All 4 love

Anonymous 4 bring medieval longing to Portland

By Doug Hubley

Anonymous 4, presented at Merrill Auditorium by PCA Great Performances, 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 26, $25/$29, 207-842-0800.

ANONYMOUS 4: quite fascinating in their strangeness.

Valentine’s Day is two weeks off, and there you sit with visions of chocolates and roses dancing in your head. And here come Anonymous 4, bringing beautiful music for your ears and a little cold water for your romantic notions.

If you haven’t heard Anonymous 4, you’ve probably heard of them. They assemble brainy programs of medieval music and sing it, unaccompanied, with a grace and purity that seems to express something essential. Their skill has carried these four New Yorkers to the top of the classical charts and to concert halls around the world. Even here: at 8 p.m. Friday, the hall is Portland’s Merrill Auditorium, and the program is Love’s Illusion, a collection of 13th-century French music.

Old songs, you bet. But they have a subtext that still resonates clearly. There were stupid rules for lovers then, there are stupid rules for lovers now, and in some ways the rules are much the same.

The songs come from the Montpellier Codex, a collection of music spanning the 13th century and assembled in 1400. The 29 works in Love’s Illusion reflect a single theme: the tradition of courtly love cherished by medieval troubadours. You remember courtly love from eighth-grade English Lit: brave knight worships fair lady, subjecting himself to her utterly, even knowing that his only reward will be frustration.

Or, as Anonymous 4 member Marsha Genensky puts it, “ ‘You’re blonde, I love you, why don’t you love me?’ ” Genensky, in a telephone interview, brings up that mid-1990s dating guide for women, The Rules, whose cunning mind-games would have obliterated 35 years of feminist progress had anyone taken them seriously. They show uncomfortable similarities to a set of lovers’ rules from the Middle Ages, which Anonymous 4 includes in the readings performed in the Love’s Illusion concerts.

“There’s that whole thing about how the woman shouldn’t say this to the man until the man says that to the woman,” Genensky explains. “And all the little steps that you’re supposed to take in order to draw someone in, and yet which build a tradition between the two people of total antitrust. So it’s treated as either a serious or a non-serious game, and the end is some kind of strange relationship based on absolute non-communication or false communication.”

You won’t get much of this when you hear Anonymous 4 sing, unless you understand 13th-century French. The social subtext is engaging to think about and was not incidental to Anonymous 4’s intention for Love’s Illusion. On the other hand, though, the purely musical dimension of this material is huge. These songs, all in a form known as the motet, evolved from the simple liturgical plainsongs commonly called Gregorian chants. Over the chant’s simple melody — sung here without words in most cases — the composers layered one, two, or three other melodies, each with its own text and with no particular concern about close harmony.

The result is a sound in which tendrils of text and melody cross and twine around each other like vines up a wall. “It’s incredibly wonderful music,” says Genensky. “Some of the four-part pieces are a little strange, because four-part music was pretty new, but they’re actually quite fascinating in their strangeness.”

Sometimes the different texts address the same subject. Sometimes they address disparate subjects, such as the Virgin Mary and a love interest, in a way that illuminates their commonalities. One piece combines a typical lover’s plaint, a creed against hypocrisy, and a drinking song. The effect is a sort of musical Cubism that takes a theme, holds it up in the light and examines it from several sides at once. For some pieces, the group starts with the chant melody and adds each layer in successive passes, providing insight into how this structure works.

Anonymous 4 date back to 1986, when Genensky, Johanna Rose, Susan Hellauer, and Ruth Cunningham first started experimenting with medieval chant and polyphony, or multipart music. (Jacqueline Horner replaced Cunningham in 1998.) Love’s Illusion, their third recording, was released on Harmonia Mundi in 1994. The quartet’s 10th and latest release is 1000: A Mass for the End of Time, issued on Harmonia Mundi last fall. All told, the quartet has sold about a million recordings, and they enjoy a popularity uncommon in classical music circles.

Yet it’s misleading to lump Anonymous 4 into classical music in the conventional sense. Their appeal extends to the world-music market too, as well as to the early-music enthusiasts that you might expect. Beyond that, “it’s also that we came up as recording artists during the 1990s,” Genensky says; their first recording, An English Ladymass, was issued in 1992. That decade saw surging interest in spiritual issues, she explains. Combining an ecclesiastical sonority with themes that keep a comfortable distance from most contemporary religious doctrine, Anonymous 4 have a natural appeal to nearly anyone’s spiritual side (or even New Age side).

“One audience member told us once after a concert that the music we sing gave him space for contemplation,” Genensky says. “And we particularly liked his way of putting it. Contemplation can be religious, if one is religious, or it can be spiritual, if one has that inclination, or it can just be contemplation. And we thought that that was an extremely inclusive way of describing the experience.”

In addition to Friday night’s concert, Anonymous 4 will coach the Deering High School Chamber Singers in a master class at Merrill from noon to 1 p.m. that day. The class is free and open to the public.

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.