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.”

Bryars conceived The Sinking of the Titanic in 1969, before the discovery of the remains of the passenger ship brought it vividly into the popular consciousness.

“When I started out with the piece, I started making a little sketch and it developed as it went on,” says Bryars. “In fact, the first performance of the piece was in 1972. When I first made the piece, I just developed lots of little, kind of research notes about the music, about events on the ship, and I imagined that this could be some sort of strange musical performance whereby, reading these notes, you could imagine the sounds in your head. It was a kind of a conceptual piece. So I didn’t really think about developing it as a performance piece until someone simply asked me. ‘Well,’ they said, ‘it’s all very well to say you have this music in your head, but what would it sound like to other people if you made it’?”

The piece was inspired by the testimony of the ship’s junior wireless operator, Harold Bride. Bride described how the ship’s band went from playing ragtime numbers, chosen to maintain calm, to playing hymns when the ship was about to go under.

As Bride swam for safety, in the five minutes before the ship sank, the band played a hymn called Autumn. They continued to play it as the waters came in around them.

Inspired by this account, Bryars imagined the band continuing to play as they descended beneath the icy waves. When the wireless operator landed safely in New York, one of the first people to greet him was Marconi, whose company owned and operated the Titanic’s wireless telegraphs.

Aware of Marconi’s theory that sounds, once generated, never die, but simply become fainter and fainter, Bryars fancied that one could still hear the band play that five-minute performance of Autumn. Hence, the piece is a recurring motif in The Sinking of the Titanic.

“The hymn is not one which has any kind of significance, in the sense that it doesn’t talk about death, or imminent death, or the afterlife or anything. It’s simply a hymn about autumn, about the harvest, and so on,” he says.

“It was a hymn which must have been known to the bandsmen because they must have played it from memory. I doubt that they found music and put it on the stands. They played something that they all knew.

“So it obviously had a currency at the time and it is in the hymn books. As I say, the words have no great significance but it’s striking that they chose to play that hymn, and the fact they chose to play a hymn at all. And to me, the point about the whole piece, if there is a point to it, is to look at the behaviour of that small group of musicians and what they did knowing that they were going to die in minutes.

“They simply played music for themselves and it was an incredibly noble thing that they did. So, in a way, that is at the heart of the piece and it always has been,” Bryars says.

With great foresight, The Sinking of the Titanic was composed as an open work, so that if, and when, new information about the ship emerged, Bryars could incorporate it into the piece.

“I didn’t play the piece very much at all until I was persuaded to do so in about 1990, not long after the ship had been rediscovered. I then sort of looked at my information and I looked at anything that had come to light during the discovery.

“Now, one of the things which came to light, of course — there were photos taken on the ocean bed, and so on — and one of the photos was of a set of bagpipes. Now, I knew that there’d been a Scottish bagpipe player on the ship, he’s mentioned a number of times, but these pipes were Irish pipes, which meant that, in fact, there were two pipers on the ship,” Bryars says.

“So what I did, then, was I actually wrote a little kind of lament just as a little signal to the presence of these two pipers. It wasn’t a traditional lament. I simply wrote a piece and this appears; really, it’s the kind of climactic point in the whole piece. About two-thirds of the way through, there’s a three- or four-minute-long bass clarinet solo, which is this lament, and it comes about because of seeing those Irish pipes in that photograph.”

This approach has allowed Bryars to not only tailor The Sinking of the Titanic to suit any location in which it might be performed, but also to accommodate a number of different elements. The use of Autumn is a case in point.

Many people believe that the ship’s final moments were accompanied by a performance of Nearer My God To Thee. A Scottish hymn specialist has contended that the final hymn played was Aughton.

“I don’t rule out the possibility of Nearer My God To Thee or Aughton or Autumn,” says Bryars. “It seems to me that Autumn is the most likely candidate on the basis of the evidence that we have.”

Then there is the unreliable element of memory. During the 1970s, Bryars interviewed and recorded two women who survived the disaster. Their memories are preserved within the piece.

“Now, a lot of their memories are wrong in the sense that what they describe and what they remember didn’t happen like that, but it is their memory and memory is a strange thing and, in a way, this piece does deal with memory and collective memory and acquired memory,” he says.

So Bryars brings many elements to this ambitious, ever-evolving piece, mixing ambient sounds with contemporaneous hymns. It is hard to credit that there was a time when critics found The Sinking of the Titanic too simple.

“A lot of the music people were making in the 1970s was quite complex and quite alienating for many audiences, and this seemed to be too simple,” says Bryars. “It is slow hymn tunes, there’s no nasty sounds in the whole piece, so, in a way, it’s almost as if that was a threat to modern music because modern music ought to be nasty and unpleasant and mine wasn’t.”

* The Gavin Bryars Ensemble, featuring Philip Jeck, performs The Sinking of the Titanic, accompanied by visuals from Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder, at Cork City Hall on Saturday, June 23, at 8pm.

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