ANON - Ensemble

ANON - Ensemble A Lincoln-based early-music ensemble which specialises in rediscovering neglected and forgotten music by composers whose identities are no longer known.

04/03/2026

Thank you to all who joined us in Lincoln Cathedral on the 21st for our concert of NOCTURN, which featured some truly stunning and fascinating pieces of forgotten music.

Thank you to the Dean and Chapter. Thank you to Richard Hall for his beautiful photography, and to the team at Southside Lincoln for all their support.

Our next concert will be on the 11th of July. Add the date to your diaries, and stay tuned for more information.

Lots of love,
ANON

After countless conversations, meetings, drafts, tweaks, redrafts, and gallons of coffee, ANON’s new book - created in c...
17/02/2026

After countless conversations, meetings, drafts, tweaks, redrafts, and gallons of coffee, ANON’s new book - created in collaboration with the extraordinarily talented Richard Hall - is finally here.

Working with Richard over the last year has been an immensely inspiring experience. His photography and artistic instinct has an extraordinary ability to tap into the human experience we all share but rarely put to words. Like moments you feel you’ve lived, or places you’ve stood, even you know you haven’t. You ‘recognise’ them, but can’t quite say why.

This book a small attempt to hold that uncanny familiarity alongside reflections on identity and anonymity in art. The images evoke recognition without explanation, while the essays and reflections ask how identity shapes meaning, how names influence value, and what it means to encounter art without the comfort of attribution.

We are launching the book this Saturday in the Chapter House of Lincoln Cathedral.

🕛 12.00 - Richard Hall will speak about his work and the process behind the images
🕧 12.30 - Thomas Wilson will give a talk about anonymity in art and it’s influence on perception and interpretation.

The book will be available in the day for £15, with a limited special edition available for £20.

Please do come if you can. It would be lovely to see you there.

ANON

13/02/2026

It has been such a privilege to work with the immensely talented Richard Hall for the last year. Please join us in Lincoln Cathedral on the 21st and 22nd of February for a unique exhibition experience, and the launch of a book created in collaboration between Richard Hall and ANON.

07/02/2026

ANON Returns to Lincoln Cathedral with NOCTURN, an unforgettable concert of music performed for the first time in centuries.

Saturday 21 February, 19.30

Get your tickets here: https://tinyurl.com/4sujw2yu

"I would venture to guess that Anon [...] was often a woman" - Virginia Woolf (1929)Throughout history, women have compo...
02/12/2025

"I would venture to guess that Anon [...] was often a woman" - Virginia Woolf (1929)

Throughout history, women have composed music. That’s not modern revisionism. It's not wishful thinking. It’s just a fact history forgot how to tell. They composed in convents and courts and kitchens. Some had training, some taught themselves. And many were as good as anyone. But the world rarely asked who they were, and for the most part it looked the other way.

It’s difficult to sign your name when you’re not supposed to have one. It’s difficult to say "this is mine" when you’ve been taught it’s vain or improper to speak up. Hard to compose when no one shows you how. Harder still when no one believes you can.

We remember Maddalena Casulana precisely because she is the exception that proves the rule. In 1568, she became the first woman in Europe to publish a book of music under her own name. She did so, she wrote, “to show the world the foolish error of men who believe themselves the sole possessors of the gifts of intellect and artistry.” That she had to say it at all tells you everything.

Most women didn’t get that chance.

Leonora d’Este was a Ferrarese noblewoman, born into privilege and power – daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and the Duke of Ferrara. She was educated, gifted, and surrounded by opportunity – and yet, when her motets appeared in print in 1543, her name did not.

It may be that the printer withheld her name. Too risky maybe. A woman, a nun, a noble. Better to let the music be its own justification. Better to remove her from the equation.

Or it may be that Leonora chose anonymity herself. Perhaps out of humility or piety. Perhaps she knew her music would stand a better chance of survival alone, without her.

For every Casulana and d’Este, there are countless more whose names we will never recover. Women who were taught to sing but not to write. Women who composed and were praised – until their husbands or fathers signed the page. Women who were told again and again that they didn’t matter, until eventually some of them believed it. Or gave up trying to prove otherwise.

29/11/2025

Enjoy this fragment of musical perfection!

From 'Curremus in Odorem' - Anonymous, c1580. Likely Flemish or German.

Found only in one source: a handwritten addendum attached to the back of a book of printed motets, now kept in the Stadtbibliothek in Augsburg.

There are many ways to destroy an old manuscript. Fire. Flood. Trying to help.For a brief, misguided period in the mid-2...
31/10/2025

There are many ways to destroy an old manuscript. Fire. Flood. Trying to help.

For a brief, misguided period in the mid-20th century, the world of archival conservation fell in love with a new miracle fix: Transparent Tape. Clean, modern, and self adhesive. No messy paste, no drying, no skills or training, just a light pressure. Anyone with thumbs could be a conservator.

Librarians and archivists used it to mend tears, reattach loose pages, reinforce fraying bindings, and across the world, centuries-old manuscripts were crisscrossed with shiny, glistening strips, each one a confident declaration that the future of conservation had arrived!

It hadn’t.

Today, tape is one of the most dreaded words in conservation. The damage it causes is chemical, invasive and, in many cases, irreversible. The clear film turns yellow and brittle. The adhesive – proudly described in mid-century brochures as “permanently tacky!” – begins to oxidise. It seeps, following the path of least capillary resistance.

And crucially, if the manuscript is written in iron-gall ink – as the vast majority of Renaissance music manuscripts are – it brings the ink with it, bleeding sideways into the parchment. In these cases, the damage is permanent. Entire motets reduced to a kind of smudgy emotional state where the music used to be.

We’ve seen it hundreds of times. Brown stripes running across a page like dark bruises. Noteheads bloated into dark, formless puddles. A long, slow disintegration of the music, triggered by the adhesive’s contact with the acid-sensitive ink.

It wasn’t a fringe practice either. From the 1930s to the 1970s, pressure-sensitive tapes were standard tools in libraries and archives. They were sold as document-repair tapes in ‘Librarians Monthly’ catalogues.

By the 1980s, the problem began to ooze back into view, and professional conservators quickly sounded the alarm. The adhesives were chemically unstable. The carriers were breaking down. Worst of all, the damage was accelerating in high-humidity conditions.

The field shifted hard. Tape repair was condemned. Manuals were rewritten. New techniques introduced.

* Kozo paper (light, strong, pH-neutral)
* Wheat starch paste (reversible, chemically inert)
* Solvent gels, suction tables, and microsurgical tools for removing adhesive residue without further damaging the ink.

Nothing permanent. Nothing too clever. Nothing that can’t, in principle, be undone.

Yet one can’t help but wonder, when the conservators of the year 2125 look back on our own delicate, careful, reversible tissue repairs, what will they say?

“How quaint. They thought they knew what they were doing.”

Preservation is always provisional. Every generation believes its methods are the final word. Every generation is wrong.

Today however, all major conservation institutes – from the British Library, to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana – explicitly prohibit the use of pressure-sensitive adhesive on historical materials. The academic consensus is clear and non-negotiable: If you love something, do not stick tape to it.

29/10/2025

This fascinating 17th-century duet survives thanks to one of the strangest discoveries in modern musicology.

The Carlo G Manuscript was discovered at a jumble sale in Vienna in 2000 and bought for just €60. It turned out to be one of the most important surviving documents of early Baroque performance practice.

Its compiler signed his name Carlo G… the rest of his surname obscured by a centuries-old smudge.

In 2007, partial scans were made of the manuscript, before it was sold at Sotheby's to a private collector who has never been identified. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

A manuscript known only through unfinished scans, compiled by a man with only half a name, containing music by anonymous composers, now in the possession of someone who refuses to be identified.

It’s anonymity all the way down. 🐢

Soprano: Lydia South
Soprano: Ruben Dales
Continuo: Adam Chillingworth

23/10/2025

'The Most Beautiful Music You’ve Never Heard.'

In 1564, the Nuremberg printing workshop Berg & Neuber produced the most ambitious musical anthology the world had ever seen: the 'Thesaurus Musicus' – a five-volume collection of 229 motets by the great masters of Renaissance polyphony: Josquin, Gombert, Willaert, Senfl, and a young rising star named Orlando Lassus.

It was a vast compendium of sacred sound: penitential psalms, jubilant hymns, funeral laments, votive antiphons. Some pieces are daringly chromatic and forward-thinking. Others still linger in the final embers of plainchant and medieval Marian devotion.

The colophon imprint reads "Montanus & Neuber," after the publishers Johann vom Berg (Latinised Montanus) and Ulrich Neuber. Yet by the time the books were completed and published, Johann had died. His widow, Katharina Gerlachin, had taken over the business – editing, financing, and publishing what would become one of the most significant monuments of sixteenth-century music.

Her name appears nowhere in the books.

She knew that a woman’s name on a major publication might erode its authority, so she worked behind her husband’s identity to ensure its survival. But it was her enterprise and, as musicologist Philippe Canguilhem argues, likely her editorial hand that brought the 'Thesaurus Musicus' to completion.
She deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote in her husband's biography.

Among the many treasures in the 'Thesaurus' is an anonymous setting of 'Inviolata, Integra et Casta'. Despite its vast scale, there are no spatial double-choir effects, no drama, no Venetian theatrics. Instead... the music just happens. In a single, seamless texture. No voice vies for attention. The ear isn’t drawn to any one melodic centre of gravity, but to the architecture of the whole. Like an impressionist painting, it is the whole that moves us, not the individual brushstrokes. In a sense, musical anonymity.

The piece is attributed to 'Anonymous', and so it wasn’t preserved for fame, fashion or commercial viability, but because someone – perhaps Katharina herself – thought it worthy to sit at the same table as Josquin, Senfl, and Lassus.

Read more about the Thesaurus Musicus, Katharina Gerlachin, and Inviolata by visiting our website: https://www.anonensemble.org/learn-more/ -Musicus

There's still time to buy tickets for our concert on the 2nd of August at Lincoln Cathedral.Based on the liturgy of Vesp...
22/07/2025

There's still time to buy tickets for our concert on the 2nd of August at Lincoln Cathedral.

Based on the liturgy of Vespers, the liminal evening rite at the twilight between day and night, 'Vespers: A Concert of Forgotten Music' features stunning polyphony from the 16th and 17th centuries by anonymous composers.

It's a unique opportunity to hear music that has languished forgotten in archives for centuries, performed for the first time to a modern audience.

Book your tickets by following the link below:
https://www.anonensemble.org/

Address

Lincoln

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when ANON - Ensemble posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category