Music is the most abstract form of the arts, it has no concrete image. In a miraculous way music can reflect the soul mood, the spiritual atmosphere depicted by the author in his work. Taking into consideration that ecclesiastical creativity is, in essence, conciliar, you can realize why church singing is of great importance for Divine Services. Not distracting the worshipper’s attention from the words of the prayer, the znamenny singing helps to hear and comprehend the text, emphasizes its sense and purport, but not only by the performing modes such as loud-voiced singing, melismas or solo parts. The ancient znamenny chants have something different: strict melodics, the profoundly and thoroughly elaborated musical form, having been well thought over by the old-times hymnographers with the only purpose to aid in feeling the prayer’s words.

In the section Singing the recordings of the Valaam Monastery brotherhood choir singing are presented in the format mp3 as well the video-materials on Valaam. The information on the CDs released by the monastery can be found in the section CD.

Some of the presented recordings are made at the recording studio, and some are live ones made in the church during the Divine Services. Undoubtedly, the studio recordings have much higher quality of their sounding, but the live ones, in spite of all their quality drawbacks, can represent the Divine Service atmosphere. A pilgrim does not have a real possibility to listen to the singings of the Lent and Easter Services when it is difficult to get to the island. Many of the pilgrims, visited the monastery, are thought to take a pleasure in listening to those singings. The presented studio recorded singings were made mainly from 1993 to 2002, and the live recordings were made from 2003 downwards.

In this section quite a big amount of the recordings are presented, so they are sorted out into the various categories for convenience. The choice of the necessary category and the year of recording can be made with the help of the filter. Firstly, it is better to start with The Selected as there the best samples of each recording category are presented. After that it is advisable to pass onto to the group aroused you interest.

At the moment the following main groups of the recordings are presented:

The Selected - the selection of the best singings of the various years and categories.

Studio recordings – the recordings made at the recording studio. You can find them in the section Compact Discs devoted to the discs released by the Valaam Monastery.

Live recordings – the recordings made at the church during the Divine Services.

Easter – the Easter Singings.

Lent – the Repented Singings of the Lent

Sunday Vigil – the recording of the Sunday All-Night Vigil.

Saint Petersburg – the recordings of the choir of the Valaam Monastery Metochion in Saint Petersburg.

Video – the video-materials on Valaam, films, TV programmes, video-recordings are presented here.