OPPENHEIMER AND THE GRAND UNION ORCHESTRA

With the release of Christopher Nolan’s new film, our memories reached back nearly 40 years to the early days of the Grand Union Orchestra and its second large-scale show (1986) A Book of Numbers. This toured the UK during the rise of public concern about the threat of nuclear war.

Anti-war protest movements calling for disarmament – like CND, Aldermaston marches and the women’s camp at Greenham Common – were at their height, when Tony Haynes and David Bradford created A Book of Numbers. It began with Oppenheimer’s work on the wartime Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico and the aftermath of Hiroshima.

On seeing the final test of his hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer famously quoted in Sanskrit from the Bhagavad Vita. In this very short but dramatic track https://youtu.be/fojnY4jzvRc (1½ minutes), extracted from our original live recording, his quote is placed alongside a setting of the English translation.

 Read the Blog for the full story of the show, and listen to the original number in full here.      https://on.soundcloud.com/9xgBg