On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 1:19 AM david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:

Depends on if you consider "ambient" to mean only instrumental music.
Gregorian and other chant (I live in Hawaii, we have our own chant
tradition) are meant to communicate meaning/feelings through words. In
my opinion, they're also not meant for "background" listening, the way I
think of a lot of ambient music.

Absolutely. The composers and historical performers of Gregorian chant (a distinctly religious music tradition) would likely be rather annoyed to be considered "as ignorable as it is listenable" (the core of Eno's original definition of ambient music)