OPChant - Promoting Dominican Gregorian Chant

OPChant is a YouTube channel started by Brother Stefan Ansinger O.P. and Brother Alexandre Frezzato O.P. It is dedicated to sharing Dominican Gregorian chant with the entire world.

Through music, we preach the truth and beauty of our faith. Every week we publish a new Gregorian Chant video on our YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/opchant), following the liturgical cycle. OPChant has the distinction of being one of the most popular online initiatives in the Order of Preachers (the Dominican Order).

We have produced more than 150 videos in just one year; our first video has been watched almost 100,000 times. Our YouTube channel itself has been visited by more than half a million people. At the moment we have 20,847 subscribers from all over the world. Our project has been covered by more than 50 media outlets in dozens of contries, and we have been interviewed for major radio and television stations in America, Rome and the Netherlands. The success of the project has completely overwhelmed us. Thanks be to God!

OPChant is a serious apostolate: it requires lots of work. We rehearse daily for an hour, and our recording sessions require 3 hours of hard work. But we are undaunted: our goal is to record as much Dominican Gregorian Chant as possible and to share this with the world.

Until now, we have been using private resources to produce our videos, with some help from the Dominican Order.

But we are a mendicant order. The word mendicant means "beggar" – living from the generosity of others is part of our way of life. That means we rely on your help to continue making great videos and improve the quality of what we do.

This is a project we have been doing for one year and we are planning to continue the project for (at least) the next few years to come.

We need your financial help for two main reasons :

1) Travel : We need to travel to churches to record. This can be relatively expensive. One of the brothers is in neighboring France for 6 months, and if we want to continue recording at this time, we need to cover the costs of travel.

2) Recording equipment : We use our own laptops for all the work. We have access only to free software, which is really not sufficient. We are using a very cheap camera with a good external microphone – but this ought to be improved.

What we need: (A) a dedicated laptop with an external screen, (B) better cameras, which will enable us to record with multiple points of view, (C) better microphones and lighting, (D) tripods for the cameras and (E) backup storage for our videos.

All of these technologies come at a price. And yet: we know that God uses this music to touch the souls of lots of people.

Please give at whatever level is appropriate for you. Every gift counts, no matter how large or small. All of this will enable us to continue to provide even more beautiful videos of Gregorian Chant on a weekly basis. Thank you for your support!