Counterpoint

Yesterday I wrote briefly about Karl Jenkins' Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary and The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, and I woke up this morning with the instrumental and percussive bit from the very beginning of Armed Man going round in my head. Tum ti tum tum titty tum, tum ti tum tum...(repeat ad nauseam, then stick it in the last movement sped up and with a single semitone's difference on one note, et voila! there is difference!). It has to be said that each of Jenkins' motifs in this piece are probably repeated four times more than is strictly necessary, which sometimes means that a change is a huge relief, rather than a natural or surprising progression. That's a shame because this music shouldn't be allowed to get boring, it's too good.

In a curious but desperate bid to get these Ohrwurms to cut it out for a while, I've been listening to his Requiem on and off all day. Never heard it before, not sure why. There are elements of it I don't find interesting - the bits that sound like Enya, for a start - and it's a bit 'bitty', unlike Armed Man which, though the movements contrast, hangs together convincingly. What I do like about this Requiem, though, is - again, like with Songs of Sanctuary - the merging of musical and lyrical traditions from all over the place. Jenkins is a listener as well as a writer and he refreshingly listens to anything and everything, hooray. Particularly effective is the interspersal of Japanese haikus amongst the traditional Latin lyrics of the Mass; this is more striking in textual than harmonic form, because the prominance of melodic lines can too often negate words and syntax (in all music, not just this). The contrast is beautiful, and the haikus add helium to the heaviness of the classical liturgy. I'm not going to get away without examples.

Take this, the Confutatis (a staple part of the Requiem progression, cf: Mozart, Dvorak, Verdi...) reads thus:

Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis, voca me cum benedictis.
Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritum quasi cinis: gere curam mei finis.
(When the damned are cast away and consigned to the searing flames, call me to be with the blessed. Bowed down in supplication I be to Thee, my heart as though ground to ashes: help me in my final hour).

Lots of that gets stodgy, linguistically and thematically. So immediately after this Jenkins inserts a haiku by Issho (I won't bother with the Japanese, though the helpfully-supplied English translation in the sleeve notes doesn't adhere to the haiku structure):

From deep in my heart
how beautiful are
the snowclouds in the west.

Isn't that great? And another. The Lacrimosa, again a staple part of Requiems of all time (mistyped "staple" as "stale" then, which also works) -

Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus: huic ergo parce, Deus.
Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.
Amen.
(On this day full of tears, when from the ashes arises guilty man to be judged: oh Lord, have mercy upon him. Gentle Lord Jesus, Grant them rest. Amen) -

is followed by a haiku by Hokusai:

Now as a spirit,
I shall roam
the summer fields.

There are five of the little Japanese nuggets in all. The contrast between the inexpressible bigness of the Mass subjects and the little chinks of moment in the haikus is an innovative experiment, and I like it. I'm not so convinced that elements of the composition work melodically (Rutter's Requiem is a more successful composition, I think), but these textual details are something always worth noting with Jenkins - he cares about what is being said, and in what way, and to whom. Take Armed Man for another instance. Within it lies several languages (French, Arabic, Greek, Latin and English) and a richness of lyric taken from the Bible, Rudyard Kipling, Dryden, Swift, the Mahabharata, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and Tennyson's In Memoriam. So in the middle of scripture and Islamic calls to prayer, we have Lancelot and Guinevere chatting to each other! This is why I like Jenkins, because he listens to what other people have said, and he thinks it matters to the world.