Yesterday we went to the Villa Marina for a performance called Better Is Peace. The Isle of Man Choral Society (100 voices) and the Isle of Man Symphony Orchestra (60 players), conducted by Mandy Griffin, came together to perform Philip Stopford's Missa Deus Nobiscum, and Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.

We were up for this on several counts. If ever a pro-peace message is needed, it's now, and you feel you want, in whatever small way, to be part of that, clapping not only for the performers but for the concept and the sentiment. Peace is better. Always. Better is peace...

It's also ages since we've had the opportunity to listen to live music, and it's something we miss. Plus, my sister-in-law sings in the choir...

She told us a couple of weeks ago, when singers and orchestra were big-time into rehearsals, that the first piece was really beautiful, but the second was mind-blowing. And thus it was...

I came away very moved. Partly because of the works themselves (more on which below); partly because the effort required to pull together something on this scale is just awe-inspiring (and how amazing that there's such an ocean of talent on this little Island...); and partly because it all feels so terribly timely. An armed man is ruling our destinies at the moment. He may be doddery; he may be incoherent; he may give every impression of terminal superficiality. But he can wreck the lives of billions, and that is exactly the way his actions are trending at the moment.

Over the course of yesterday evening and today, I listened again to chunks of both pieces. Every time you dig a little deeper, you're rewarded a little more.


The very impressive Villa Marina

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Missa Deus Nobiscum is a Latin mass, first performed in 2019. The composer tells us it was commissioned by a Methodist school in Belfast to mark their 150th anniversary. They didn't mind that he wanted to do it in Latin... After all, their motto is Deus Nobiscum (God is with us). That whole video is an interesting little window onto the process of composition.

He comments, inter alia, on the ending. Which is quiet... I actually hadn't realized it had finished, and was expecting some grand finale. The end of a mass is usually joyful, says Stopford, but what he was aiming for was warmth. G Major. Grant us peace. It had to finish quietly.

In a rather nice touch, the composer was present for the performance of the piece (presumably its Manx premier).

So, this was a lovely half-hour of music. Very accessible, in two senses: It's both easy to listen to, and can be staged by quite small groups (you can get away with an orchestra of 22).

In the intermission, endearingly, you can buy your little tub of Davison's ice cream. Which we did.

And so to Part 2.

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The Armed Man was first performed in 2000. It was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to mark the millennium, but is dedicated to the victims of the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo. It's subtitled A Mass for Peace, but only four sections come from the mass (Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei); the rest of the text is drawn from all sorts of religious and historical sources, and from poets ranging from Kipling to Tennyson..

You can find the text for all the sections here. Two other very useful sites are Debi Simons's compilation of all kinds of background links and performance clips; and a post by Dave Schriber, giving a singer's perspective on this incredibly emotive text.

The smallish orchestra of the first piece had expanded to a full battery of brass, woodwind, and percussion for this one.

We open, rhythmically and memorably, with fifes and drums, and a very old French song, L'homme arme. This source, which contains a wealth of interesting material, explains that this little verse, with its haunting melody, emerged in the middle of the 15th century, probably in response to the fall of Byzantine Constantinople. Rapidly gathering momentum, it enjoyed huge popularity, and ended up being incorporated into lots of mass compositions as a "cantus firmus" ("a fixed tune, around which other polyphonic voices were arranged"). In translation it reads: "The armed man should be feared. Everywhere it has been proclaimed that each man shall arm himself with a coat of iron mail. The armed man should be feared."

In striking contrast, we now transition to the Islamic call to prayer, exquisitely sung for us yesterday. We spent more than 14 years with this call as part of the rhythm of our day, and I rarely failed to be moved by it. It's the human's cri de coeur par excellence.


Yogyakarta, 2013. One of the many mosques in our lives

This is followed by a Kyrie, a psalm ("save me from bloody men..."), and a particularly brilliant Sanctus, full of driving rhythms.

But the following four movements bring us war and its consequences. It's visceral stuff.

We move from the tired old patriotic nonsense ("Jehovah of the Thunders, Lord God of Battles, aid!"... "How blest is he who for his country dies") to the thick of battle. I'll quote Schriber here: "Realizing too late that they are doomed, all the soldiers can do is desperately charge. The slaughter plays out in a glissando cacophony of random cries and moans by the chorus, instructed by the composer’s notation to 'convey horror.'"

Then we hear the shivery sound of the tam-tam... The tam-tam of death, as we learnt at one MPO concert... Certainly applicable here. Finally, after a long, boding silence, a lone trumpet sounds the Last Post.

After that, we have to face what we've done... Angry Flames is a text by Togi Sankichi, a Hiroshima survivor and peace activist who died of radiation exposure in 1953 (there's more of his work here). That's followed by Torches ("The animals scattered in all directions screaming terrible screams..."). As Schriber says, it sounds like a continuation of the previous piece. But it's from a 6th-century-BC Hindu epic. The Mahabharata... My God, we've been seamlessly doing this stuff to each other for millennia...

As Schriber testifies, "These are emotionally difficult passages to sing as well as to hear."

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Hiroshima, 2015. One of the many moving monuments at the Peace Memorial Museum

These searing sections are followed by a beautiful, contemplative Agnus Dei, and a meditation written by historian Guy Wilson, Master of the Royal Armouries (the commissioning institution, if you remember): "You, my dearest friend, who should be with me now, not cold too soon, and in your grave, alone."

The Benedictus, with its haunting cello solo, is stunningly beautiful. Here, Jenkins modestly shares his surprise at the way it has moved people over time (and also talks about the fear it has induced in cellists, because it is pitched quite high).

And finally, we come to Better Is Peace, the 13th section, and a compilation of texts from Tennyson, Malory, and Revelation. We start with a reprise of The Armed Man melody from the beginning, still with the drums and piccoli. But it's much more upbeat. And we move on, chime-like, to all the stuff we want to ring out, never to see again ("Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace"). And finally, again quietly, comes the hymn-like "God shall wipe away all tears".

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I think this experience will stay with me for a while.

Whether war is "permissible" in any shape or form is a longstanding theological and political debate, and I remember some interesting discussions with students from a variety of backgrounds in the course I used to teach on Politics and International Law. There's an accessible but thoughtful resume of the "just war" doctrine on the page featuring the always lovable St Faithfuls Havnot. It explains, very rightly, that as soon as you move from the theoretical to the practical, things get muddy, and concludes: "Whatever you decide, you are dealing in tragedy. Not triumph."

Which is very much Jenkins's point.


The memorial right opposite the Villa Marina