The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace

1. The Armed Man - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
2. Call to Prayers- Adhaan - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
3. Kyrie - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
4. Save Me from Bloody Men - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
5. Sanctus - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
6. Hymn Before Action - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
7. Charge! - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
8. Angry Flames - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
9. Torches - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
10. Agnus Dei - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
11. Now the Guns Have Stopped - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
12. Benedictus - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)
13. Better is Peace - The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Jenkins, Karl)

 Tonight’s performance is an extraordinarily creative enterprise.

The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace, a work for chorus and orchestra by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, began as a   commission from the British Royal Armouries museums to celebrate the Millennium (as well as the opening of the Armouries’ new facility in the City of Leeds).   Since its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in London in April 2000 The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace has become immensely popular, presented by over eight hundred choral groups around the world.  Jenkins’ dedication of the work to the war victims in Kosovo during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990’s was soon almost overshadowed by the powerful irony that the first CD recording of the work was released within days after September 11, 2001—when the nature and meaning of warfare took on radically new dimensions.

So powerfully moving has this choral work proven to be that, from its earliest performances, multimedia enhancements seemed natural, typically in the form of scenic projections of images from war-film footage.  Two film versions were produced, in 2004 and 2007, and are often used as scenic background for performances.  Also in 2007 a film entitled The Armed Boy, depicting the challenges of responding to bullying and gang violence, was commissioned for a performance of Jenkins’ work in Dearborn, Michigan.¹

But to Griffin Ballet Theatre director Mitchell Flanders and Griffin Choral Arts director Stephen Mulder, Jenkins’ evocative music suggested a creative new twist on the work’s already-strong visual character.  It fairly begged for enhanced expression through dance.  So many parts of the music for The Armed Man call for physical movement even from the singers (stamping of marching feet, gestures of cowering in fear, etc.) that Jenkins himself might agree that a full ballet staging communicating through body movement makes perfect artistic sense—and is even the ultimate logical and emotional extension of the music.  That this more fully spatial and kinetic art form is approached here tonight in Griffin, Georgia, is a tribute not only to the inspiration provided by Jenkins’ music but also to the vision and courage of Mitch Flanders and Steve Mulder, as well as of the performers and supporters of the ensembles they lead.  One result of this collaboration is that this joint production between GCA and GBT is quite possibly the world premiere of a full choreography of The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace. ²

 

Karl Jenkins and His Music

The son of an organist/choirmaster in a seaside village in southern Wales, Karl Jenkins (b. 1944) studied classical music at the University of Wales at Cardiff and as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music in London.  His musically eclectic spirit also led him into the fields of jazz and even rock, as a member of the well-known 1970’s band “Soft Machine” and eventually as guiding force of the crossover classical/world-music/new-age/pop Adiemus project.   His credits include important successes in commercial music and film-scoring.  He holds a Doctor of Music from the University of Wales and was awarded an additional honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester.  In 2005 he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Even if they don’t know his name, audiences are probably familiar with some of his music, especially for television commercials for Delta Airlines (the African-chant-sounding “Adiemus”) and the De Beers diamond company (the string-orchestral, classical-sounding “Palladio”).  While Jenkins’ use of musical styles with such strong affinity with commercial advertising and other popular art forms (especially film scores) sometimes comes under criticism, the appeal of this music to a wide spectrum of listeners makes his music uncommonly accessible.  In the case of The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace, this accessibility is crucial, in view of the universal importance of its subject.

 

 The Work

Guy Wilson, Master of the Armouries and chief commissioner of the The Armed Man, describes the background and genesis of the project:

L’Homme Armé is a song written at the Court of Charles the Bold of Burgundy between 1450 and 1463.  Soon afterwards a cycle of six masses was written, five using parts of the melody of L’Homme Armé, the sixth including the whole tune.  Thereafter until the end of the 16^th century, over 30 more masses were written using the tune of the song in some way. . . . The theme that “the armed man must be feared” which is the message of the song seemed to me painfully relevant to the 20th century and so the idea was born to commission a modern ‘Armed Man Mass’.  What better way . . . to look back and reflect as we leave behind the most war-torn and destructive century in human history, and to look ahead with hope and commit ourselves to a new and more peaceful millennium. . . .  And so the idea developed to combine within the basic mass form a variety of poetry and prose and a wide range of musical styles reflecting the multi-cultural global society in which we live in an attempt to create a work that dealt in an inclusive way with a theme of universal interest and relevance.  The challenge was then to create a coherent work that tells a story, makes people think, and tugs at the heart strings.³

Although at some stage of selecting a composer John Rutter was considered, the commission was ultimately awarded to Karl Jenkins.  While Guy Wilson had selected the original texts (including writing one of the poems himself), he credits Jenkins not only with exceeding the musical expectations of the project but also with helping refine the selection and arrangement of the textual material.

The musical form of the “war mass” is not new.  Jenkins’ work stands in the line extending from the ancient popularity of the L’homme armé masses, running through such important works as Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (performed by GCA in March 2008) up to two twentieth-century masterworks that influence Jenkins’ mass:  Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1936 Dona Nobis Pacem and Benjamin Britten’s 1962 War Requiem.  These works influenced Jenkins’ composition not only in the use of the liturgical form of the mass but in the incorporation of secular texts alongside the traditional language of the mass and of other biblical material.⁴

The texts chosen for the Jenkins commission ranged widely:  selections from the Bible (Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels, and the Revelation); the Islamic Adhaan (Call to Prayers); Greek and Latin verses from the Ordinary of the Mass; English poetry by Dryden, Swift, Kipling, and Tennyson; Malory’s medieval romance Le Morte d’Arthur; the Hindu epic the Mahàbhàrata; and a poem by Japanese poet and atomic-bomb survivor Toge Sankichi (along with the previously mentioned new poem by Guy Wilson).

The varying musical forms and styles include period-imitative dance settings of the late-medieval French “title song” and an imitation of one of the many later “covers” of that famous tune in Italian Renaissance motet style (“After Palestrina”); prayer-chants in Greek, Latin, and Arabic; lush symphonic orchestrations reminiscent of film scores (especially by Ennio Morricone);  near-minimalist, recitative-like tone-essays in modernist harmonies; and—in closing—a benedictory hymn reflecting both the tradition of the chorale-ending Bach cantata and the famous Welsh a cappella choral tradition. An especially heartrending musical “quotation” is from Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings (used in the film Platoon) in the movement “Now the Guns Have Stopped.”  Other dramatic film-score-sounding moods such as in the “Sanctus”and the “Hymn Before Action” are so full of desperate foreboding that they prompted a chorus member who had seen the horrors of combat in the Vietnam War to observe that  Jenkins’ music captures “the real deal.”

If the variety of texts and musical styles weren’t amazing enough, the work’s true genius is seen in the ways texts and music are grouped, combined, juxtaposed, contrasted, or employed ironically—and in such ways as to draw both performers and audience members irresistibly into the emotion of the action.

Probably the most powerful example of this involvement is the mid-work climax:  the “Charge!” movement.  The text begins with John Dryden’s 1687 poem “Song for St. Cecelia’s Day,” which in praising the patron saint of music offers a series of examples of how music can stir our emotions and even rouse us to action.  Jenkins illustrates this principle through fanfares and complex rhythms that seem to strain at their boundaries.  The harmonies and rhythms in the voices imitate trumpets and battle drums, turning the singers—like the soldiers of the charging armies—into “instruments” “played upon” by forces they can neither control nor resist.  Even the somewhat quieter reminder from the female voices of the possibility of death (in the famous line from Horace “Dulce et decorum est,” translated by Jonathan Swift as “How blest is he who for his country dies”) can’t slow the surge–in Dryden’s words, “’Tis too late to retreat.”  Tempo accelerates to the breaking point as the final “Charge!” is sounded.  The ensuing cacophany from both voices and instruments–eventually rising into shrieks that (as the score instructs) “Convey horror!”– is often interpreted as the clash of the two organized armies, for such was the mode of warfare in the time of the poets whose words are quoted.  But at this important moment in the work Jenkins prepares us for important new perspectives.  What follows the loud chaos is total silence (and in our ballet staging total lack of motion)—possibly the most purposeful “music” of the entire evening.  Then a lonely bugle call (the “Last Post,” a British counterpart to “Taps”) introduces scenes depicting the devastation caused by twentieth century wars, such as the aftermath of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, described by a poet who survived that holocaust but was to die from its after-effects eight years later.  Looking backward from this side of the climactic moment of silence, we realize that the previous shrieks of horror were not necessarily only those of the clashing armies but also those of the innocent civilian victims more modern wars have come to euphemize as “collateral damage.”

It is no startling conclusion, then, to say that this is an anti-war work.  Is anyone honestly in favor of war?  The deeper and more complicated question is what kind of anti-war work it is—or how we may respond to it.  Does Jenkins suggest any answers?   When near the end of the piece he reprises the ancient L‘homme armé theme he turns the melody to the more hopeful-sounding major key—even though the words have not changed: “The armed man is [still] to be feared.”  (Today, how easily we substitute the word “terrorist.”)  The answer from Malory’s sadder-but-wiser chivalric romance may seem reassuring:  “Better is peace than always war”–until we realize how near a cliché such a non-answer actually is.  Or shall we leave the theater still singing our New Millennium’s Resolution suggested by the words from Tennyson—“Ring in the thousand years of peace”?  (Ironically, however, we recall that Tennyson’s optimism for a new, peaceful millennium was soon challenged by the twentieth century–with its world-wide wars and innovative weapons of mass destruction.)  Or, as in the final words in Jenkins’ mass, is the best we can do simply to [pray to and] Praise the Lord?

But are even these possible responses more sentiment than resolution?  Does Jenkins’ work offer any hint of what can actually be done to eradicate war-making?  In some ways, the work is constrained by its commission:  it was a “deliverable” paid for by a governmental body (The Royal Armouries) that owes its very existence—and future support—to our fascination with war-making, not only with its machinery but with the graphic documentation of its terrible consequences.   Moreover, the commissioning body is not just any government agency:  it is one of the war-shrines (along with the Imperial War Museum) of the world’s greatest colonial empire throughout most of the 18^th-20^th centuries (reflected by the choice of texts from the high-Victorian, nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Kipling).

But it is also clear that the Armouries’ commission and Jenkins’ music are aware of these paradoxes.  In commissioning this work the Armouries were sincerely trying to address this contradiction, in some important ways hoping to “reinvent” themselves, to be seen—and to understand themselves—more as an historical archive and less as a symbol of the glorification of war.  Even if no clear, immediately practical solution is offered—which is not to say that there can never be such a solution–something important of tangible substance has been created:  a work of art explicitly called “A Mass for Peace” (Jenkins insists that the subtitle always be printed), to which all of us are given ready access, with the invitation to explore—each in our own way—how the music (including dance) moves us to ponder how the manifestations of violence in our lives contribute to the continuation of warfare.  In addressing the problem of defending ourselves against the “armed man,” Karl Jenkins’ music compels us to consider what each of us can do for peace.  A still more important question is (borrowing from Tennyson) what, with our “kindlier hand[s],” we will do.⁵

 

Program notes by Bill Pasch, copyright 2009

 

 

This program is supported by the Georgia Council for the Arts through appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly and Administered by Arts Clayton.  The Georgia Council for the Arts is a Partner Agency of

National Endowment for the Arts.  By arrangement with Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company, publisher and copyright owner.

 

Notes

¹     The two film versions of the Armed Man: a Mass for Peace (the latter now in DVD format) were produced by Opus TF.  On The Armed Boy see http://cityofdearborn.org/news/at-the-center-cc.shtml  (accessed 15 January 2010) and rental information by e-mail at info@thearmedboy.com.

²      Extensive searches and inquiries–including with publisher and rights-holder Boosey & Hawkes–have produced no contradiction to the possibility that this is the first world staging of the work with nearly full choreography.  In 2006 a production in Nottingham, England, added dance to only three of the movements.

(See http://www.scienceonstage.co.uk/Programme%20Armed%20Man.pdf.)

³     Liner notes in the first CD recording: Virgin 2001, 7243 8 11015 2 0 / CDVE956.

⁴     An important addition to information about Jenkins’ The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace as well as about the “war mass” tradition in which it stands (with particular reference to Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten) is a 2009 Ph.D. dissertation by Jonathan Michael Kraemer, Echoes of War –The Resonating Patterns of Influence: An Examination of Recurrent Musical Trends in Large-Scale, Sacred, British, Anti-War Choral Works of the Twentieth Century, Texas Tech University, http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-03222009-145413/unrestricted/kraemer_jonathan_diss.pdf.

⁵     Thanks go to Mitch Flanders, Dr. Steve Mulder, and the many others connected with Griffin Ballet Theatre and Griffin Choral Arts for innumerable comments in conversation that helped shape these notes.  Special thanks go to Dr. Kevin Hibbard, who consulted valuably on this project, from the vantage point of his own experience directing The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace in 2007 in its Southeastern U.S. premiere with the University of West Georgia Concert Choir and Collegium Vocale.

 

TEXTS

 

The Armed Man (sung in French)

The armed man must be feared.

Everywhere it has been decreed

That every man should arm himself

In an iron coat of chain-mail.

 

Call to Prayers (the Adhaan, sung in Arabic)

God is great beyond description.

I bear Witness that there is no god except Allah.

I bear Witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Hasten to prayer.  [Sung turning the face slightly to the right.]

Hasten to salvation.  [Sung turning the face slightly to the left.]

God is great beyond description.

There is no god except Allah.

 

Kyrie (sung in Greek)

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

 

Save Me from Bloody Men

Be merciful unto me, O God:

For man would swallow me up.

He fighting daily oppresseth me.

Mine enemies would daily swallow me up:

For they be many that fight against me,

O though most high.  (from Psalm 56)

Defend me from them that rise up against me.

Deliver me from the workers of iniquity,

And save me from bloody men.  (Psalm 59: 1-2)

 

Sanctus (sung in Latin)

Holy Lord God of Hosts,

Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory.  (Isaiah 6:3)

Hosanna in the highest!

 

Hymn Before Action  (Rudyard Kipling, 1898)

The earth is full of anger,                   High lust and froward bearing,

The seas are dark with wrath,                     Proud heart, rebellious brow —

The Nations in their harness                       Deaf ear and soul uncaring,

Go up against our path;                              We seek thy mercy now!

Ere yet we loose the legions —                    The sinner that forswore Thee,

Ere yet we draw the blade,                         The fool that passed Thee by,

Jehova of the Thunders,                              Our times are known before Thee —

Lord God of Battles, aid!                    Lord, grant us strength to die!

 

Charge!

The trumpet’s loud clangor

Excites us to Arms

With still notes of Anger

And mortal Alarms.

(from John Dryden, 1687, “Song for St. Cecelia’s Day”)

How blest is he who for his country dies.

(from Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745, “To the Earl of Oxford, after [translated from] Horace”)

The double double beat

Of the thundering drum

Cries, hark the Foes come:

Charge, Charge, ’tis too late to retreat.

(Dryden, “Song for St. Cecelia’s Day”)

 

Angry Flames (by Toge Sankichi [1921-1953]; translated from Japanese by Richard H. Minnear)

Pushing up through smoke

From a world half darkened

By overhanging cloud –

The shroud that mushroomed out

And struck the dome of the sky,

Black, Red, Blue –

Dance in the air,

Merge,

Scatter glittering sparks,

Already tower

Over the whole city.

Quivering like seaweed, the mass of flames spurts forward.

Popping up in the sense smoke,

Crawling out

Wreathed in fire:

Countless human beings

On all fours.

In a heap of embers that erupt and subside,

Hair rent,

Rigid in death,

There smolders a curse.

 

Torches   (from the Indian Sanskrit epic The Mahàbhàrata, from the 8^th-4^th centuries BCE;  trans. Board of

Trustees of the Armouries)

The animals scattered in all directions, screaming terrible screams.

Many were burning, others were burnt.

All were shattered and scattered mindlessly, their eyes bulging.

Some hugged their sons, others their fathers and mothers, unable to let them go, and so they died.

Others leapt up in their thousands, faces disfigured and were consumed by the Fire.

Everywhere were bodies squirming on the ground, wings, eyes and paws all burning.

They breathed their last as living torches.

 

Agnus Dei (sung in Latin)

Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

 

Now the Guns Have Stopped (Guy Wilson, Master of the Armouries, b. 1950)

Silent,

So silent, now,

Now the guns have stopped.

I have survived all,

I, who knew I would not,

But now you are not here.

I shall go home alone;

And must try to live life as before,

And hide my grief

For you, my dearest friend,

Who should be with me now,

Not cold, too soon,

And in your grave,

Alone.

 

Benedictus (sung in Latin)

Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

 

Better Is Peace

(Lancelot):   Better is peace than always war.

(Guinevere):   And better is peace than evermore war.

(from Thomas Malory [1404?-1471], Le Morte d’Arthur)

 

(Reprise)  The Armed man must be feared;

Everywhere it has been decreed

That every man should arm himself

In an iron coat of chain-mail.

 

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out old shapes and foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free.

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land;

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

(from Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1802-1892], In Memoriam A.H.H. [1850])

 

God shall wipe away all tears . . .

And there shall be no more death,

Neither sorrow nor crying,

Neither shall there be any more pain.    (Revelation 21:4)

Praise the Lord.

 

 

 

 

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