The Sinking of the Titanic

On April 14th 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg at 11.40 p.m. in the North Atlantic, and sank at 2.20 a.m.on April 15th. This piece is based wholly on the circumstances surrounding that event, and the equation of facts that emanate from it, in one direction or another. All the elements in the present recording, in published extracts from the piece, in other performances already given, are based on these considerations.
The initial starting point for the piece was the reported fact of the band having played a hymn tune as the ship went down, the lack of any report of their having stopped playing, combined with a number of other features of the disaster that are both reproducible and that ‘‘take the mind to other regions’’.
There has been some doubt and speculation about precisely what hymn the band played, and, while the piece reflects this doubt, some emphases are inevitable. Harold Bride, the junior wireless officer, wrote his account in the New York Times, April 19th 1912:‘‘. . . From aft came the tunes of the band. It was a ragtime tune, I don’t know what. Phillips (the senior wireless officer) ran aft, and that was the last I ever saw of him alive . . . 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 afterquarter sticking straight 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 it I cannot imagine.’’
‘‘Autumn’’, an Episcopal hymn, becomes a basic element of the music; from Bride’s evidence, this was the music they played from 2.15 to 2.20a.m., when the ship finally foundered. However, it has been supposed that the band played, at the end, ‘‘Nearer my God to Thee’’. One version of this, to the tune Bethany, was in Sankey and Moody’s ‘‘Sacred Songs and Solos’’ and, therefore, familiar to many passengers; it was also the basis of Karg-Elert’s pieces based on the incident. Another version, Horbury, was reproduced in the contemporary edition of Lloyd’s Weekly News, and was used at the Titanic Band Memorial Concert held on Empire Day, 1912 at the Royal Albert Hall, being orchestrated and conducted by Sir Henry Wood. However, Colonel Gracie, who left the ship at 2.18 a.m., emphasised that he didn’t hear the band play ‘‘Nearer my God to Thee’’, and insists that if they had played it, he ‘‘assuredly would have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death to us all and one likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding...’’
On the other hand, Sir Ronald Johnson points out that ‘‘Autumn’’, in the American hymn books, is set to 3 hymns ‘‘of great banality’’ and was unfamiliar to British churchgoers. (Astor, the American millionaire, himself an Episcopalian, may have requested it the hymn-singing during the previous evening had been chiefly of ‘requests’). However, the words would have been of little comfort in a crisis – one version begins ‘‘See the leaves about us falling’’ – and there would have been no mistaking it for ‘‘Nearer my God to Thee’’ (it was not necessarily mistaken for it – Gracie only knew of two passengers who were cited as authority for that hymn – nor is there any evidence that the words were ever sung or intended to be). Sir Ronald tells me that he believes that, while Bride heard the music correctly, the reporters misheard him (Bride had handled reception of messages rather than transmission at the end) and that what he said was that the band were playing ‘‘Aughton’’, a setting of ‘‘He Leadeth Me’’. Favouring connections made by reasons of phonetic similarity (cf. Brisset, Roussel, Duchamp), I favour ‘‘Aughton’’ as the most plausible alternative to ‘‘Autumn’’.
The various possibilities and conjectures become incorporated into the piece, like footnotes, and this recorded version uses ‘‘Autumn’’ as the main body of the music, with ‘‘Aughton’’ also used (short extracts from ‘‘Nearer my God to Thee’’ are added sparingly).
The hymns are arranged for the same ensemble as that on the ship viz. 3 violins, 2 celli, 1 double-bass (originally, Wallace Hartley 1st violin, Jock Hume 2nd violin, George Krins 3rd violin, Roger Bricoux 1st cello, J. W. Woodward 2nd cello, Fred Clarke double-bass). Since, after about 12.40 a.m., the band moved up from ‘A’ Deck to the exposed Boat Deck, it is unlikely that the two pianists Theodore Brailey and P. C. Taylor would have played since,(a) the highest deck with pianos was ‘A’ Deck, and lifts did not extend to Boat Deck,(b) by the time in question ‘A’ Deck was flooded and it is unlikely that the pianos would have been moved up to Boat Deck. After the development of wireless telegraphy, Marconi had suggested that sounds once generated never die, and hence music, once played, simply gets fainter, (as does any sound on this account). Indeed, it is retained more effectively in the more sound-efficient medium of water and is partly sealed in by the ‘ceiling’ effect of the coincidence of air and water. However dissipated this music becomes by its travelling up and down and across the North Atlantic, subject to variations, it is preserved to some extent in a less vulnerable state in the ship itself at a point 2,500 fathoms below the surface at about 41.46 N., 50.14 W. The size of the North Atlantic makes it suitable for such experiments with long-distance acoustics of the type carried out and demonstrated by Stephen Alcott and his six sons. The music, thus, descends with the ship as well as dissipating laterally, and is continued there for, to date, 63 years, a duration symbolically shortened in performance. (Dr. Faustroll was 63 when he deliberately drowned by sinking his skiff, removing the waterproof preparation by drawing his finger along the outside of the hull - Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon described the effect of the iceberg’s impact as being like a giant finger drawn along the ship).
There the music continues until the point in the future when Douglas Woolley’s Titanic Salvage Company refloat the ship by the methods developed by Balas and Szaszbor. When and if that is done, the music comes to the surface with the ship and returns to its previous acoustic state, no longer affected by the effects of water at that depth. This conjectured refloating is included in the piece.
Parallel with the ‘reality’ of the Titanic (and its treatment) is the fiction of a ‘ghost’ version (accorded the same treatment). In 1898, Morgan Robertson, author of, among other works, a set of sea-stories entitled ‘‘Spun Yarns’’, wrote about a ship called the Titan, the most luxurious ocean liner of its day and which was considered unsinkable. The ship was triple screw and could make 24.25 knots (same as the Titanic), its tonnage was 70,000 tons (Titanic 66,000), it was 800 feet long (Titanic 882.5), it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage in the North Atlantic in April, it could carry about 3,000 people and only had room in its lifeboats for a proportion of them, as had the Titanic. It is possible, but unlikely, that Captain Smith may have performed ‘‘The Sinking of the Titan’’, in the same way that a ‘perfect’ realisation of ‘‘The Sinking of the Titanic’’ would contain all the materials of the original. Thus, there are, simultaneously, two pieces, one ‘ghosting’ the other with closely similar facts, both pieces existing in performance whether stated or not.
This recording uses the hymn tune ‘‘Autumn’’ (partly subject to aquatic treatment), the hymn tune ‘‘Aughton’’, parts of the hymn tune Horbury, the ragtime tune ‘‘O You Beautiful Doll’’ (one of two ragtime pieces known to have been played during the period immediately prior to the hymn tune), Miss Hart, a survivor of the disaster, recalling certain memories of the music on the ship in conversation with the composer, a music box which plays ‘‘La Maxixe’’ (Miss Edith Russell amused a child in her lifeboat by playing this piece on a music box contained in a toy pig which produced the music when the tail was twisted).
Although these sounds have been associated with the piece in several performances it would be a mistake to think of this sounding music as being the piece; there have been performances which use none of these elements.
Some extracts from the extensive notes about the piece, which constitute a score, are published in the American music magazine Soundings (number 9, Summer 1975).

…La ’Pataphysique est la science…

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet

The piece is for the pre-recorded voice of an old tramp, with added chamber orchestra. In 1970, a friend, Alan Power, was making a film about tramps in London, mainly around Euston, Waterloo and Elephant and Castle. While filming he made a number of tape-recordings, some synchronised with the film, others not, and he eventually brought them to me to help with mixing them. On the tapes were parts where tramps would suddenly break into song, sometimes slightly pathetic sentimental songs, sometimes loud operatic extracts. One of these songs was ‘‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’’, part of which forms this piece. He gave me the tapes that he didn’t use in his film, and this song was among those tapes. When I played it through, the tramp’s singing was in tune, more or less, within his own singing and with my piano - far more than any of the other songs. He was not alcoholic, unlike all the other singers, and was very religious and talked at great length about his beliefs. I made a tape loop from part of his singing, a loop which resolved sufficiently for it to begin again without jarring, and this was transferred on to a full reel of tape, the duration being limited by the length of tape. I wrote out a simple chordal accompaniment at the piano and arranged this for a small ensemble to record at Bob Woolford’s Studio in September 1971 to be used as the soundtrack for a 16mm. film by Steve Dwoskin, in which an old man, filmed at very high speed, walks slowly towards the camera. (Strictly, the film was a visual track to the music, since the music came first). Performances with various additional instruments, sometimes using the film, have taken place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; The Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Mills College, Berkeley, California; San Francisco Conservatory of Music, California; The Festival of Mixed-Media, Ghent; and for many of these performances extra instrumental parts were necessary if everyone were to be able to play. Finally, in 1974, the definitive score was written, a score in which reasonable substitutions may be made for various instruments and groups.
The voice begins alone, slowly faded in, and gradually, group by group, instruments are added to the voice very slowly and sympathetically. Eventually all the instruments are playing and the piece fades away and finishes.
In this performance, all the parts in the score are included and are in this order:
The voice begins alone, then strings are added, then guitar and plucked bass, then woodwind (flute, clarinet, bass-clarinet, bassoon), then 4 French horns, then harp, then brass (2 trumpets, trombone, tuba), then oboe, then organ, and vibes.
When the piece is played live, it is played in a restrained way, without pomp or show.