Jack Campbell’s VE Day Celebration Concert – My name is Jack Campbell, and I’m a concert violinist and composer. I am currently embarking on a month-long 12-concert tour of the UK. This features a live performance for violin and electronics, featuring a composition of my creation. Written in collaboration with the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, this piece features a live decryption of a musical enigma code in concert! A work of scientific/musical collaboration in celebration of VE Day, this concert will be performed at St. Mary’s Wrexham Cathedral in Wrexham at 1pm on May 16th.
Wrexham Premiere
This is the Wrexham premiere of a cross-disciplinary musical creation which I have been designing, researching, and developing over the last five years. Without the support of the National Museum of Computing (Bletchley Park, UK), my studies and the completion of this project would not have been possible.
I believe that music serves three inherent functions:
- To memorialise and contextualise history.
- To, in the same fashion as a scientist, provide a canvas on which to explore the breadth of the human imagination.
- To encourage and cherish connection, innovation, and intellectual progress.
Over the last five years, I have built computational machines and mechanisms that are musical equivalents of the Enigma and BOMBE machines. The computational mathematics and computational mechanics of encryption are precisely the same as the original historic machines, which are celebrated in this museum. The difference is that instead of encrypting language, these machines encrypt music.
The musical alphabet and keyboard have been adapted from primary alphabetic characters to musical pitches: this has been created by the analysis of statistical linguistic data in frequency, use, and purpose, between the notes and keys of music, and the usages of letters within the German language.
Musical Encryption And Decryption
This musical enigma machine then generates musical pitch, melodies, harmonies, and forms, simply by inputting a melody of choice, and letting the musical enigma machine transform it through all its various devices of encryption. Once at the highest level of encryption, these musical structures are then deconstructed by plugging them through the musical bombe machine.
Both the processes of musical encryption and decryption, with all the various transformations undergone in that process, play out musically across this piece. When listening, please note that every single pitch you hear is generated by a musical enigma and bombe machine. My musical imagination has simply given them context and shaping.
Also within this work are recordings of the mechanical noises of the Enigma and Bombe machines within this museum. I thank Robert Dowell for making these historical sound documents. It is a relatively unknown fact that Alan Turing himself designed the world’s very first device for generating computer music. I have taken these found sound recordings of the Bombe and Enigma machines and musically manipulated them using sound software directly stemming from Turing’s musical inventions.
While the violin plays the Enigma/Bombe constructed pitches, the computer backing track will play sonically designed Enigma/Bombe recordings made using Turing’s invention’s descendants. Also included in this backing track are sounds of radio transmission and sounds of military conflict, which are thematically appropriate.
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Simple Music Melody
Please note that the piece starts with the highest level of encrypted musical complexity at the apex of the musical Enigma’s work, and you will slowly hear this encryption unravelled by the musical Bombe. At the end of the piece, only the originally encrypted simple musical melody remains. I invite you to try and listen to the melody as it unravels, and hear the patterns of pitch that emerge. It is also fun to note that the rhythms you hear the violin play at the beginning of the piece are those musical pitches’ phonetic alphabetical equivalents in the natural rhythms of Morse code.
The melody, which I have chosen to encrypt, which you will finally hear unveiled at the end of the piece, is the traditional song “Molly Malone,” which was Alan Turing’s favourite piece of music. Turing himself was a violinist. The story goes that when the police came to take him away, he was sitting playing this piece on the violin.
I have set the rotors and plugboard, and other encryption devices of the Enigma machine to the exact historical settings of 18th October, 1944. October 18th was the day on which I finished the piece, it is one of the very few days of the war for which we know the exact historical settings of the Enigma machine, and it is the day on which the Nazi’s executed Victor Ullman, one of the greatest composers.
This is a thematic tribute to the brutal fates suffered by artists during the war for pursuing freedom of intellect, and an acknowledgement that the work done by the Bletchley Park team helped allow for a world where the majority of musicians, like me, can continue to express ourselves freely.
Agnus Dei
Finally, the musical form of this piece is that of an Agnus Dei. An Agnus Dei is an ancient musical form; Agnus Dei is also the codename of the first Turing/Welchman Bombe Machine.
I could not be more grateful to be sharing this project, of which I am so proud! This is the first of many musical reflections on the Second World War I have planned across the next year to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its end. This is just the beginning of many further experimentations with using Enigma and Bombe machines to write music.
This piece premiered in November at the National Museum of Computing. It has since toured across Canada and has featured in live broadcasts on the radio. This performance is the Wrexham stop of my 12-performance Spring UK concert tour. The performance is at noon on May 17th at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Wrexham.
There have been other past musical interpretations of the Enigma-breaking story, but these deal primarily with the details of Alan Turing’s personal life. This work is a scientific musical equivalency of mathematical data and a cultural acknowledgement of the brilliance of everyone who worked at Bletchley Park. I invite you to listen with open ears and minds… and consider not only music from an aural standing, but also from one of intellectual and imaginative conceptual notions.
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