A Goof Friday concert conducted by Timothy Howard, and featuring Karl Jenkins’ poignant work The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace performed by the Kirk Choir of PPC with guest singers and the Friends of Music Orchestra.
Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: a Mass for Peace was written in 1999 and premiered on April 25, 2000. The piece was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum for London’s Millennium celebrations, to mark the museum’s move from London to Leeds. The work was dedicated to victims of the Kosovo crisis.
Like Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem before it, The Armed Man is essentially an anti-war piece. It is based on the Catholic Mass, which Jenkins combined with other sources, principally the fifteenth century folk song “L’homme armé” in the first and final movements.
In addition to extracts from the Roman Catholic Mass, the text for The Armed Man incorporates texts from other religious and historical sources, including the Islamic call to prayer (Adnan), 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 leukemia.
The Armed Man was one of the first major “classical” compositions by Jenkins, who began his career as a jazz and jazz-rock musician and then gained fame with his work writing music for radio and television commercials. It now holds the distinction of being the most often performed major work by any living composer.
03/25/2016
7:30 pm
Location
Pasadena Presbyterian Church
Program
- Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace
Artists:
- Kirk Choir with guest singers
- Judith Siirila Paskowitz
- Jessie Massoudi
- Jonathan Mack
- Michal Dawson Connor
- The Friends of Music Orchestra
- Timothy Howard
Resources:
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