Utwory na płycie:

• Opening
• Wondrous Light
• Gordon Brown's Apology
• Song of Songs
• Deep is the Night
• Enough
• I shall meet him again
• Outbreak of War
• At Sea
• De Profundis
• A Mother's Lament
• If Death is Kind
• Ode to a Nightingale - Start
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 1
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 2
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 3
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 4
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 5
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 6
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 7
• Ode to a Nightingale - Verse 8

McCarthy:
Codebreaker

Todd:
Ode to a Nightingale

Writing a music drama about Alan Turing was a far more complex and dizzying undertaking than I had first imagined it would be. In a way, the story of Turing’s life is a composer’s gift: an eventful and ultimately tragic existence that had vast repercussions, the reverberations of which we are still feeling today. And yet it was a life shrouded in mystery. Turing left behind surprisingly few clues regarding what he felt about, well, anything at all. He was a private man dedicated to his passion for scientific and mathematical enquiry. But he was also a national hero whose genius saved millions of lives during the Second World War and who died as a result at least in part of persecution from the country he was instrumental in saving from oblivion. His is the clearest claim to the title ‘inventor of the computer’, thereby allowing me to type this on a train as it wheezes its way through the Surrey countryside (a landscape, incidentally, that Turing would have known well in his pastime as a distance runner of near-Olympic standing). There can have been few people in history who achieved so much of profound consequence for humanity in so little time.

Codebreaker isn’t a biography, complete with copious footnotes, or an exhaustive encyclopaedia entry. There are many aspects of Turing’s life that I would dearly have loved to include, but too broad a narrative arc, too meandering a musical journey, would have lessened the dramatic impact of the whole. From the outset, I wanted Codebreaker to be a portrait of a living, breathing human being and not the musical equivalent of a marble monument to a Great Hero. So I had to find the man behind the myth-making. And I found him in two ways. Firstly, through his mother’s biography (which, remarkably, Sara Turing wrote in spite of the fact that she had no knowledge of her son’s contribution to the war effort), and secondly, through the letters that Turing composed to the mother of Christopher Morcom. Indeed, Morcom was key to everything.