Mack
Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Music to Freeze to
Death By
The
re-packaging of all the Titanica continues, demonstrating that nothing succeeds
in show business like the deaths of hundreds of people and the recycling of the
old Cowboy and the Lady theme: working-class lad corrects the ‘tude of the
haughty rich girl, who falls in love with him and cooks, cleans, and has lots
of babies happily ever after. This was
amusing with Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon, but quickly deteriorated into Nazi /
Communist leveling ideology in the 1942 Titanic
and in every subsequent Titanic film.
Last
year Sony published a CD of music from the Original Motion Picture (yes, in
caps, as if there could be an unoriginal motion picture), and, more
interestingly, some of the popular songs that were part of the White Star
songbook: “Valse Septembre,” “Marguerite Waltz,” Wedding Dance,” Poet and
Peasant,” “Blue Danube,” “Song Without Words,” “Estudiantina,” “Vision of
Salome,” “Titsy Bitsy Girl,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Sphinx,” “Barcarole,” “Orpheus,” “Song of
Autumn,” and “Nearer My God to Thee.”
James
Horner’s soundtrack is quite familiar, and the Irish influence is very
appropriate, given that the ship was built in Belfast. The design was English, but strong Irish
hands riveted the plates.
The
music aboard the Titanic was not
Irish, though; Austrian seems to be the dominant influence, along with bits of
English, German, Yiddish, and African-American.
The songs popular in 1912 are an interesting look at popular
culture. Some of the music is light
classical, and some are the musical equivalent of Victorian parlor poetry. Ragtime, a predecessor to jazz, might have
been considered somewhat daring.
Apparently
the musical selections were by request and quite mixed: “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” might be followed by a Viennese waltz and then an operatic overture. Neither musicians nor the audience fixated on
genres, leaving themselves aesthetically open to new possibilities.
There
were only eight musicians aboard the Titanic,
contractors from a music agency: one pianist, three violinists, three cellists,
and a bassist. They played as two different groups among the various dining
rooms, in concert, and at divine services for first class and second class
passengers.
There
was no guitarist, so the dying were spared that when the end came.
The
matter of “Nearer My God to Thee” has often been debated, but the testimony of
the survivors is that after a sequence of lighter music, the musicians played
the hymn toward the end. The movies cue
the music precisely to the sinking of the ship, but life is seldom so tidy. Disasters, personal or collective, seldom feature
a soundtrack.
Curiously,
no one has yet made an epic film about the hundreds of people who die in
nightclub fires. The Titanic is often used as a metaphor for
our hubris in depending upon technology, but filmmakers never film the hubris
of nightclub owners who lock emergency exits.
And while hundreds suffocate and burn to death, what does the band play?
And
now, this Sunday, thousands and thousands of people will crowd themselves
together into a relatively small space with not nearly enough escape routes if
there’s a crisis: a bomb, a riot, a flash mob, or a cascading panic of
undetermined origin.
Do
we make progress?
And
what will the band play?
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment