Jack Campbell's Sounding Bombe: Enigma Project draws on historic decoders, April 11 at Gallery 881

Science meets history in Vancouver violinist’s 50-minute piece of music for violin and found-sound

By Janet Smith

Jack Campbell. Photo by SD Holman

Sounding Bombe: Enigma Project is at Gallery 881 on April 11

FIRST, AS SO SUITS the music of Jack Campbell, a quick history lesson: The Enigma machine is an early-20th-century cipher device that Nazis employed extensively during the Second World War. Basically, it works via an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the letters of the alphabet.

The Bombe machine, on the other hand, was an electromechanical device that British cryptologists used to help decipher German Enigma-encrypted messages during the war.

And now Vancouver violinist Campbell has created music based on the mathematical calculations that the Allies famously used to crack the Enigma code.

Sounding Bombe: Enigma Project, a 50-minute piece of music for violin and found-sound, is the accumulation of five years of study and was written in collaboration with the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, U.K. Think beautiful music meeting math, science, and history, plus, as Campbell has put it, “the human spirit’s resistance of evil and tyranny”.

On an even more complex level, the long-term project marks the intertwining of electromechanical computation and electro-acoustic composition. As Campbell has described in his notes for this week’s concert at Gallery 881, “you will slowly hear this encryption unravelled by the musical bombe, until at the end of the piece, we are left with the simple musical melody that was originally encrypted.” We won’t reveal what that melody is here; suffice it to say it was the favourite song of Alan Turing’s—the English mathematician and computer scientist who helped crack the Enigma code, of course. And did we mention that Turing was also a violinist?

Note that Campbell has adjusted the rotors, plugboard, and other encryption devices of the Enigma machine to the exact historical settings of October 18, 1944. In a further layer, Campbell says the musical form of this piece is that of an Agnus Dei‚ an ancient musical form that also happens to be the codename of the first Bombe machine.

The show here is part of a Canadian and U.K. tour. Vancouver company Belle Spirale Dance Projects will also join Campbell for the U.K. leg. 

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