Penclawdd, Wales

Karl Jenkins was born in Penclawdd, on the Gower peninsula, South Wales,in 1944 and commenced piano lessons at age six with his father, who was the local chapel choirmaster. Later, at Gowerton Grammar School, he studied the oboe and went on to become Principal in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. He read music at the University of Wales, Cardiff, followed by postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London and initially made his name in the area of jazz. In April 1995 he released his Adiemus - Songs of Sanctuary, the first in a series that has seen global success with 15 gold and platinum awards.

"The Armed Man - A Mass for Peace" has gained an amazing popularity in a very short time. It is a powerful and compelling account of the descent into, and consequences of, war. Guy Wilson, Master of the British Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, commissioned it to commemorate the millennium. The intention behind the commission was to do something of lasting value that they could continue to use in their educational outreach work, and which would also reflected the country's Christian tradition while looking at the moral and historical issues raised.

While seeking ideas for what might be undertaken, the Head of Collection Care at the Museum suggested a series of concerts featuring some of the L'Homme Armé Mass settings of the 15th and 16th centuries. Guy Wilson says "The theme of the song that 'the armed man must be feared', a message so painfully relevant to the 20th century, prompted the idea to commission a modern Armed Man Mass setting. What better way within the framework of a Christian musical and liturgical form, both to look back and reflect as we leave behind the most war-torn and destructive century in human history, and to look forward with hope and commitment to a new and more peaceful millennium. The idea developed to include a variety of texts and a wide range of musical styles, reflecting the multi-cultural society in which we live, to create a coherent work that tells a story, makes people think and tugs at the heart strings".

Jenkins has said: "When I started composing The Armed Man, the tragedy of Kosovo unfolded. I was thus reminded daily of the horror of such conflict and so I dedicated this work to the victims of Kosovo." Using the basis of a Christian (Requiem) Mass, Karl Jenkins has, like Brahms and more recently, John Rutter, incorporated a personal selection of both secular and sacred texts, chosen by Guy Wilson, into his setting. Jenkins has been inspired and guided by the 15th-century French song L'Homme Armé, to create a major and unsettling choral work that raises questions and provokes poignant reflection. The poignancy and relevance of the work is heightened by the fact that the CD recording of the work was released on September 10th 2001, the day before the tragic events in the United States.


The Mass takes its title from the French song L'Homme Armé, (the Armed Man), and this is used as the basic building block to create several movements of the composition. A modern equivalent would be to create a setting using themes from the Sound of Music perhaps or some other popular song. The original L'Homme Armé Mass settings coincide with many important events in Western civilization during the Renaissance period - the invention of the printing press, the Reformation and the end of the 100 Years War. Indeed, to celebrate the end of the 100 Years War, in the French town of Tours on March 10th 1454, a celebration Mass was held in which the L'Homme Armé setting written by the Flemish composer Ockeghem was performed.


More than thirty composers between the mid 15th and late 16th centuries have used the L'Homme Armé melody as the starting point to create over forty Mass settings. Palestrina composed two such Mass settings based on the tune and the 'Christe, eleison' section in Jenkins' work is taken directly from one of these, Palestrina's Five Voice setting. Any credible composer of the time would have composed at least one Mass based upon the tune. While we associate the practice of using this melody mainly with the Renaissance, the practice continues into the seventeenth century, with a late setting by Carissimi and in more recent years it has been used by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, presently Master of the Queen's Music. In addition,there were also polyphonic secular songs based upon the melody, written by prominent composers of the time, such as the aforementioned Ockeghem and, Busnois, who is the first composer to create a Mass setting based upon the tune. One of the earliest known settings of such secular songs is attributed to the English composer Robert Morton, (c.1430-1476?), who worked at the Burgundian Court from 1457-1476.


In the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples there is a remarkable manuscript collection from the early Renaissance, containing six Mass settings, all based on the Burgundian L'Homme Armé melody. Each of them is composed of the five usual sections of the Ordinary of the Mass, i, bringnamely, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Deing the total number of movements in the collection to thirty. The first five Masses are for four voices, the final one for five parts, with the L'Homme Armé tune being used as a two-voiced canon. This collection is unique for a number of reasons: the whole compositional cycle is based on the L'Homme Armé tune; the diversity and high quality of the contrapuntal writing and the influence of Dufay and Busnois is clearly identifiable; the cantus firmus, as the melody becomes in this collection, is drawn from a different section of the tune in each of the first five Masses. The sixth Mass is especially interesting in that only it treats the L'Homme Armé melody in its entirety as the cantus firmus. [Originally the cantus firmus was always taken from Gregorian chant and was usually sung in long notes in one part while the other voices or instruments provided more florid lines around it. Gradually, popular secular tunes began to be used.]

Various suggestions as to the origin of the popular song and its importance as a musical building block have been put forward. Some suggest that 'the armed man' represents St. Michael the Archangel, others that it was a popular tavern (Maison L'Homme Armé) near Dufay's rooms at Cambrai, still others that it represented the arming for a new crusade against the Turks, as the first appearance of the song is contemporaneous with the fall of the great city Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, an event which was to have a major psychological effect in Europe.

While the composer of the tune is not known for certain, the Italian theoretician Pietro Aron, (1480-1545),

attributed it in his Thoscanello to Anthoine Busnois, who served at the Court of Charles the Bold between 1433-1477, even before Charles became Duke of Burgundy. The text of the song, which translates as "the armed man must be feared; everywhere it has been decreed that every man should arm himself with an iron coat of mail; the armed man must be feared" is militantly political in nature. The fact that polyphonic compositions based upon it became so successful during the reign of Charles the Bold suggest that the L'Homme Armé was meant to portray a person who actually existed, most likely Charles the Bold himself, who spend the greater part of his life in waging war. Military conflicts of this age were generally religious in origin. Earlier Burgundian rulers were concerned with stopping the advancement of Islam, represented in the Turkish advances in Europe and particularly the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It is not surprising that in an age of political and religious tensions and conflicts, a song such as L'Homme Armé, with its simple melody and strong message, should be received so enthusiastically. Indeed, Mass settings, beyond their liturgical function, also contained a political and ideological message. The use of the tune affirmed both the political and religious victory over 'unbelievers'. Thus, a military idea is dressed in liturgical attire and presented to the faithful, to whom the strict separation of sacred and secular, of ecclesiastical and political matters, would have been foreign.

 

The Jenkins' setting of the Mass opens with the sounds of a army marching to the beat of military drums, gradually building up to the choir's entrance singing the original 15th century theme, L'Homme Armé - The Armed Man. This develops and eventually recedes as the army continues on its way. We are suddenly brought to a time of reflection as we hear the Islamic Call to Prayers (Adhaan), summoning the faithful of Islam to prayer day in day out. [We remember this evening our Muslim brothers and sisters who have just completed the holy month of Ramadan and its fasting and who this evening celebrate the feast of Eid Al-Fittr.] This interlude of reflection continues with the Kyrie eleison, which pays homage to the great Renaissance composer Palestrina by using the Christe, eleison movement from his five-part L'Homme Armé Mass. This leads into a plainchant inspired setting of words from Psalms 56 and 59, praying for God's help to deliver us from our enemies. The Sanctus is full of menace, and the tribal character adds to its power. The menace continues in the next movement - a setting of the first two verses Rudyard Kipling's Hymn Before Action, which builds to a devastating line "Lord, grant us strength to die."

War now seems inevitable and Charge opens with typical military fanfares.

The choir joins in with a battle cry based on texts from John Dryden and our own Jonathan Swift, that lead to the inevitable consequences: war in all its uncontrolled destruction, the eerie silence of the battlefield following the battle and the burial of the dead. Can there be anything worse? Yes, there is, for now we hear Angry Flames, a selection of verses from a poem about the horror of the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima, written by one who was there on that fateful day and who died in 1953 of leukaemia brought on by exposure to the radiation. But is there anything new under the sun? Seemingly not, for now, in Torches, we hear a passage of striking similarity from the ancient India epic The Mahàbharàta. This is the greatest of the Sanskrit epics of ancient India describing the wars between kinsmen of the ancient kingdom of Bharata. The text describes in very vivid terms the forest fire that consumes some of the principal characters in the story.
[The Mahàbharàta - composed between 300 BC and 300 AD - has the honour of being the longest epic in world literature, 100,000 2-line stanzas, although the most recent critical edition edits this down to about 88,000, making it eight times as long as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey together, and over 3 times as long as the Bible. According to the Narasimhan version, only about 4,000 lines relate to the main story; the rest contain additional myths and teachings. In other words, the Mahàbharàta resembles a long journey with many side roads and detours. It is said "Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else." The name means "great [story of the] Bharatas." Bharata was an early ancestor of both the Pandavas and Kauravas who fight each other in a great war, but the word is also used generically for the Indian race, so the Mahàbharàta sometimes is referred to as "the great story of India." The work is divided into 18 books, concerning an 18-day war among 18 armies. The main narrative describing the war is contained in the first ten books.]

From such terrible destruction, the score now reminds us that even one death is one too many, that each life is sacred and unique. Firstly, we return to the Christian liturgical text of the Agnus Dei, which with its lyrical theme, reflects on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ's death on the cross and this is followed by an elegiac text, Now the Guns have Stopped, written by Guy Wilson and used in the Museum, telling of the feelings of loss and guilt that so many of the survivors of the First World War felt when they came home yet so many of their friends did not. Even the survivors can be hurt by the destruction of war.

We now hear the Benedictus, disjoined from its usual position following the Sanctus, and here bringing healing to the wounds by its slow, stately melody, a haunting cello solo, affirming faith and leading to the ultimate, positive climax of the work. Better is Peace takes us back to the opening of the work and to Sir Thomas Malory's world of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. As we know from their tragic tale, bitter experience has taught them that peace is always better than war. The L'Homme Armé theme returns to struggle with Malory's desire for peace. We arrive at a moment of decision and commitment: Do we want this new millennium to be like the last? Do we join with Tennyson as he encourages us to "Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace"?

It seems an impossible dream and already, just five years into this new millennium, we have seen and continue to see the horrors continue. But the score concludes with an unaccompanied chorale, very much in the style of the great oratorios and Passion setting of J. S. Bach, an affirmation from the final pages of the New Testament Book of Revelation: change is possible, sorrow, pain and even death itself can be overcome.