Science and music are not such strange bedfellows, although our tendency in Western culture is to separate the two. Violinist and composer Jack Campbell’s Sounding Bombe: Enigmatic Music brings together musicality and science, past and present.
The work for solo violin and electronics was written in collaboration with the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park UK, and at its heart are the mathematical computations that the Allies, led by Alan Turing and others who worked at Bletchley Park, used to crack the infamous Nazi Enigma code.
It’s a piece that reflects on history, while turning to the future. The relationship between the electro mechanical computation used during WWII, and contemporary electro acoustic composition. It’s a musical representation of the science. The Second World War ended 80 years ago; where will the science of AI and computerized mechanics take us next?
He’ll be performing the concert in Toronto at Array Music on April 5 as part of several stops across Canada, and another 12 concerts in the UK, including events at museums and cathedrals as well as the usual music venues.
The tour will culminate in a record release, and five nights’ performance at the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
We caught up to Campbell to ask a few questions about the work.
Jack Campbell: Q&A
LvT: To back up a bit, how did you choose the violin as your instrument, or did it choose you?
JC: When I was two-years-old I told my mother that I wanted to play the violin. My family were not musicians, but music was a pillar of our home. I grew up in a joyful environment full of ideas and love with records playing constantly and my mother was always singing. Thanks to this climate, my young brain associated music with positivity and inspiration. I have always been fascinated by the beauty of sound itself and by the time I was 16 I knew that the violin would be my lifelong companion and creative muse, tool, and treasured friend.
LvT: This is a piece that looks to both the past and the future — how did you come to this concept? I’ve read it was developed over a five year period. Did you know where it would go when you began?
JC: The common thread between my projects are puzzles and/or mysteries. I’m thrilled you understood the past-future connection of this work. Reflecting on the past, embracing the future, and absorbing the present are most interesting compositional questions and important notions to consider when absorbing music, and the concepts of past, future, and present are mysteries themselves. I love the unknown!
What is more beautiful or interesting than the power of the human imagination…and without the unknown, how can we imagine? Puzzles invite the imagination to explore the unknown, and I play with these ideas across my work: whether breaking codes, creating thought experiments in musical form, musical/scientific experiments, or exploring unheard and indeterminate music. This is rather cheeky of me, but it can get so silly trying to define being a “composer violinist” or a “violinist composer” that I prefer to say “musical detective”.
The codes cracked at Bletchley Park were the most consequential puzzles in human history: it resulted in the end of the Second World War and invented the computer! I’ve been smitten with the mathematical concepts involved in cracking the code since I was young, and have been considering how to write music with the mathematics of the Turing Welchman Bombe Machine since I was a teenager. I keep a picture of Alan Turing in my wallet and diary at all times: he’s my hero! This led to designing musical enigma/bombe machines when I was in my undergraduate degree, and in 2024 I finally figured out how to create the piece in a way which was focused on mathematics but still paid adequate tribute to this time in history. I can guarantee this is not the end and I will be working with these concepts for decades.
LvT: How would you describe its musical style?
JC: I passionately believe the future of classical music lies within a complete embrace of using mathematics, computation, and computers as compositional tools: not simply for creating sounds and the practical elements of music making, but rather for the generation of content and structuring of ideas.
Note that I say structuring, not creation: machines cannot replace the human creative brain, but we can use them to assist us in accessing new dimensions and elements of our innate creativity. Computers provide an indispensable connection between sound exploration and sound creation: think of how they have continuously totally transformed popular music. Can you imagine the sounds we would hear if we had the same seismic change in their incorporation into the classical realm?
It’s also important to me that my music, while so often rooted in experimental and abstract concepts, is anchored in fact: computers allow composers an opportunity to understand the facts of sound in a way never known before.
The work features live violin playing composed music written by the musical enigma and bombe machines alongside a live electronics track based on archival sound recordings of the machines in action. This is a marriage of imaginative abstract concept, computer generated/assisted music, and sonic and historical fact. Due to my love of mathematical fun, a lot of my music is microtonal, a-rhythmic, and makes use of extended compositional techniques to explore different dimensions of sound and spontaneity, but this piece is through composed, structured, and precisely notated. There is a clear sense of pattern, melody, rhythm, and harmony.
It’s amazing what logical pitch material the theoretical computational machines generated and infectious rhythmic material the actual mechanical machines created.
LvT: Your work often uses music to create connections with other art forms — and in this case science. Do you think of music as a kind of universal language?
I have always had many interests, with sound being the connecting thread between them. Some of the creative questions I like to ponder daily are: we think a lot about how architecture can impact sound, but how can sound impact architecture? How do linguistic and didactic structures in literature and language relate to how we perceive music? How has ballet and opera provided a narrative and memorialization of history, and how can it reflect our collective human needs to understand history? How do colour and texture in visual art impact compositional musical forms? How can we amplify the microscopic sounds of the natural world we cannot hear? How does music impact our physiology? How does climate change affect our soundscape and how do we capture and save the sounds we are in danger of never hearing again?
And, most of all, how can music interface with computers in a way which champions and celebrates the human imagination without endangering its freedom? I worry slightly about describing music as a universal language, as I think there are some inherent issues with the comparison, but I certainly believe that sound is one of the unifying factors between all living creatures.
LvT: It’s a very timely message about the way that science can be used, as well as the human spirit. Are those themes that emerged from the work, or did you have that kind of direction in mind when you began?
JC: Absolutely. Aside from pure mathematical brilliance, this moment in history is such a concrete example of how extraordinary minds put their brilliance to use not for the benefit of themselves but for humanity and society. These acts are of the utmost importance and must be championed!
- Find more details and tickets for his April 5 concert at Arraymusic [HERE].
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