The Armed man - Mass for peace

Having completed his initial music training in Wales, KARL JENKINS joined the National Youth Orchestra of Wales as an oboist and graduated from the Cardif University, then continued as a PhD student at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Since the 1970s he has been playing mainly jazz and progressive rock as a saxophonist, oboist and pianist in the group of famous Graham Collier. With Nucleus, the jazz- rock band he had co-founded, he won the first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1970. Despite the many performances, recordings and renown he had achieved in more popular areas, he became world famous precisely with The Armed man - Mass for peace for soloists, chorus and Orchestra, written in 1999. Like other genres, emancipated from church worship, this is not a liturgical mass, despite its use of short Latin texts taken from the Ordinary. What underlies it is the anti-military and universal idea of unity on multicultural and ecu- menical basis. The mass has a simple structure, lending a direct support to the message of the author. Jenkins opens his work with the fifteenth-century song L’homme armé, using it both as a medieval symbol and an image from contemporaneity. Prayers are featured after it – Muslim and Christian; prayers for mercy and hope for deliverance from the Psalms; glorification through the text from the Catholic mass. This is followed by several literary texts – from Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden; the testimony of the Hiro- shima tragedy by Japanese poet Sankichi Toge, who died of radiation sickness; texts from the ancient Indian epics Mahabharata, depicting scenes of bloodshed and suffering. Then follows the Agnus Dei text from the Ordinary, signifying the advent of the atoning sacrifice, the coming of the sacrificial lamb, which redeems humanity; after some more author’s texts, verses from the Revelation of St. John are introduced, which suggest the liberation from pain and end in “Glory to God!” The piece was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum for the Millennium celebrations and to mark the museum’s 1996 move from London to Leeds. Guy Wilson, then master of the museum, selected the texts for the mass. Jenkins dedicated the Mass to the victims of the Kosovo hostilities. The music features some sound associations with military attributes - marches, drums, imitation of a military orchestra, etc. The inclusion of prayers, Muslim and Christian, creates contrast and conveys peace and tranquillity. The dramatic climax occurs with the general pause between the seventh and the eighth movement, followed by a seventeenth-century English bugle call, The Last Post, performed at military funerals. It leads into the memory of the Hiroshima tragedy. The final movements represent a catharsis following the tragedies of humanity. L ‘ homme armé is heard again, this time with new lyrics, “Better is peace than evermore war” by fifteen-century English poet Sir Thomas Malory. The premiere of the work was performed on April 25, 2000 at the Royal Albert Hall - London, by the National Youth Choir and the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Grant Llewellyn. In 2005 the mass was conducted by Jenkins at the Windsor Festival, where it became a central event. To this day, it has been given thousands of performances by professional and amateur ensembles, which is a sheer record for a contemporary music piece. It was recorded in 2000 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the author for the Virgin Label.