Web References in Karl Jenkins and his Mass for Peace

Front Matter

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Cover Image: by Gulzer Hossain from Pixabay

Part One, “L’Homme Armé”

Siege of Constantinople, Chronique de Charles VII by Jean Chartier, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

I’ll be posting individual performance videos for each section, with a recommendation for a full performance at the end. This one has a nice narrated intro, but if you want to skip it you can go to about 1:15:

If you’re a Medieval-music fan, you might enjoy this video in which a scholar picks apart how the armed-man tune is used throughout an early Mass, this one by Palestrina:

And here’s an article about another armed man Mass, this one by Dufay.

“Dufay: Kyrie from Missa L’Homme Armé”

Here’s the accompanying clip from the film:

Part Two: “The Call to Prayers” (“Adhaan”)

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Here’s the only individual performance video I could find online; appropriately enough it’s from that performance in Slovenia that I referenced earlier.

And here’s the film clip:

Footnotes:

¹“A Piece of Music Does Not Make Peace”

^2”Sir Karl Jenkins slams the ‘bigotry’ of NZ Cathedral that banned his work over Muslim call to prayer”

³”The Mass, the Imam, and the Elephant in the Cathedral”

⁴”The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace”

⁵” Karl Jenkins’ ‘The Armed Man – a Mass for Peace’ performed at the Dormition Abbey, Mt. Zion, Jerusalem”

Part Three:“Kyrie”

Image by falco from Pixabay; both images refer to New Testament stories of mercy—“Prodigal Son” (left) and “Good Samaritan” (right)

After the repetition of the Kyrie Jenkins is ready to plunge us into an even earlier style of music: Gregorian chant. But do take a few minutes first to watch this truly lovely performance:

Here’s the film clip:

¹Undated program notes by the San Francisco Choral Society for a performance of the Mass

Part Four: “Deliver Me from Bloody Men”

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Here’s a performance video, although I was not able to find a separated-out live-action one:

And here’s the promised Malcolm Gladwell TED talk:

And here’s the clip from the film:

Part Five: “Sanctus”

“Blessed Be the Host of the King of Heaven”, Russian icon from the 1550s, public domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons

Below is the performance video that kicked off the total re-direction of this chapter. It is actually the concert conducted by Jenkins himself on the occasion of his 60^th birthday at which the film was shown for the first time. Watch for what strikes me as the most horrifying image in the entire film: the soldier getting a little boy to give the Nazi salute. (Sorry about the low-res and rather distorted video quality, but there it is.)

And here’s the clip provided from the official film website:

³Sabaoth,BibleStudyTools.com

Part Six: “Hymn Before Action”

Image by Bruce Mewett from Pixabay

Of course, as a committed Tolkien fan, I was reminded of the scene before the battle of Gondor between Gandalf and Pippin:

Here’s a good performance of this movement:

And here’s a clip from the film:

Part Seven: “Charge!”

Image by Enkhtamir Enkhdavaa from Pixabay

Video quality is poor in this performance from Slovenia, but the sound is great:

Here’s the clip from the film:

Here’s a guy who’s playing the real thing—pretty great!

¹“Wilfred Owen” on The Poetry Foundation website

Part Eight: “Angry Flames”

The Genbaku Dome. Photograph by Shigeo Hayashi, one of two photographers attached to the academic survey teams. Public domain, image accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

(Japanese text and English translation from the website antiwarsongs-org with contributions by Bernart Bartleby)

Jenkins’ voicing has soprano, mezzo, tenor, and baritone soloists with the chorus joining in at times, but there have been various liberties taken with his vocal choices. An individual performance video is below using only a female soloist; it deserves many more views than it has!

Here’s the film clip available for this section:

¹”The Most Fearsome Sight: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima”

²From “Unforgettable Fire: Drawings by Atomic Bomb Survivors—1977,” quoted in “The Nuclear Secrecy Blog”

Part Nine: “Torches”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The audio in this individual performance video is excellent; the video quality not so much. This is that same Slovenian orchestra who performances have been included in a couple of other chapters.

I hope no one will think that I’m trivializing the sentiment of this part of the Mass if I include a clip here from the 1942 Disney animated movie Bambi in which the wounded Bambi and his father escape from a forest fire caused by a campfire:

And, finally, the clip provided for this section. Please note that this video is considered to be (and is) quite graphic and not suitable for children. It shows piles of bodies being burned.

Part Ten: “Agnus Dei”

Leaded glass window in the Catholic parish church St. Patricius in Eitorf; representation Lamb of God;

image accessed via Wikimedia Commons, author Reinhardhauke

Finally, “Dona nobis pacem.” There have been whole compositions based on this one phrase, including a famous one from Mozart which is usually sung as a canon or round, and one from Jenkins himself, both of which I’ll post below. But for this part of his Mass Jenkins uses the words very simply at the end: “Give us peace.” It’s a great lead-in to the last three movements of the Mass.

Jenkins later made some a cappella arrangements of his works, and here’s the one for this movement (albeit with some rather weird, jumpy accompanying images).

And here’s Jenkins’ piece using just the “dona nobis pacem” text—it’s totally different from his treatment in the Mass, showing his versatility as a composer:

Here’s the promised Mozart canon:

And here’s the clip provided from the film:

Part Eleven: “Now the Guns Have Stopped”

Image accessed via The Atlantic, photo credit: Gerry Broome / AP

The video below has a soprano with a lovely voice and also (somewhat rarer) clear-as-crystal enunciation. I was excited at first to see that this was a performance that included the film, but beyond the first few frames you don’t see it. Ah well. The shots of the performance itself are quite well done.

Here’s the film clip for this section:

I was irresistibly reminded of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from the musical Les Misérables as I wrote this chapter. The male lead Marius sings of his heartbreak over the loss of his friends and comrades-at-arms after the fighting in the streets of Paris is over. Below is a concert version that I like because it includes the ghostly departed friends in the scene. (I’ve seen this musical live four times and also gone to the movie, so consider me a Les Mis junkie.)

¹ From The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War, p. 131 in the paperback version, accessed via Amazon

Part Twelve: “Benedictus”

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Be sure to watch the short video below in which the great man himself talks about its composition and reception, and also how scared some cellists are of it since it’s so high.

I kept seeing the video on the sidebar of YouTube with a picture of this Hauser guy and 10 million views.

And here’s the clip from the film, scenes of refugees fleeing to a new life—somewhere, anywhere, just as long as it’s far from the destruction and devastation they’ve witnessed. The image in the thumbnail is almost certainly a border crossing, but the film has no captions. The scene with the refugees on the boat in the orange lifejackets is, I think, Syrians fleeing to Greece. That image of those lifejackets left behind on the beach is startling, or at least it was to me: at first I thought that everyone had drowned.

Part Thirteen: “Better Is Peace”

Image by kosalley from Pixabay

I’m including for the stand-alone performance of this section a very special grouping: three high-school choirs plus an adult orchestra, all from South Africa, participating in an event from 2011 called the “Global Sing for Peace.” Honestly, it’s worth watching just for the conductor—and the teens’ tee shirts. But it’s also just great musically.

And here’s the final clip from the film, consisting solely of images from the “ring, ring” section:

Here’s the unadventurous link, though:

Karl Jenkins The Armed Man A Mass for Peace: World Orchestra for Peace

²”Interview: Karl Jenkins, Composer”