation isn’t finished,” he told me. “We are always going further.”
For some in the Catholic Church, liturgical reform broke a continuity of worship that had endured for millennia. Whether they lived in Dakar or Des Moines, Catholics prayed in Latin—a tradition that some conservatives, especially in the United States, hold so dear that they are willing to defy the Vatican. But the monks of Keur Moussa see no contradiction between the specificity of their culture and the universality of their faith. “There is no way I can be a Christian if I’m not a good Serer first—if I’m not good with my tradition, with my ancestors,” Brother François Diabel told me. N’tab echoed his sentiments. “Latin is the official language of the Church,” he said. “We all learn it, and it’s good to use. But people must pray to God as they are, with their languages and instruments.” He gestured at the koras, tilting skyward in their stands. “We go toward God through what we are.” ♦
