Singing of St. Nick

Anonymous 4 is anything but--at least to those interested in early music.

These four women who research and perform medieval music have been stars on the classical music charts since coming together in 1986. They have performed chants and polyphony--music sung in multiple parts--throughout the U.S. and Europe and have sold more than 1 million records.

Marsha Genensky is one of the original members of Anonymous 4, which takes its name from musicologist’s designation for a 13th century Englishman who wrote about vocal polyphony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. All their work is noted for intense scholarship as well as musicianship. On Friday, they will perform the local premiere of “Legends of St. Nicholas,” their program of hymns, songs and other works about St. Nick, at El Camino College Center for the Arts.

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Question: You all have different, but complementary, backgrounds. How did you find each other to form Anonymous 4?

Answer: We did have totally diverse backgrounds, ranging from Susan [Hellauer’s] trumpet major to my aborted folklore PhD. Obviously we were all interested in music, but all came at it from a funny and different angle. We were all performing on the East Coast with early music groups and in the mid-’80s were in Alex Blachly’s Pomerium, a group of about 12 singers specializing in Renaissance music. Johanna [Maria Rose] and I decided to move back in time, from the Renaissance to medieval music, and it ended up being a group of four women [including Jacqueline Horner].

Q: Only men had recorded polyphony up to that point because it was associated with monks. Was that a hard barrier to break?

A: We had to get a “note from our teacher” when we made our first recording. There was a public debate, though not among scholars but just the general public, about whether women did or did not sing polyphony. So we had to have some scholarly backup when we put out this record of polyphony for women. We did get some bad reviews saying we had desecrated the music, though they didn’t say we sounded bad.

Q: Were people upset because it was women singing religious music?

A: A lot of the music we sing is religious music because so much of the music that survives is what was written down. And the people who knew how to write were clerics. The wealthy, who also knew how to write, were into monophonic music, so we really don’t get into that troubadour repertory. I think it was really a question of authenticity, more than desecration in the sacred sense. . . . There is very strong evidence that women did sing chants in the privacy of the convent. And there are a number of manuscripts for equal voices found in convents.

Q: Does the music actually sound better in churches than in modern concert halls?

A: There’s not only an acoustic thing, but there’s also a visual environment that you get from being in a beautiful church. There are churches that sound bad, but the ideal setting is a beautiful church that sounds gorgeous. One of the things we try to do is evoke another time and place and it’s easier for the performers and the audience to go to that other place. . . . It’s amazing how successful it can be, even in concert halls. We may have a hard time in a concert because the acoustics are difficult on stage, but in the audience it sounds great. You can’t account for anything. We’ve had a hard time on stage, and then someone comes up afterward and says they saw the Virgin Mary floating over us. And that has happened.

Q: Your “Legends of St. Nicholas” CD came out last year. Was it just time to do a Christmas record?

A: Actually, we had to have a first program. That was the first program that we made in 1986. We recorded it very late. It’s been modified and we’ve committed evolution upon it a number of times until it reached the state it’s in now.

Q: You did a lot of research on the real St. Nicholas for this project. Did you learn anything surprising?

A: I wasn’t brought up in the Christian tradition, so many things were new, except what you learn from Christmas carols and Alvin and the Chipmunks, or pick up from your school friends. One of the most amazing things I learned is that saints can be very punitive and really mean. They can beat people up.

Q: Does that affect how you sing about St. Nick?

A: We have a broader impression of him. He does become a more real type of person. Nobody real--at least in my life--is all good or all bad, or behaves any certain way all the time. The fact that St. Nick does things that imply losing his temper makes him a fuller person.

Medieval music, however, is sometimes thought of as completely unemotional, and sometimes it’s difficult to get the relationship between the text and the music. But the mood of a text informs the mood or speed or pitch at which we sing it. A lot of the people say that medieval music is “music in a smaller box.” So the listener has to go inside the box rather than have something huge and emotional thrown at them. It’s something that requires a narrowing of focus.

Q: What are some of the things you’d suggest people focus on in the St. Nicholas program?

A: There’s one fun thing for those who listen closely. Because the music on this program comes from different countries, they’ll hear music that sounds like it’s in different languages because Latin pronunciation varied according to the local dialect. So when you sing a piece in standard Latin, it sounds one way, but if you sing it in French Latin, it sounds like a whole different piece, even though they are the same words and the same notes.

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* Anonymous 4 presents “Legends of St. Nicholas” Friday at 8 p.m. at El Camino College Center for the Arts, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance. $19 and $22. (800) 832-ARTS.