Anonymous 4 is singing proof that the road to salvation is paved with polyphony

“I am a poor, wayfaring stranger, while journy’ing thru this world of woe. Yet, there’s no sickness, toil nor danger, in that bright land to which I go,” concedes the religious ballad “Wayfaring Stranger.”

“There sweet shall be thy rest, and every longing satisfied, with full salvation bless’d,” invokes the folk hymn “Like Noah’s Weary Dove.”

“Let storms of woe in whirlwinds rise, each cord on earth to sever, there bright and joyous in the skies, there is our home forever,” yields the gospel song “The Shining Shore.”

With souls battered by the constant struggle to survive, colonists consoled themselves with the infinite and unblemished peace, joy and rest that only Heaven could provide. To put it simply, death was something to be looked forward to—unpleasant though it was, it was also the only chance for true relief.

It’s enough to make one grateful, isn’t it? Modern life in developed nations sure is cozy by comparison. But as Marsha Genensky, who has pored over these lyrical texts from the perspective of both a performer and an academic, reminds us, these songs are still powerfully relevant.

“These lyrics come from a time when life here was really a lot harder,” says Genensky. “People were moving West and trying to make their way and many times really didn’t have a whole lot to make it with. Yes, now we have electricity and cars and supermarkets, but that’s not true for everybody, both here in urban and rural areas and many other countries in the world. So it needs to resonate with us as we think about our neighbors, close and far.”

Genensky is a founding member of Anonymous 4, a group of singers and instrumentalists who perform traditional music from the medieval, renaissance and colonial American periods. Their concert this Saturday will focus on selections from their 2006 recording Gloryland, a collection of early American tunes that would’ve been considered mainstream music in the Ozarks and the Appalachians during the 18th, 19th and early part of the 20th century.

“These were the gem places where a lot of ballads and folk songs that either came from the British Isles  or originated in the United States just really found a home,” explains Genensky.

As the music for these traditional songs is often obscurely preserved in churches, town libraries, and sometimes less tangibly in the minds of family members who pass them down through the generations, arranging these songs presents a serious challenge. Even armed as the members of Anonymous 4 are with graduate degrees in folklore, folklife and medieval musicology, Genensky describes the reconstruction of these songs as an intense archeological endeavor.

“Just because you can see [the music], doesn’t mean you know what to do with it,” she says. “Even in the simplest situation, you have the notes and the rhythms in front of you. But you could sing it at any pitch, with any inflection.”

But historical due diligence aside, the true triumph of the four women who comprise the core of the group is in achieving their harmonic blend. These four very different voices create an arrestingly gorgeous sound—mellifluous, haunting and capable of conjuring overtones that send chills down your spine in the best way possible.

“It’s more about listening to the sound of which you are a part than it is about listening to yourself and how you fit in or how you dominate,” explains Genensky. “You have to not put your ego in it … The more you just let the sound carry with you as only one of its pieces, the more it actually becomes larger than the sum of its parts.”

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