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The admired a cappella ensemble bids the world farewell after three decades of radiant artistry.
Sunday morning, August 3, 1986. The Upper West Side of Manhattan had been deserted by anyone who could get away, and not many showed up on West 99th Street at St. Michael's Episcopal Church, where four of us-two choir members and two friends-had agreed to sing the service that day. We loved the medieval music we'd been reading together for a few months. But we wondered what the congregation, hearing the debut of soon-to-be Anonymous 4, would think of the strange old sounds.
Afterward, enough of the few churchgoers were pleased and fascinated (or said they were) to encourage us. But it was not their reaction that fueled our launch: it was our own pleasure in the musical process-finding, voicing, and interpreting songs and plainchant that few others around us bothered with.
Our first concert program-Legends of St. Nicholas-was quickly scheduled for the following December, again at the Tiffany-windowed, acoustically perfect St. Michael's. We sang in the side chapel so our enthusiastic audience of fifteen friends and family did not seem quite as sparse at it was. If drawing a big crowd to hear our new musical idea had been the criterion for continuing, it would have been over as soon as it began. But it wasn't, and so it wasn't.
We rehearsed long and often, for few prospects and little money. Within a year, we lost a member to our grueling-for-nothing schedule, but we were soon four again when Ruth Cunningham joined Marsha Genesky, Johanna Maria Rose, and me.
Beginning in 1987, St. Michael's offered us a residency and a concert series, and there we steadily built repertoire and refined our own style of programming: compact, thematically unified, appearing quietly out of some distant place, and disappearing back there again. When our listeners reported, over and over, that our concerts had "transported" them, we knew why we were spending so much time in the library and in rehearsal.
The Anonymous 4 style of programming was no accident-or perhaps, in a way, it was: each of us brought along skills and experiences that seemed to interlock and work together in an almost magical way.
Johanna had studied acting...