470 | 42 TURING’S lEGACy
Turing has been extensively celebrated in music. One of the earliest Turing songs was Steve
Pride’s ‘Alan Mathison Turing’, written in about 2002 (‘. . . he took a bite from a poison apple,
they found him dead on the bedroom floor . . .’).^23 Matthew Lee Knowles’ For Alan Turing—Solo
Piano Suite in Six Movements premiered in 2012 at Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday Party, held
at King’s College, Cambridge.^24 James McCarthy’s oratorio Codebreaker premiered in 2014
at London’s Barbican Centre, with the London Orchestra da Camera and the Hertfordshire
Chorus. McCarthy says about Codebreaker:^25
I want the audience in this piece to feel like they’ve been sitting across the table from Alan Turing
and they’ve shared a cup of tea with him, and have spoken about his hopes and his fears and what
he loves.
But like many artists McCarthy uncritically accepted the verdict of Turing’s inquest. His ora-
torio draws to a close with Turing’s suicide, and gay martyr Turing is reunified after death with
Christopher Morcom.^26
An operatic work by the Pet Shop Boys, A Man From the Future, also premiered in London in
2014, at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. The title of the work is oddly selected since a
key to understanding Turing’s life and work is that he was a man of his time. In the Proms perfor-
mance, orchestrated songs were interspersed with lengthy spoken passages from Hodges’ 1983
biography of Turing.^27 Quite different is Nico Muhly’s Sentences, which premiered at the Barbican
in 2015 with the Britten Sinfonia and counter-tenor Iestyn Davies. Muhly says admiringly:^28
Turing’s work may have begun as mathematics, but it is amazing to think about the impact it had
on physical people’s bodies—it literally saved lives.
Sentences has seven thematic sections with topics ranging from bicycling to the Turing test to
Turing’s death—though the fast-talking Muhly (himself gay) says emphatically ‘No one wants a
gay martyr oratorio’. Like Muhly, Justine Chen explores the lingering question of suicide versus
accident in her opera The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing, and she dramatizes four different
theories of how Turing died.
The sheer amount of serious new music and theatre about Turing demonstrates the quantity
of energy that has been released by his sudden impact on contemporary culture. A Google
search reveals by comparison no serious music about Isaac Newton and little about Einstein.
Chapter 19 has already mentioned a number of Turing movies, including The Imitation
Game. Turing was a definite presence in Danny Boyle’s 2015 biopic Steve Jobs.^29 Persistent
rumours link Turing with the bitten apple logo that Jobs created for Apple Computer, Inc.: in
figure 42.4 Bust of Turing at
Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Photograph by Jonathan Bowen.