Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunnigham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) is a superstar ensemble, and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season. Their records are always at the top of the Billboard charts and their concerts are consistently sold out. Anonymous 4’s new album, Secret Voices, features music from the Las Huelgas Codex, a collection of sacred and secular works spanning the entire 13th and early 14th centuries. Cistercian nuns living in a convent near Burgos in south-central Spain would have sung the music in this collection.
Anonymous 4’s Susan Hellauer spoke with Ariama editor Craig Zeichner about Secret Voices.
Find part 2 of this interview on our blog >>>
Ariama: Congratulations on Secret Voices. It’s been a while since Anonymous 4 has recorded medieval music.
SH: It’s actually been a while since we’ve developed a new medieval program. We’ve been using parts of medieval programs over the last few years, but I think it reflects the changing nature of concert series and audiences, because we’ve been asked for programs that mix American music with the medieval. So we’ve done a program called Shall We Gather where the first half was music from our Ladymass program and the second half was music from American Angels and Gloryland.
Ariama: That’s an interesting mix.
SH: People really reacted well to it, because after we released American Angels and toured with it, people would come up to us after the show and say, “I thought you were going to sing medieval music.” Then we would do a medieval show and somebody would say, “Why didn’t you sing some of that American stuff?”
Ariama: Tough to keep everybody happy.
SH: Secret Voices took almost two and a half years to develop because since we stopped as full-time performers we don’t all live on the same coast. There’s a lot of repertoire in the Las Huelgas Codex and we spent a lot of time reading and trying things out. I did all new transcriptions of the music and it took a while for us to sing it and try it.
Ariama: Extremely labor-intensive?
SH: Thank God for the Sibelius notation [computer] program—although when you try to do medieval music in Sibelius you are basically defeating all the things about it that are helpful when working on Beethoven or contemporary music. I was able to make quick changes using it and we all worked a lot on the rhythms and voicing, so it took a while.
Ariama: What drew you to the Las Huelgas Codex?
SH: We were thinking about the Codex since our very beginning. It’s a natural because of its association with the convent. Hildegard of Bingen and Las Huelgas would be women’s medieval music par excellence. But we didn’t want to go there first because we didn’t want to be labeled a “women’s music group.” No disrespect to people who concentrate on that repertoire, but I think it’s much easier to concentrate on that music now. In the 1980s you would have just put yourself into a blind alley. There’s no way out and then you’d have to fight your way out to do “men’s music.” So it’s something we put off and put off until no one would notice that we were girls singing supposedly controversial girl’s music.
Ariama: There always has been something of a purest bias, hasn’t there?
SH: We have some beloved early reviews where one writer in particular would say, “Yes, it’s beautiful and it’s in tune, blah, blah, blah, but they are distorting the repertoire because this is MEN’S MUSIC!” He would go on and on about it. We enjoyed the reviews immensely. This one writer was really something—being reviewed by him was like being on Nixon’s enemies list.
Ariama: There’s some debate about whether the nuns would have sung polyphony in the convent.
SH: Yes, some scholars disagree about this. It wasn’t so much a medieval attitude against women, but singing polyphony would have been like a profession in those days. It would have been considered beneath the aristocratic class of most of the women in the royal convent. The analogy would be like being of a certain class and fixing your own car. But the music offers some clues. In the text of the little solfeggio exercise [track 4] it says something like, “Come on ladies, you would be very wrong to ignore your music exercises because you were born to sing polyphony.” There are other things in there too. Who would have sung O monialis concio [track 15]—would they have hired men to sing? No one really has an answer. So it’s still a controversial manuscript in terms of who sang it.
Ariama: There are lots of musical styles in the Las Huelgas Codex, aren’t there?
SH: The little rondellus, Benedicamus domino [track 19], is so English, yet it hasn’t been identified with any English source. Remember, the convent was on the road to Compostella. It was a big travel stop, so people would come by routinely to go to Compostella. People still go there and we did a concert across the street from the shrine, and night and day people were going in and out; it was like the subway at rush hour. It was like that in the Middle Ages too. The convent was on the crossroads of Europe. They were powerful women there with the power to do things in the convent that ordinary nuns couldn’t. They also had friends in high places, so they had a lot of the secular hits of the 13th century but transformed with new texts into music they could sing devotionally and liturgically. The Codex is interesting from a social, musical, liturgical and women’s historical perspective.
Ariama: Performance style isn’t an exact science, is it?
SH: In the end, we have no idea how this stuff originally sounded. An interviewer once thought she was going to be very clever with me and asked, “If you could go back in time to one place what would it be?” She was going on with “Would it be Notre Dame or Las Huelgas or Hildegard’s convent?” I said with no hesitation, “I’d go back to watch the 1927 Yankees with Babe Ruth in the World Series.” You know, if I went back to Notre Dame or Hildegard’s convent and didn’t like what I heard, what would I do then?
The audience is part of my performance. I can’t put a wall up between my audience and me. They have to hear something coming across from me to them. I can’t wash out the Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles that they’ve heard, as well as all the background music they are exposed to. I can’t get rid of their frame of reference musically. So I have to work within it.
Ariama: Here you are 25 years in, with several albums that have appeared on the Billboard charts. Did you ever imagine it would be this way?
SH: Oh God no! But you know what the great thing is? We were just a group of people who got together to do just what we wanted. We got together because we had some sort of passionate goal and you know, that’s very lucky.
To learn more about Anonymous 4’s upcoming plans, read more of the interview on Ariama's Blog.
by Craig Zeichner
