And the band played on

GAVIN BRYARS’S The Sinking of the Titanic is one of the most important pieces of contemporary music, but when it debuted in the early 1970s it received a critical battering.

“I think people actually found it was probably too simple,” says Bryars. “The critical view of the whole concept was that it was actually garbage, that it had no cultural merit whatsoever. One of the other pieces, which had its premier at that time, was Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which became very successful.

“But at that time, and the time of its first recording, in 1975, both pieces were viewed as being of no significance whatsoever.”