“I always thought if you go far enough in one direction, you meet yourself coming back,” says soprano Jacqueline Kwiatek-Horner, a former member of the acclaimed a cappella vocal group Anonymous 4 and the founder of a new vocal trio ModernMedieval.
Kwiatek-Horner will join local organist Keith Reas ’84E (DMA) for this week’s upcoming Third Thursday concert series at the Memorial Art Gallery, in a program titled “A Medieval Tapestry.” The concert starts at 7:30 p.m.
Anonymous 4 was an all-female vocal ensemble dedicated to singing Medieval chant and early polyphony. The ensemble’s name, Anonymous 4, referred to an anonymous author of a famous thirteenth-century manuscript that revealed the names of two composers—some of the earliest composer names on record—who wrote music for Notre Dame in Paris (Leonin and Perotin). Anonymous 4, the ensemble, was known for bringing a new energy to repertoire that had been overlooked.
But it was when the vocal group expanded to contemporary music, reducing the perceptual space between music old and new, that their reputations expanded further.
“We wanted to commission a contemporary composer to write something for the year 2000, so we asked Steve Reich, and we sent him a piece of two-part polyphony that was just constant seconds—crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch—and he wrote back, and he said, ‘Why do you even need me? This sounds like it was written yesterday.’”
After three decades, 21 Billboard-topping albums, and countless international performances, Anonymous 4 performed its final concert in December 2015.
Kwiatek-Horner, now a faculty member at Princeton University’s Department of Music, didn’t envision singing in another major vocal group after her 15 years with Anonymous 4. But in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum asked her to put together a small ensemble of women’s voices to sing Medieval chant by Hildegard Von Bingen, one of the earliest composers on record and the first female composer we know of across music history. She assembled a trio, which included Eastman alumna Martha Cluver ’03E. After positive reviews, Kwiatek-Horner thought her newly conceived trio would be the perfect way to dig deeper into the connections between Medieval music and newer music.
“A lot of early music has very strong dissonance, and then all the rules are out the window because there weren’t any rules,” she explains. “And then you come to a contemporary piece, and it has kind of a similar affect, a similar sonority. So, what always interested me was, how do you bring those two worlds together?”
And the word “modern” in ModernMedieval’s name doesn’t only mean the music of today. Most any music over Classical music’s history can be modern in comparison to Medieval music, and so the trio’s possibilities are endless. The group’s most popular program, however, has commissioned several contemporary composers (including Eastman alumnus Caleb Burhans ’03E, who is married to ModernMedieval member Cluver) to write music inspired by Hildegard chants, which are performed in between the new works. Just by ear, it can be difficult to tell which works are new and which are old.
Thursday’s concert is based around the idea of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is both a sacred and secular figure in Medieval works, both a figure of the divine and of romantic love. Mary is associated with wisdom, love, and worship, and so the works explored on the program take on such themes. Many of the works are ones that ModernMedieval performs but adapted for voice and organ.
Included on the concert will be Hildegard chants. Although Hildegard chants are usually monophonic—meaning only one musical line—Kwiatek-Horner will sing with Reas providing a drone on the organ. They are love songs with themes of nature, fertility, growth, and beauty.
“It’s hot stuff,” says Kwiatek-Horner. “Love can be secular and sacred. They really do come together—there was a blurring of lines.”
And one selection will emphasize the varying meanings of modern that Kwiatek-Horner is so drawn to. In a kind of mash-up, she’ll sing the text of the famous English carol “There is No Rose,” but to the tune of an ancient Irish folk tune. “The tune is probably older than the text, and the text is pretty old,” she says, “so what’s the modern in that context?”
Reas will also perform some solo organ works to round out the concert.
Third Thursday Concert: A Medieval Tapestry
7:30 p.m. | Memorial Art Gallery, Fountain Court
Concert included with museum admission