Monday, January 28, 2013

1.27.13, Music to Freeze to Death By


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?


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