Batman Complete Score.

[phantom stranger]

In Mask of the Phantasm, Shirley Walker just had the choir chant the names of WB executives backwards. Perhaps she and Elfman did something similar for Batman?

[The Dark Knight]

Take this for the uninformed opinion that it is but I always assumed it was simple chanting.

Indeed. It didn't have to mean anything. It just had to sound ghostly and mysterious. And it was.

[batass4880]

In Mask of the Phantasm, Shirley Walker just had the choir chant the names of WB executives backwards. Perhaps she and Elfman did something similar for Batman?

They probably did then. Cool!

[THE BAT-MAN]

Does anyone know what the choir at the beginning of "Descent into Mystery" is saying? Also, what are they singing in? Latin? Italian?

I do.

Here is a excerpt quote on page 131  from the book titled, "Danny Elfman's Batman: A Film Score Guide" by Janet K. Halfyard.

"Descent into Mystery" is, without doubt, one of the best-known and most important cues in the score.  It occurs very close to the midpoint of the film and takes the Bat-theme into completely new melodic, harmonic, and timbral areas.  Two of the most obviously new features of the theme's treatment are the use of voices and the cue's absolutely harmonic stability.  Whereas one of the main characteristics of the Bat-theme treatment so far has been its harmonic unpredictability, this cue  starts and ends in D minor without any harmonic deviations.  Instead, the musical impetus of the cue lies in the way Elfman continually varies and builds the complexity of the texture, layering the instruments and voices over a stable harmonic base.  The use of voices is unusual in context: although many of Elfman's scores make use of voices, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns among them, this is the first time in Batman that we have clearly heard a choir.  Voices are indicated in the score at the end of the slow, opening section of the main title, but they are very low in the mix of sound and might easily be missed altogether when watching the film, although they are more prominent on the soundtrack recording.  The choir's unexpected and very prominent introduction into the foreground of the music this late in the score heightens the impact of the cue and indicates that there is something particularly important happening here:  it has required new musical materials in order to be realized.  Elfman's evocation of "O Fortuna" from orff's Carmina Burana in the staccato phrasing of "Descent" lends the music a sense of the scale and power of that work.  The words are indistinct and are not given in the score but appear to be a combination of solfe'ge (Personal Edit: Solfe'ge is the use of the sol-fa syllables to note the tone of the scale. A singing exercise in which the sol-fa syllables are used.  Example, Do Re Me Fa So La Te) and Latin--- the only clear phrase is "in sancto,"(Personal Edit: Sancto, the Latin word for holy) which we hear several times.  The Latinate text gives the music an impression of ritual and mystery

[batass4880]

Awesome, thanks for the info! Never thought about the solfe'ge scale before.

[Azrael]

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't even know that such a book ever existed. Thanks!