For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

200ob South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

Cover: Gabriel Weather Vane, rendered by Lucille Chabot, c. 1939,

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Index of American Design

The Sixty-fifth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

“Sixty-five, but not retiring”

National Gallery of Art

2,596th Concert

Anonymous 4

Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner,

and Johanna Maria Rose

With special guests

Darol Anger, fiddler and mandolin player

Scott Nygaard, guitarist

December 10, 2006

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

“Long Time Traveling”

The performers will announce the program from the stage, making

selections from the following songs:

Religious ballads and lyric folk songs

Poor Wayfaring Stranger, The Lost Girl, You Fair and Pretty Ladies,

Parting Friends

Shape-note tunes

Fm on My Journey Home, Ecstasy, Wondrous Love

Folk hymns and revival songs

Like Noah’s Weary Dove, Return Again, Mercy Seat, Father Adieu,

I Shall Be Satisfied, Merrick

Gospel songs

Where We’ll Never Grow Old, The Shining Shore, Sweet Bye and Bye,

Angel Band, Shall We Gather at the River, Green Pastures, Just over in

the Gloryland

3
The Musicians

ANONYMOUS 4

Renowned for their unearthly vocal blend and virtuosic ensemble singing,

the four women who compose Anonymous 4 combine musical, literary,

and historical scholarship with contemporary performance intuition as

they create ingeniously designed programs, often interweaving music with 

poetry and narrative. They have performed in major cities throughout Asia,

Europe, and North America, and are celebrated regulars at the Tanglewood

and WolfTrap summer performing arts series. They have also sung with

the Concordia Orchestra at Lincoln Center, with the Hong Kong Philharmonic

Orchestra under Lucinda Carver, and with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra

under Marin Alsop, as well as at major international festivals, including the 

bbc Proms, the Bergen International Festival, the Brisbane Biennial, the 

Flanders Festival, the International Oude Muziek Festival, and the Lucerne

International Festival. Anonymous 4 has sold nearly two million copies

worldwide ofits award-winning recordings for Harmonia Mundi USA. Its

debut recording, An English Ladymass, was named 1992 Classical Disc of

the Year by cd Review magazine. For two consecutive years (2004 and 2005),

the quartet was voted one of Billboard’s top classical ensembles ofthe year.

In the realm of contemporary music, the group performs the voice of

Joan of Arc in Voices ofLight, an oratorio with silent film composed by Richard Einhorn. The ensemble commissioned Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to write

A Carnival ofKings, which it premiered and recorded on its 2003 release,

Wolcum Yule. The album includes works by Richard Rodney Bennett and 

Geoffrey Burgon as well. Other new works Anonymous 4 has premiered are

Steve Reich's Know What Is above You and Einhorn’s A Carnival ofMiracles,

both commissioned by wnyc Radio.

Anonymous 4 records exclusively for Harmonia Mundi and appears at

the National Gallery by arrangement with Herbert Barrett Management of

New York City.

5
DAROL ANGER

Violinist, fiddler, composer, and educator Darol Anger has made several

musical genres his own, some ofwhich he helped to invent. With the jazzoriented Turtle Island String Quartet, Anger developed and popularized new

techniques for playing contemporary music on string instruments. He also 

worked with the David Grisman Quintet to forge a new genre of acoustic

string band music. Anger’s own groups—the Republic of Strings, the Fiddlers 4, Psychograss, and the Anger-Marshall Duo—frequently perform his

compositions and arrangements. He developed his signature sound working

with many ofthe world’s great string musicians known for their improvisational skills, among them Vassar Clements, Bela Fleck, Stephane Grappelli,

David Grisman, Mark O’Connor, and Tony Rice.

Highlights ofAnger’s critically lauded recordings include At Home on

the Range, Chiaroscuro, Diary ofa Fiddler, Heritage (an all-star folk compendium), Republic of Strings releases, and six Turtle Island String Quartet

recordings from between 1987 and 1997. He has been a featured soloist on

a number ofmotion picture soundtracks and has workshops and clinics 

to his credit at many leading colleges and universities in Brazil, Germany,

and the United States. A MacDowell fellow, Anger has received numerous

composer’s residencies and grants. He plays a fiddle made by Bob Kogut

and a mandolin made by Benjamin Wilcox; he uses D’Addario strings and

prototype Glasser bows.

SCOTT NYGAARD

Scott Nygaard is one ofthe most inventive and original guitarists on the

bluegrass and acoustic music scenes. He was the guitarist with singersongwriter Laurie Lewis’s band from 1989 to 1992, and with Tim O’Brien’s

band, the O’Boys, from 1992 to 1997. Nygaard has also collaborated with

Darol Anger, Jerry Douglas, Tony Furtado, David Grisman, and Chris Thile, 

receiving numerous Grammy nominations for his stellar sidemanship. With

influences from Riley Puckett, Django Reinhardt, Doc Watson, and Clarence

White, Nygaard incorporates bluegrass, Cajun, jazz, rock and roll, and western swing into an original and powerful guitar style.

6

In addition to playing in the Republic of Strings, Nygaard performs with

and arranges music for singers Chris and Cassie Webster, whose debut recording, Ten Thousand Miles, was released in February 2004. Nygaard’s second

solo album, Dreamer's Waltz, released on Rounder Records, was nominated

for an Indie Award by the Association ofIndependent Music. A former editor at Acoustic Guitar magazine, Nygaard currently writes freelance articles

on music, maintains a busy performance schedule, and manages his son

Josefs nascent bike-racing career. He plays a Dana Bourgeois guitar and

uses L. R. Baggs electronics, aer acoustic amps, and D’Addario strings.

7
Program Notes

The tunes included in this program, for which Anonymous 4 has chosen the 

theme “Long Time Traveling,” are filled with imagery ofthe journey, ofbirds 

and flying, and ofreaching and crossing over the Jordan River. Most ofthese 

songs have themselves been traveling for a very long time, in an intertwining of oral and written traditions that has flourished for many generations.

The musical and lyrical elements ofAnglo-American music take part 

in an endless game ofmix and match: sacred words are set to dance airs,

worldly and spiritual texts share the same tunes, and the lyrics ofmuch

loved hymns are sung to other melodies. The tune most commonly known 

as Poor Wayfaring Stranger appears with its original religious ballad text in

the lyric folk song You Fair and Pretty Ladies, in the haunting folk hymn

Parting Friends, and in a bluesy instrumental version. John Newton’s poem 

Savior, Visit Thy Plantation has been attached to two different tunes: Return

Again and Merrick. The folk song The Lost Girl has been likened to the English piece Streams ofLovely Nancy, and You Fair and Pretty Ladies is similar 

to the Scottish O Waly, Waly. These melodies may or may not have originated

in the British Isles, but they bear the influence of English, Scottish, and 

Irish traditional songs.

The melody of Wondrous Love predates the nineteenth-century text and

three-part arrangement that Anonymous 4 sings by several hundred years.

The tunes for I'm on My Journey Home and Ecstasy, revival songs identifiable

by their rousing choruses, were either newly composed or adapted from oral

tradition, and arranged in spare three-part settings by songboolc compilers 

in the nineteenth century. Many ofthese musicians doubled as itinerant

singing schoolmasters, primarily in the southern states. The tunes they

composed and arranged are known as shape-note tunes, because they were

marked using four different shapes for note heads (triangle for fa, circle for

sol, rectangle for la, and diamond for mi), intended to help students learn to

read music quickly and easily. Although no shape-note songbooks have been

published since the mid-i850s, the shape-note singing tradition flourishes

to this day. The folk hymns on this program that come from such songbooks 

are Like Noah's Weary Dove, Return Again, Merrick, and Parting Friends.

Gospel songs first became popular in the middle ofthe nineteenth

century in the cities and revival campgrounds of New England, New York,

and Pennsylvania. The Shining Shore dates from the mid-i85os, and I’m

on My Journey Home was published several years later. Unlike the singing

schoolmasters in the South, whose musical education most often focused on 

indigenous music, the earliest gospel songwriters studied European musical style and tradition, with the result that their compositions feature more

sentimental texts and richer harmonies. Nonetheless, songs like The Shining

Shore share the simpler and more folklike character ofsongs written in the

South and almost immediately found their way into southern songbooks 

and hymnbooks. Some ofthe gospel songs in the program, including Where

We’ll Never Grow Old and Just over in the Gloryland, date from the early twentieth century, and Green Pastures was written in the early 1960s.

Anonymous 4 sings the shape-note tunes I’m on My Journey Home,

Ecstasy, and Wondrous Love in the three-part harmonizations in which

they first appeared in the nineteenth-century songbooks. The gospel songs 

The Shining Shore and Where We’ll Never Grow Old are also sung in their

original settings. The other folk hymns, revival songs, and gospel songs are

presented in new arrangements by members ofAnonymous 4, Darol Anger,

Mike Marshall, and Scott Nygaard.

9
T

Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Nordic Voices

Christmas music from Norway and other countries

Presented in connection with the 

Norwegian Christmas Festival at Union Station

December 17, 2006

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court