The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace

The Armed Man was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds to mark the millennium and dedicated to the victims of the war in Kosovo; the first performance was at the Royal Albert Hall on 25 April 2000. Jenkins takes the fifteenth-century French song L'homme armé as his thread and hangs on it the Muslim call to prayer, the Mass ordinary, Kipling, Dryden, Swift, a passage from the Mahabharata and the poet Sankichi Toge, who survived Hiroshima. The sequence moves from mobilisation through battle to mourning and ends in a plea for peace.