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- Emily Howard
But then, what are these numbers? (2019)
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
Commissioned by the Barbican Centre for "Ada Lovelace: Imagining the Analytical Engine" with Britten Sinfonia, curated by Emily Howard as part of the Barbican’s Life Rewired Season.
- Mz + 1.0.0+bcl.0/perc/pf.hp/vn.vc
- Mezzo-soprano
- 18 min
- Ada Lovelace
- English
Programme Note
But then, what are these numbers? (2019) is a setting of a little known letter penned by 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace to her mother.
Although it is not known exactly when this letter was written, some believe it was in 1851, the year before Lovelace died of uterine cancer at the age of 36. Her mother visited her each morning, and Lovelace would write to her each afternoon. Thus, the letter is a continuation of a conversation, with parts assumed and therefore missing, and what I love most about it is its ambiguity. In sentences that jump between disparate subjects, the letter seems to explore questions of order, disorder and technological progression. It reveals her state of mind at the time – full of highs and lows – and a range of emotions sprang out at me as I read it. These emotions made their way straight into my score as performance directions: humorously, with slight vexation, poignantly, with increasing arrogance and ever more fantastical.
In a nod towards Lovelace’s own joyous interest in playing with mathematical ideas, I have dissected, randomised and reordered the text from this letter using algorithms from the earliest days of computing that form the foundation of modern artificial intelligence. Underpinned by music moving through similar variations and progressions, the musical iterations culminate in the letter’s correct order and, paraphrasing Lovelace’s own words to her mother, harmonious discipline in the final act.
But it was the contradictory nature of this letter, and indeed much of Lovelace’s life, that attracted me. Her complex relationship with her family, fame and fortune can be set against her own passions: an abundant love for music (she was a harpist, a pianist and wrote about singing arias from Bellini’s Norma), and of course her commitment to mathematics.
But then, what are these numbers? is part of a larger series of my works inspired by Lovelace and her multidisciplinary interests. These include vocal work Ada sketches and orchestral works Mesmerism and Calculus of the Nervous System.
Emily Howard © 2023
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“…Howard’s growing fascination with the English mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-52), whose research into what became computer programming went little recognised during her short life. The first sign of this was Ada sketches (2011), a scena whose theatricality found its sequel in But then, what are these numbers? (2019). This sets one of Lovelace’s letters to her mother, possibly written in the year before the former’s death, in which she muses on aspects of life – reordered according to early algorithmic processes – before arriving at an epiphany of emotional clarity at the close.”