A Composer Unbound by Genre
by Linda Freeman
Karl Jenkins grew up surrounded by music; it wasn’t something he sought out, it was simply the atmosphere through which he moved. His father, being the local choirmaster, organist, and school teacher in their village of Penclawdd, Wales, was naturally his son’s first music teacher. Young Karl started out as a keyboardist, playing Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky on piano and organ. He soon took up the oboe, and was drawn to jazz during his teens. After college, he moved to London and could be found playing the saxophone at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. With trumpeter Ian Carr, he co-founded the jazz-rock group Nucleus; they began winning competitions, went to Montreux in Switzerland, and there won a trip to the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. Later, he played in the legendary British jazz-rock band Soft Machine. Both groups infused their music with an eclectic mix of jazz riffs, a rock and roll beat, and flights of psychedelic pop.
Beginning in the 1980s, Jenkins wrote original music for use in commercials. Campaigns he scored for Renoult, and for Delta Airlines won awards. Jenkins went on to develop Adiemus, the theme he wrote for Delta, into a full-length composition for his album Songs of Sanctuary, reversing the usual process most composers follow, of creating works for the world of the arts and later licensing them for use in commercials.
Songs of Sanctuary and the two albums that followed it, collectively dubbed The Adiemus Project, marked Jenkins’ return to a kind of music generally referred to as classical, although Jenkins himself is not interested in labels and categories. Indeed, the albums that make up The Adiemus Project are classified as new age and world music as well as classical. Some musicologists find them unclassifiable, probably to the composer’s delight. It was shortly after the third album in the Adiemus series that Jenkins received the commission from the Royal Armouries to compose The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace. Since then, he has returned regularly to such established formats of the classical canon as the requiem, the concerto, and the cantata, although the music and texts with which he inhabits those forms continue to draw on a wide array of nontraditional sources.
Karl Jenkins has written music for movies, jazz festivals, and the British royal family; he has written music meant to explore his Welsh heritage, to commemorate those lost in tragedies, and to sell blue jeans. In every style and application of music, he has won awards and acclaim for his compositions. He has received multiple honorary doctorates and a knighthood. But Karl Jenkins shows no evidence of a swelled head or inflated ego; he views himself as a craftsman, who sits down at his piano every day to “just doodle around,” hoping to find an idea that feels worth developing. As singers and audience members, we hope those ideas continue to flow freely.
