RAISING THE TITANIC

By Michael Walsh

IT BEGINS WITH A ship's bell clanging peacefully in the night. Suddenly there is the shuddering impact of steel meeting solid, razor-sharp ice. Then the music emerges as if from a watery grave, half heard and half perceived, a stately, contemplative hymn solemnly intoned by a string sextet. A brass choir picks up fragments of the tune, while a boys' chorus adds a heavenly descant of Kyrie Eleison. From time to time, scraps of sound emerge from the wreckage-buckling bulkheads, rushing water, disembodied voices of the survivors, alarm horns honking futilely across the cold North Atlantic-but as the great ship settles beneath the waves, the music continues in its calm, imperturbable course.

So goes Gavin Bryars' extraordinary elegy The Sinking of the Titanic, released this month on Point Music. Mankind's greatest and most poignant symbol of technological hubris has inspired the British composer, 52, to one of his finest and most moving works, every bit the equal of 1993's haunting Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet and even surpassing it in the complex and sure-handed way Bryars uses his materials.

Jesus' Blood made its impact by repeating, for nearly an hour, a phrase of a hymn tune sung by an old man on a London street and recorded by a TV crew filming a documentary on derelicts. Bryars devised a kaleidoscopic accompaniment for the man's a cappella tape loop, slowly shifting and swelling the instrumentation and finally bringing on Tom Waits near the end to sing a raw, urgent posthumous duet.

Titanic has much the same structure. Evoking the incredible fortitude of the musicians who kept playing until the ship sank, the hymn Autumn (which bears a striking resemblance to Amazing Grace) is repeated over and over while its aural environment gradually changes. Modular in construction, the work can be performed at varying lengths. "As you know, water is a highly efficient conductor of sound," explains Bryars. "Obviously, it was impossible for the band to keep playing under water, but theoretically the music has just kept on going, forever. That's the feeling I was after."

Timelessness is a hallmark of Bryars' work. He first explored it as one of the composers for director Robert Wilson's epic the CIVIL warS, a multiact theater piece that has yet to be performed in its entirety. He is currently working on his first full-fledged opera, Dr. Ox's Experiment, based on an obscure Jules Verne novel about a stranger who arrives in a village where time moves infinitely slowly and who disrupts everyone's life by bringing them back to "normal." In The Sinking of the Titanic he has created a modern fantasia on a hymn tune that resonates serenely through the eight decades since the "unsinkable" luxury liner went down. In a commemorative masterpiece, Bryars offers a fitting benediction.