Faced with the challenge of writing for the peculiar instrumentation made famous by Igor Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat, I thought of the broken consort of early music. Broken consorts feature a mixture of instrument families, but not enough of anything to constitute something like an orchestra. In this sound world I thought of the famous L'homme Armé tune on which countless renaissance masses were based, and I thought it would be an interesting sidewise glance at Stravinsky's famous work about a soldier to base a work for the same instrumentation on a tune called, “the armed man.” I've always found the juxtaposition of this military street call with the sacred angelic sounds of renaissance counterpoint to be a particularly interesting feature of works containing the L'homme Armé tune. In my setting I focused on this dichotomy.
