On 21 August the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons, gave the first UK Performance of Emily Howard's Calculus of the Nervous System. The work is the concluding panel of a triptych (the earlier ones are called Ada sketches and Mesmerism), which is a tribute to Ada Lovelace (1815–52), the daughter of Lord Byron who, as a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. The title is that of the mathematical model that Lovelace hoped to develop to demonstrate how, as Howard writes, ‘the brain gives way to thought, and nerves to feeling’. Howard conceived Calculus of the Nervous System as a series of ‘memories’, whose structure is ‘a neural network with its roots in strictly engineered time … using values from one source (an exponential equation and its derivative), subsequently muddled and reordered by chance processes’. The memories are linked in some way that is not clear and not explained by the quotations from Sir Geoffrey Hills's Clavics which appear in the score (but which are not in any way audible or able to be apprehended by anyone without a score).