The Armed Man

St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, Remembrance Sunday, 10/10/2024

The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, by Karl Jenkins, Garleton Singers, directed by Stephen Doughty

The Church of St Mary’s, solitary in the darkness along the banks of the Tyne, was glowing from inside, warm-lit windows running along all its 63 metres at both ground-floor and clerestory levels. Figures were approaching quietly through the graveyards from several directions, gradually taking on form as they neared the lighted doorway. All intensely mediaeval; the Lamp of Lothian beckoning to the faithful.

“The faithful” are the fans of the local Garleton Singers who, under Stephen Doughty, regularly treat their community to choral music at the highest standard. This Remembrance Sunday they were to sing Karl Jenkins’ ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’.

In 1999, praying for a less bloody New Millennium to come, Guy Wilson, Master of the Royal Armouries Museum, selected from traditions near and far eight sacred and secular texts expressing the bleak realities of war. These pieces punctuated and framed by four Ordinaries of the Catholic mass: Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Benedictus, plus the Islamic Adhan formed a ‘Mass for Peace’. Wilson commissioned Karl Jenkins as composer.

This music was largely new to me. It was a vivid and emotional journey. The first movement, ‘L’Homme Armé’, from a Renaissance folksong, revealed the calibre of the choir. They opened quietly, singing in unison in minor key to a marching beat and Allison Orr’s exquisite piccolo, with entries from percussion and trumpets. Midway, a glorious deep throb heralded in the 16-foot-pipe organ; the singers opened out into rich harmony and voice, exuding not joy but excitement, anticipation.

The organ is an added privilege of being in this church. At the creative hands of Caroline Cradock it enriched the soundscape throughout, subbing for full strings, its growl portending the doom in Kipling’s “The earth is full of anger” and deep-droning beneath Sankichi’s chilling account of Hiroshima.,

As the familiar European harmonies of the first movement faded, there burst a solo “Allah!”: the frisson of the muezzin’s call to prayer played through an onstage speaker, as in public spaces daily throughout most of Islam. Hard upon that incantation came the ‘Kyrie’. Malcolm Garden’s dark, expressive cello led in to our first soloist, Roxane Pryse Hawkins, pure and plaintive, borne on the calm ebb and flow of the chorus.

Then, under shadow of war, the men prayed “Save us from bloody men,” a Gregorian-style chanting of lines from the psalms. At this point the timing seemed marginally less tight than usual. Perhaps deliberate, it added a sense of apprehension. But march on they must, stepping to a grim ‘Sanctus’ from the massed choir; every so often over the heads of the determined marchers a celestial ‘Gloria’ burst through: truly glorious, for this choir has a sublime group of sopranos. Thus ended the first, largely scriptural phase of the cycle.

 There followed four poems describing war. To sing this cycle must have been challenging and harrowing. The choristers need to express, with discipline, multiple aspects of brutality and horror, grief and chaos. Prayers for survival in battle turn into pleas for mercy in death, then into hopeless calls of ‘Charge!’ as the soldiers realise they are surrounded and end up gabbling a shifting cacophony of random cries around the platoon of choristers; until silenced. A sostenuto from organ and bugle (played on flute) trails away to nothing. I closed my eyes, immersed in this auditory choreography.

For ‘Angry Flames’ of Hiroshima, 4 soloists were left standing among the debris of the now seated choir.  Soprano Alison New opened, her voice exquisite in the higher registers, and the utterances then taken in turn by the other voices, all with a stunned, coldly operatic delivery. Finally the most horrendous of the warfare quartet. Translated from 6thc BCE Sanskrit into English, it details precisely and without mercy how animals, caught in a burning forest from Man’s war-making, cling to their loved ones, becoming ”Living Torches.”  I regretted the clarity of the Garletons’ diction. The choir expressed tenderness, though I would have favoured more cold fury. It would also make a more striking end to this hard-hitting section, to contrast with the relief which follows.

 The soaring ’Agnus Dei’ laments but soothes, returning us to some familiarity. Claire de Preez sings Guy Wilson’s own brief ode to grief for a fallen comrade with a dignified purity of tone. The poem moves gracefully into the luscious cathartic strains of Jenkins’ ‘Benedictus’. The choir are then free to enjoy themselves in an upbeat finale with ‘L’Homme Armé’ , marching along in major key, Tennyson’s bells ringing in a new millennium of peace. The joyous volume swells, voices joust with effortless precision. I found myself smiling.

 In 1999, just as Jenkins was working on this cycle, ethnic cleansing began in Kosovo. But one cannot end on a note of despair. So a quiet affirmation: a vision from the Bible of no more death. The Singers lowered their scores to deliver this unaccompanied: by and from the heart.