The Sinking of the Titanic (Bryars)
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The Sinking of the Titanic is a work by British minimalist composer Gavin Bryars. The piece is an adaptation of the event that the band on the RMS Titanic continued to perform as the ship sank in 1912; it imagines how the music performed by the band would sound and reverberate through the water as they would have continued—and some time after they ceased—performing. Composed between 1969 and 1972, the work is now considered one of the classics of British contemporary classical music.[1]
Bryars' inspiration for the work came from a report that the wireless operator Harold Bride on the Titanic had witnessed the house band continue to perform as the ship sank. In April 1912, Bride had told the New York Times: "[T]he band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing "Autumn" then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic on her nose, with her after-quarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle - slowly [...] the way the band kept playing was a noble thing [...] and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing "Autumn". How they ever did it I cannot imagine. That, and the way Phillips (the senior wireless operator) kept sending after the Captain told him his life was his own, and to look out for himself, are two things that stand out in my mind over all the rest [...]"[2]
Bryars imagined that the sound would continue to reverberate as it disappeared under the waves; hence, the piece demonstrates notes gradually being drawn out into drones and lower harmonics. Writing in 1993, Bryars said "the music goes through a number of different states, reflecting an implied slow descent to the ocean bed which give a range of echo and deflection phenomena, allied to considerable high frequency reduction".[2]
The work dates back to 1969, when Bryars wrote a short piece for an exhibition in support of art students at Portsmouth. In keeping with work done by contemporary collective Art & Language, the work was initially a single page of A4 paper with typed instructions.[3] The instructions referred to how the work should sound and how it might be created but were not a score as such.[3]
Bryars frequently participated in the Music Now series of concerts organised by Victor Schonfield in London in the early 1970s, usually with pianist John Tilbury.[3] Schonfield was keen to showcase Bryars' music and in December 1972 organised a concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall.[3] The Sinking Of The Titanic would be the centrepiece of the concert. Bryars created a more traditional score for the work and used the Episcopal hymn Autumn as the basis of the work, based on the testimony of wireless operator Harold Bride, although there was some discussion that it may have been actually Aughton that was heard. Bryars incorporated fragments of Aughton and other tunes reportedly heard on the ship.[3] The work has been performed several times in subsequent years, including a performance in San Francisco conducted by John Adams. Other performance venues have included New York's Guggenheim Museum, a Belgian art-nouveau swimming pool and a Huddersfield nightclub.[4]
The work has been described as an "indeterminate" and "open work", which has changed as new information on the disaster comes to light.[4] The work was originally scored for small orchestra and tape, but has expanded to include other sources such as music boxes and turntables.
In 2012, the centennial year of the disaster, the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, Philip Jeck and artists Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder presented a series of concerts with accompanying archival film images of the Titanic synched live to the music.[5] The concerts were initially performed in cities closely associated with the disaster such as Belfast and Cork, before touring more widely, including a performance at London's Barbican Hall on the anniversary of the disaster.[5]
