The Sinking of the Titanic

The Sinking of the Titanic is a work by British minimalist composer Gavin Bryars. Inspired by the story that the band on the RMS Titanic continued to perform as the ship sank in 1912, it recreates how the music performed by the band would reverberate through the water some time after they ceased performing. Composed between 1969 and 1972, the work is now considered one of the classics of British experimental music.

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-quartet 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.."

Bryars imagined that the sound would continue to reverberate as it disappeared under the waves. 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".

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. The instructions referred to how the work should sound and how it might be created but were not a score as such.

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. Schonfield was keen to showcase Bryars' music and in December 1972 organised a concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall.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. The work has been performed several times in subsequent years, including a performance in San Francisco conducted by John Adams. Other performances have included New York's Guggenheim Museum, a Belgian art-nouveau swimming pool and a Huddersfield nightclub.

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