Fri 26th April 2013
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The Armed Man
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Generously supported by funding from:
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Karl Jenkins - The Armed Man, A Mass for Peace
Jenkins was born and raised in the Gower village of Penclawdd, in the county of Swansea, South Wales. His father, who was a local schoolteacher, chapel organist and choirmaster, gave him his initial musical instruction. Karl Jenkins attended Gowerton Grammar School.
Jenkins began his musical career as an oboist in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. He went on to study music at Cardiff University, and then commenced postgraduate studies in London at the Royal Academy of Music, where he also met his wife and musical collaborator, Carol Barratt. He studied with Alun Hoddinott.[1][2][3]
[edit]Career overviewFor the bulk of his early career Jenkins was known as a jazz and jazz-rock musician, playing baritone and soprano saxophones, keyboards and oboe, an unusual instrument in a jazz context. He joined jazz composer Graham Collier's group and later co-founded the jazz-rock group Nucleus, which won first prize at theMontreux Jazz Festival in 1970.
In 1972 he joined the Canterbury progressive rock band Soft Machine and co-led their very last performances in 1984. The group defied categorisation and played venues as diverse as The Proms, Carnegie Hall, and the Newport Jazz Festival. The album on which Jenkins first played with Soft Machine, Six, won the Melody Maker British Jazz Album of the Year award in 1973. Jenkins also won the miscellaneous musical instrument section (as he did the following year). Soft Machine was voted best small group in the Melody Maker jazz poll of 1974. After Mike Ratledge left the band in 1976 Soft Machine did not include any of its founding members, but kept recording on a project basis with line-ups revolving around Jenkins and drummer John Marshall. Balanced against Melody Maker's positive view of the Soft Machine of 1973 and 1974, Hugh Hopper, involved with the group since replacing bassist Kevin Ayers in 1968, cites Jenkins's "third rate" musical involvement in his own decision to leave the band,[4] and the band of the late 1970s has been described by band member John Etheridge as wasting its potential.[5]
In November 1973 Jenkins and Ratledge participated in a live-in-the-studio performance of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for the BBC.[6] It is available on Oldfield's Elements DVD.
Jenkins has created a good deal of advertising music, twice winning the industry prize in that field. From the 1980s he developed a relatioship with Bartle Bogle Hegarty, starting with composing musics for their Levi's jeans "Russian" series. Perhaps his most-heard piece of music is the classical theme used by De Beers diamond merchants for their television advertising campaign focusing on jewellery worn by people otherwise seen only in silhouette. Jenkins later included this as the title track in a compilation called Diamond Music, and eventually created Palladio, using it as the theme of the first movement. Other notable arrangements have included the "Papa? Nicole?" advertisements for the Renault Clio.[1]
As a composer, his breakthrough came with the crossover project Adiemus. Jenkins has conducted the Adiemus project in Japan, Germany, Spain,Finland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, as well as London's Royal Albert Hall and Battersea Power Station. The Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary (1995) album topped the classical album charts. It spawned a series of successors, each revolving around a central theme.
Jenkins was the first international composer and conductor to conduct the University of Johannesburg Kingsway Choir led by Renette Bouwer, during his visit to South Africa as the choir performed his The Armed Man: A mass for peace together with a 70-piece orchestra.
Jenkins' latest choral work The Peacemakers, features texts from Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Anne Frank and Mother Teresa, as well as words from the Bible and theQur’an with some new text specially written by Terry Waite. On the 2012 record the London Symphony Orchestra is joined by different vocal forces including Rundfunkchor Berlin, the City of BirminghamYouth Chorus, and the 1000-strong "The Really Big Chorus" made up of members of UK choirs from across the country brought together in one day, in one studio, to contribute to two movements on the album. Guest artists include violinist Chloë Hanslip, soprano Lucy Crowe, Davy Spillane on Uilleann pipes, Indian bansuri player Ashwin Srinivasan and jazz musicians Nigel Hitchcock and Laurence Cottle. The album was released on 26 March 2012 and concerts in the UK and USA took place later in the year.[7]
Jenkins began his musical career as an oboist in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. He went on to study music at Cardiff University, and then commenced postgraduate studies in London at the Royal Academy of Music, where he also met his wife and musical collaborator, Carol Barratt. He studied with Alun Hoddinott.[1][2][3]
[edit]Career overviewFor the bulk of his early career Jenkins was known as a jazz and jazz-rock musician, playing baritone and soprano saxophones, keyboards and oboe, an unusual instrument in a jazz context. He joined jazz composer Graham Collier's group and later co-founded the jazz-rock group Nucleus, which won first prize at theMontreux Jazz Festival in 1970.
In 1972 he joined the Canterbury progressive rock band Soft Machine and co-led their very last performances in 1984. The group defied categorisation and played venues as diverse as The Proms, Carnegie Hall, and the Newport Jazz Festival. The album on which Jenkins first played with Soft Machine, Six, won the Melody Maker British Jazz Album of the Year award in 1973. Jenkins also won the miscellaneous musical instrument section (as he did the following year). Soft Machine was voted best small group in the Melody Maker jazz poll of 1974. After Mike Ratledge left the band in 1976 Soft Machine did not include any of its founding members, but kept recording on a project basis with line-ups revolving around Jenkins and drummer John Marshall. Balanced against Melody Maker's positive view of the Soft Machine of 1973 and 1974, Hugh Hopper, involved with the group since replacing bassist Kevin Ayers in 1968, cites Jenkins's "third rate" musical involvement in his own decision to leave the band,[4] and the band of the late 1970s has been described by band member John Etheridge as wasting its potential.[5]
In November 1973 Jenkins and Ratledge participated in a live-in-the-studio performance of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for the BBC.[6] It is available on Oldfield's Elements DVD.
Jenkins has created a good deal of advertising music, twice winning the industry prize in that field. From the 1980s he developed a relatioship with Bartle Bogle Hegarty, starting with composing musics for their Levi's jeans "Russian" series. Perhaps his most-heard piece of music is the classical theme used by De Beers diamond merchants for their television advertising campaign focusing on jewellery worn by people otherwise seen only in silhouette. Jenkins later included this as the title track in a compilation called Diamond Music, and eventually created Palladio, using it as the theme of the first movement. Other notable arrangements have included the "Papa? Nicole?" advertisements for the Renault Clio.[1]
As a composer, his breakthrough came with the crossover project Adiemus. Jenkins has conducted the Adiemus project in Japan, Germany, Spain,Finland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, as well as London's Royal Albert Hall and Battersea Power Station. The Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary (1995) album topped the classical album charts. It spawned a series of successors, each revolving around a central theme.
Jenkins was the first international composer and conductor to conduct the University of Johannesburg Kingsway Choir led by Renette Bouwer, during his visit to South Africa as the choir performed his The Armed Man: A mass for peace together with a 70-piece orchestra.
Jenkins' latest choral work The Peacemakers, features texts from Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Anne Frank and Mother Teresa, as well as words from the Bible and theQur’an with some new text specially written by Terry Waite. On the 2012 record the London Symphony Orchestra is joined by different vocal forces including Rundfunkchor Berlin, the City of BirminghamYouth Chorus, and the 1000-strong "The Really Big Chorus" made up of members of UK choirs from across the country brought together in one day, in one studio, to contribute to two movements on the album. Guest artists include violinist Chloë Hanslip, soprano Lucy Crowe, Davy Spillane on Uilleann pipes, Indian bansuri player Ashwin Srinivasan and jazz musicians Nigel Hitchcock and Laurence Cottle. The album was released on 26 March 2012 and concerts in the UK and USA took place later in the year.[7]
The Armed Man - A Mass for Peace
In addition to extracts from the Ordinary of the Mass, the text incorporates words from other religious and historical sources, including the Islamic call to prayer, the Bible (e.g. the Psalms and Revelation), and the Mahabharata. Writers whose words appear in the work include Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Sankichi Toge, who survived the Hiroshima bombing but died some years later of leukaemia.
The Armed Man charts the growing menace of a descent into war, interspersed with moments of reflection; shows the horrors that war brings; and ends with the hope for peace in a new millennium, when "sorrow, pain and death can be overcome".[2] It begins with a representation of marching feet, overlaid later by the shrill tones of a piccolo impersonating the flutes of a military band with the 15th-century French words of "The Armed Man". After the reflective pause of the Call to Prayer and the Kyrie, "Save Us From Bloody Men" appeals for God's help against our enemies in words from the Book of Psalms. The Sanctus has a military, menacing air, followed by Kipling's "Hymn Before Action". "Charge!" draws on words from John Dryden and Jonathan Swift, beginning with martial trumpets and song, but ending in the agonised screams of the dying. This is followed by the eerie silence of the battlefield after action, broken by a lone trumpet playing the Last Post. "Angry Flames" describes the appalling scenes after the bombing of Hiroshima, and "Torches" parallels this with an excerpt from the Mahabharata, describing the terror and suffering of animals dying in fire. Agnus Dei is followed by "Now the Guns have Stopped", written by Guy Wilson himself as part of a Royal Armouries display on the guilt felt by some returning survivors of World War I. After the Benedictus, "Better is Peace" ends the mass on a note of hope, drawing on the hard-won understanding of Lancelot and Guinevere that peace is better than war, and on the text from Revelation: "God shall wipe away all tears".[2]
[edit]PerformancesThe Armed Man: A Mass For Peace was premiered at The Royal Albert Hall, London on 25 April 2000, performed by The National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the National Musicians Symphony Orchestrawith Julian Lloyd Webber as the cello soloist, and conducted by Grant Llewellyn.
The piece is one of Jenkins' most popular works, and is regularly performed by professional and amateur musicians. By March 2008 it had already seen 537 performances worldwide. Of the 348 UK performances, the majority were by nonprofessionals
The Armed Man charts the growing menace of a descent into war, interspersed with moments of reflection; shows the horrors that war brings; and ends with the hope for peace in a new millennium, when "sorrow, pain and death can be overcome".[2] It begins with a representation of marching feet, overlaid later by the shrill tones of a piccolo impersonating the flutes of a military band with the 15th-century French words of "The Armed Man". After the reflective pause of the Call to Prayer and the Kyrie, "Save Us From Bloody Men" appeals for God's help against our enemies in words from the Book of Psalms. The Sanctus has a military, menacing air, followed by Kipling's "Hymn Before Action". "Charge!" draws on words from John Dryden and Jonathan Swift, beginning with martial trumpets and song, but ending in the agonised screams of the dying. This is followed by the eerie silence of the battlefield after action, broken by a lone trumpet playing the Last Post. "Angry Flames" describes the appalling scenes after the bombing of Hiroshima, and "Torches" parallels this with an excerpt from the Mahabharata, describing the terror and suffering of animals dying in fire. Agnus Dei is followed by "Now the Guns have Stopped", written by Guy Wilson himself as part of a Royal Armouries display on the guilt felt by some returning survivors of World War I. After the Benedictus, "Better is Peace" ends the mass on a note of hope, drawing on the hard-won understanding of Lancelot and Guinevere that peace is better than war, and on the text from Revelation: "God shall wipe away all tears".[2]
[edit]PerformancesThe Armed Man: A Mass For Peace was premiered at The Royal Albert Hall, London on 25 April 2000, performed by The National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the National Musicians Symphony Orchestrawith Julian Lloyd Webber as the cello soloist, and conducted by Grant Llewellyn.
The piece is one of Jenkins' most popular works, and is regularly performed by professional and amateur musicians. By March 2008 it had already seen 537 performances worldwide. Of the 348 UK performances, the majority were by nonprofessionals
