Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES • FALL 2017 • sai-national.org 18 I n 2013, the British composer James McCarthy was commissioned to create a choral work about Alan Turing by the Hertfordshire Chorus. Both the work and its performance in London received accolades. However, until the movie Imitation Game was released in 2014, the majority of the American public had no idea who Mr. Turing was. So I will begin with a primer exploring the life and work of Alan Turing: a brilliant British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist, and theoretical biologist born in London on June 23, 1912. Possessing a brilliant mind and thirst for knowledge, Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers brought his skills to the attention of the British government and he was asked to join the British code breaking organization headquartered in Bletchley Park. Aer WWII broke out in September of 1939, their sole focus was breaking the code of the "Enigma" encryption machine which allowed the Nazis to safely transmit orders to position the German U-boats. Turing developed the electromechanical machine that was able to decipher the Enigma messages, and this would prove to be pivotal in undermining the Germans and ending the war. By early 1942, Bletchley Park was decoding 39,000 messages per month, and as time progressed that number rose to over 80,000 messages monthly. e British government estimated that the decryption work at Bletchley Park, of which Alan Turing was a principal architect, shortened the war by two years and saved approximately 14 million lives. Documents relating to his work were so sensitive in nature that they were not declassified and remained sealed by the British government until 2012! Truly, he was the father of computer science and a visionary well beyond his time, posing the question, "Can machines think?" Indeed, his theory of artificial intelligence is at the core of the computing devices of today. Despite his groundbreaking work that helped end the war and save millions of lives, he was treated as a common criminal when it was discovered that Turing was gay. In 1952, British law stated that homosexual acts were a crime, and he was arrested and convicted of "gross indecency." Alan was given the option of imprisonment or chemical castration, and he chose the latter as he felt he still had much work to do. is proved to be catastrophic, as the effects of continuous hormonal injections were debilitating and unbearable. Tragically, he took his own life on June 8, 1954. Turing's Law was passed in 2013, and the Royal Queen posthumously pardoned the thousands of gay men who had been unjustly convicted for being homosexual by the British government. James McCarthy's piece for soprano soloist, choir, and orchestra is written from the viewpoint of Turing's grieving mother, reflecting on the life and loss of her beloved son Alan. e powerful and highly emotional text draws from a mixture of personal narrative and memories interwoven with speeches and verse from the well-known poets Wilfred Owen, Sarah Teasdale, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Burns. At the world premiere of the work in London, Codebreaker: An International Collaboration IN CONCERT At left, Clarksville Alumnae Chapter President Cody Robinson with Member Laureate Kelly Corcoran. Below, a standing ovation after a performance of Codebeaker by Nashville in Harmony and One Voice Charlotte.

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