The Sinking Of The Titanic (1969-)

This piece originated in a sketch written for an exhibition in support of beleaguered art students at Portsmouth in 1969. Working as I was in an art college environment I was interested to see what might be the musical equivalent of a work of conceptual art. It was not until 1972 that I made a performing version of the piece for part of an evening of my work at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. During the next three years I performed the piece several times including an American performance directed by John Adams in San Francisco and in 1975 I made a recorded version for the first of ten records produced for Brian Eno's Obscure label. That recording formed the basis for most subsequent performances until I recorded the piece "live" at the Printemps De Bourges Festival in 1990, when the availability of an extraordinary space - the town's disused water tower dating from the Napoleonic period - and the rediscovery of the wreck by Dr. Ballard made me think again about the music. In any case the piece has always been an open one, being based on data about the disaster but taking account of any new information that came to hand after the initial writing. All the materials used in the piece are derived from research and speculations about the sinking of the "unsinkable" luxury liner. On April 14, 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg at 11.40pm in the North Atlantic and sank at 2.20am on April 15. Of the 2201 people on board only 711 were to reach their intended destination, New York.

The initial starting point for the piece was the reported fact of the band having played a hymn tune in the final moments of the ship's sinking. A number of other features of the disaster which generate musical or sounding performance material, or which "take the mind to other regions" are also included. The final hymn played during those last five minutes of the ship's life is identified in an account by Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator in an interview for the New York Times of April 19, 1912:
"From aft came the tunes of the band...the ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The 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 up in the air, began to settle slowly...The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, 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 I cannot imagine."

This episcopal hymn, then, becomes a basic element of the music and is subject to a variety of treatments. Bride did not hear the band stop playing and it would appear that the musicians continued to play even as the water enveloped them. My initial speculations centered, therefore, on what happens to music as it is played in water. On a purely physical level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce much of a sound (it was a string sextet that played at the end, since the two pianists with the band had no instruments available on the boat deck). On a poetic level, however, the music once generated in water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more sound efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the ship to the ocean bed and remain there, repeating itself over and over until the ship returns to the surface and the sounds re-emerge. The rediscovery of the ship by Taurus International at 1:04 on September 1, 1985 renders this a possibility. This hymn tune forms a base over which other material is superimposed. This includes fragments of interviews with survivors, sequences of tunes for the hymn on other instruments, references to the different bagpipe players on the ship (one Irish, one Scottish), miscellaneous sound effects relating to descriptions given by survivors of the sound of the iceberg impact, and so on.

This new recording includes elements taken performances on other acoustic spaces: the water tower at Bourges and an Art Nouveau swimming pool in Brussels for example.

Although I conceived the piece many years ago I enjoy finding new ways of looking at the material in it and welcome opportunities like the present recording to look at it afresh.

Gavin Bryars
July 1994

Recorded at Le Chateau d'Eau, Bourges, Westleton Church, Suffolk and DAT Studios, Cricklewood, London
Bourges digital mastering at Autograph Sound Recording Ltd.
Made in the Netherlands
℗ © 1994 Point Music/A Joint Venture of Euphorbia Productions, Ltd. and Phillips Classic Productions.
Manufactured and marketed by Polygram Classics and Jazz, A Division of Polygram Records, Inc.