“I cannot tell you when or where the attack will come or that it will come at all. I can only remind you that we must be ready when it does come.” With these few words in 1950 did the then US President Harry Truman usher in the real nuclear age, an age that started not with the exploding of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, nor with the twin horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that which had its beginnings in the first stirrings of paranoiac fear generated in all the ordinary peoples of the western world by a “what if..?”, an unspoken, ever-present gloominess of mind and spirit, a debilitating and doom laden gnawing at the very fibre of civilisation and civilised society. It was an age where, in the words of Todd Gitlin’s “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage”, “The Bomb was the shadow hanging over all human endeavour. It threatened all the prizes…we could never quite take for granted that the world we had been born into was destined to endure.”

Into this half-crazed/half-damned universe of Mutually-Assured-Destruction (MAD) was born Gregory Corso’s “Bomb”. Published by City Lights in 1958, it is one of the earliest poems to confront the existence of the nuclear bomb, and, most importantly, to tackle the paradoxes inherent within our concept of the bomb itself – on one hand, “Bomb” details the destructive power of a weapon that can annihilate mankind, on the other it is concerned with the positive force of man’s own potential to see the world from a new perspective. Although it can be read as a polemic against nuclear war, Corso’s poem is also a vehicle for the transformation or alteration of consciousness, prefiguring the way man understands himself and the world about him. Like the bomb, powerful forces – whether they are generated by our religious prophets, politicians, heads-of-state, or by authentic artistic statement – provide the elemental energy that transforms human consciousness itself.

In Corso’s own words: “Bomb was written when I came back from England, when I saw the kids Ban the Bomb, Ban the Bomb, and I said ‘It’s a death shot that’s laid on them, the immediacy of people being hanged in England at that time, and it’s not as if the Bomb had never fallen, so how am I going to tackle this thing?’ Suddenly death was the big shot to handle, not just the Bomb…The best way to get out of it was make it lyrical, like an embracing of it, put all the energy of all the lyric that I could name…And you can only do it by embracing it…So, gee, I loved the bomb.”

Oft controversial in its neutral, neither-for-nor-against, bomb-stance, Corso’s poem has suffered much in the course of the last 50 years. Dismissed at the time of its publishing as “rant and shapeless anger” by the literary critic Hayden Carruth, and infamously heckled and even bombarded (with the shoes of outraged poetry society students) at New College Oxford, “Bomb” has endured and risen above these taunts and angry outbursts, recognised as it is now as one of the key early works of the Beat Generation, a “shock waltz” treading along “the brink of paradise” to use the poem’s own lyric. In our 21st-Century post-cold war/global war against terror world, once more populated by confused, frightened and dissociated peoples, the continued relevance of Corso’s poem is all too apparent. Yes / Yes / into our midst a bomb will fall

Following on from Parts I & II of my “Beat Series” – respectively “Howl” and “On The Road” – 2008 saw the writing of my musical setting of “Bomb”, Part III of “Beat Series”. Since as far back as the inception of this four-part series of linked works in 2003, I've had a general idea in my head of how the music for "Bomb" would sound. Writing it during the autumn and part of the winter of 2008, I was pleased to find that I stayed true to my initial wishes, with the narrator delivering the text with a deliberate mixture of "Fire & Brimstone", pulpit-bashing hysteria, and the tender voice of the lyrical poet in full Romantic flow.

The music is divided into eight distinct sections, mirroring eight areas of differentiation I have perceived within the structure of the poem itself. Beginning with a brief introductory statement, the work moves through a series of formal constructs dominated by two key scales – the first, taken from South Indian music, is the “Kosala” scale with a raised second and fourth degree; the second scale is a basic “T-b3-T-b3-T” pentatonic, made into a hexatonic scale by the addition of a lowered sixth. These two scales represent the two contrasting themes found within Corso’s poem, as discussed earlier in this programme note – the poetical paradox made musical. The use of an Indian scale is to represent the goddess Kali, whose terrifying magnificence I feel fits appropriately with Corso’s lyrical personification of the Bomb. The modified pentatonic I use in “Bomb” is one I feel most perfectly expresses what Albert Ayler called “the rising spirit of Man”, or the alphabetical “Y”. The “T-b3-T-b3-T” penatonic is missing the usual black-and-white determining third degree of the major/minor western sound world, and as such, to my ears and spirit, conveys a magical sense of boundless possibility and optimism.

I first heard this scale on the Don Cherry album, “Brown Rice” and I used it a great deal in my setting of Beat Series Part I: “Howl”. It is one of the connecting features of each of my Beat Series settings, and is representative of the overall optimistic soul of the Beats themselves, something which I believe accounts for the continued popularity of their work some 50 years after its appearance in post-WWII western culture.

As with the other two parts of the series, I have used the text of the poem as the main, flexible structural device. The narrator reads at his own pace, unrestricted by any pre-arranged musical format, and the eight key sections of the work are cued to start and finish when specific points are reached in the text itself. This is an aspect of my Debop Method, developed during the writing of “Howl”, and responsible for the fluid nature of that setting.

Beat Series Part III is dedicated to the late Robert Anton Wilson, in recognition of his continued inspiration and Promethean genius. All Hail Eris!

The work was premiered in January 2009 at Birmingham's Yardbird Jazz Club, featuring narration by Sid Peacock, Steve Tromans - piano, Chris Mapp - bass, and Miles Levin - drums.