Making medieval music

DURHAM -- Ah, reunion tours. A chance for musical acts to relive the magic, singing their golden oldies before a nostalgic crowd. Saturday night, a reunited classical ensemble performing at Duke University will aim to take listeners back. Way back. All the way to the 13th century.

After a five-year hiatus, the a cappella quartet Anonymous 4 is once again touring the country singing medieval music. Founded by four women in 1986, the group is best known for unearthing and performing sacred music from the Middle Ages.

For two decades, Anonymous 4 remained one of America's most respected early music ensembles. In 2004, an announcement that the group was breaking up was treated like public radio Armageddon. "Pledge now! Get what could be the last Anonymous 4 CD" was the plea from classical music stations.

Turns out, Anonymous 4 wasn't exactly breaking up. They were making some personnel changes and transitioning to what cofounder Marsha Genensky calls "a part-time ensemble." She spoke by phone recently from her home in California, where she teaches at Stanford University.

"I'm the black sheep," Genensky said, laughing. The group's other three members still live in the New York vicinity. As a part-time ensemble, Anonymous 4 has still performed occasionally and continued learning new material, especially early American music. In 2006, they released the critically acclaimed CD "Gloryland," a collaboration with bluegrass musicians Mike Marshall and Darol Anger. Sporadic concerts followed featuring that repertoire of folk songs, hymns and spirituals.

But this fall tour, featuring music mostly from 13th-century Spain, is a milestone.

"This is our first year back touring with medieval music," Genensky said. "It does feel like a big and happy return to what we started out doing."

An amicable split

She's joined on the road by fellow founder Susan Hellauer; Ruth Cunningham, an original member who left Anonymous 4 in 1998 and returned in 2007; and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, a singer from Northern Ireland who initially came on board to replace Cunningham. As for Johanna Rose, the fourth founding vocalist, she's alive and well and pursuing other early music projects that involve (gasp!) instruments. (The split for this a cappella group was so amicable that there's a "Catching up with Johanna" feature on the Anonymous 4 Web site, plus pictures of her cats.)

On this eight-city tour, Anonymous 4 will perform music drawn from a single volume known to historians as the Las Huelgas Codex, a collection of 195 works that dates to about 1325.

"To us, this is a very important codex," Genensky said. "If you study medieval musicology, it's a big, big fish in a small pond."

The codex represents 140 years of music collected by nuns at a Cistercian convent in northern Spain. It's a significant historical document because it includes early examples of polyphonic Spanish music, that is, songs with multiple lines of melody. Prior to the 13th century, the majority of sacred music would have been chanted in unison.

"[Polyphony] was like this great new technology," Genesky said. "It was like fireworks."

So why were these nuns on the cutting edge? The Las Huelgas monastery was located along the St. James Way, a major pilgrimage route, and the travelers who stopped there brought with them music collected from all over Europe.

Women were prohibited from singing in public at the time, but Genensky has a theory -- though she can't prove it -- that some women took the holy orders at Las Huelgas because they loved music so much, they couldn't imagine their adult lives without it. "Of course, they had to make some sacrifices," she said.

On the menu

The Anonymous 4 concert will chronologically follow the nuns of Las Huelgas through a day at the convent, from morning matins through evening vespers. In between, the quartet will sing movements from a mass, a vocal exercise and French love songs that someone altered so the Latin lyrics reflected devotion to God rather than a man.

"There are quite a variety of sounds and textures within the codex," Genensky said. "We've picked the pieces that we love."

On Sunday, Genensky and her colleagues will remain in Durham to lead a master class organized by Karen M. Cook, a Ph.D. student who directs the Duke Collegium Musicum. In groups of four, 16 pre-selected students, faculty and community members will face the pressure of singing for Anonymous 4.

The master class, set for noon in the Nelson Music Room on East Campus, is open to the public. Saturday's concert will be, appropriately, in Duke's neo-Gothic chapel.

"You shouldn't pass up an opportunity to hear a performance in the chapel," Cook said. "Anonymous 4 is really excellent at what they do, and this is repertory that you can't hear everyday."

Not to mention, music that you might not be able to hear Anonymous 4 sing for another five years.

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