‘God of Mercy and Compassion,

Look with pity on my pain,

Hear a mournful broken spirit,

Prostrate at thy feet complain,

Many are my foes and mighty,

Strength to conquer I have none,

Nothing can uphold my goings,

But thy blessed self alone.’

Episcopal Hymn ‘Autumn’

Prior to the publication of Silent Spring Rachel Carson had for many years worked as a distinguished marine biologist. Among her many achievements was the discovery that the sea’s temperature was gradually rising. Carson published her first notable essay, ‘Undersea’, in 1937 under the name R. L. Carson, as she assumed using her full name would put her at a disadvantage. ‘Undersea’ was a meditative account of the life of the seabed and drew on her experience in the US government’s Fisheries Bureau, for whom she had originally written the piece. It begins:

Carlson was twenty-eight before she ever saw, smelled or touched the sea. She spoke of being born with a fascination for the ocean and dreaming of it during her childhood in landlocked Pennsylvania.

Throughout the twentieth century our history was taught in terms of the country’s relationship to the sea, from Drake to Trafalgar and, subsequently, the Battle of Britain. Our mastery of the waves, it is still habitually suggested, provided Britain both with an empire and national character that was physically and spiritually independent. We are an island nation but our island story is told by our earth-bound senses. Even if some of the activity around our shoreline, such as fishing, takes place far underwater, we are prone to concentrate on the surface of the waves rather than the sea’s depths; the recesses of the abyss remain largely unexamined in the more patriotic conceptions of the British Isles.

For the length of our coastline the twelve nautical sea miles that extend from the shore outwards towards the horizon belong to the United Kingdom. The figure, which is used by the majority of nations in the world, is the official definition of Territorial Waters. This strip of sea around a country’s borders is usually owned by  the nation. The majority of Territorial Waters and their seabed in Britain are owned by the Crown and managed by the Crown Estate. The patriotism evident in nautical music such as Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs is appropriate, as the Queen owns the sea that surrounds Britannia. The singing of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the other ‘Sea Songs’ occurs during the second section of the Last Night of The Proms, which many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall regard as the evening’s highlight. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ are sung in sequence and the annual demonstration of the very English, ironic hysteria running through the crowd swells to a patriotic climax. For all the notion of tradition associated with this ritual demonstrated by the mass waving of Union Jacks, this final part of the evening’s programme is a recent invention. The music of the second half of the Last Night was introduced in 1954, so is a tradition which began more recently than the reign of the current monarch.

In the United Kingdom, experience of the coast is formed early in life through its use as a regular location in children’s literature and, for many, as a holiday destination. The sea is a constant presence, not only in our memory and imagination, but physically, in our country’s geography. According to the Ordnance Survey, grid reference SK 257 144, a field at Church Flatts Farm, near the village of Coton in the Elms in Derbyshire, is the furthest point from sea in Britain. Even from this village, that has a claim to be the most inland point in Britain, the sea is only about seventy miles away, less than a two-hour drive. The twice-daily broadcast of what the poet Sean Street called ‘the cold poetry of information’ of the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 is a twice-daily reminder of how habitually the sea’s rhythms lurk in the background of everyday life. Although mainly providing an essential service for mariners starting their working day, its familiarity and constancy can offer a source of comfort to anyone listening, awake in the dead of night.

Those who live within sight of the sea and spend their days in its company talk of its changing character as though the current were an expression of certain moods; the troughs and crests of a wave alter their constitution according to the temperament of the sea as well as the controlling pressure of spring or neap tides. The energy of the tide at our shoreline is a permanent process of arrival, confluence and departure, beyond which the visible currents of the sea recede towards a mass of water, past the offing, towards the depths and, for many of us, as Rachel Carson suggested, the unknown.

In Part VI of The English Hymnal, there is the heading ‘To Be Sung in Rough Weather’. One of two suggested hymns is ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’, now recognised as The Navy Hymn and known from the final line in three of its verses, ‘For those in peril on the sea’.

As a cathedral chorister in Newport in South Wales, a city that still maintained working, if not lively, docks, I regularly sang ‘Eternal Father’ during services when the city’s dignitaries were present. I was always struck that the tune’s major note resolution seemed forced, as though the very real peril of being at sea was, true to sailing superstitions, a factor to be, if not ignored, then certainly to be given only the lightest recognition and seldom to be commented upon. This comforting note suggested the sea as a protective presence around  our coast, the sea of the shoreline and Territorial Waters rather in contrast to the depths of the Mid-Atlantic.

Another piece of choral music whose subject was the sea had a very different effect on my senses. In its entry in the catalogue of the Royal School of Church Music, the anthem ‘They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships’, by the composer Hubert Sumsion, is described as ‘One of the most popular anthems in the RSCM catalogue. Sumison’s anthem is a dramatic setting of Psalm 107 that is a study in word-painting. It requires a good organist.’

This need for ‘a good organist’ is due to the series of long-held pedal-notes that require a degree of dexterity to play and create the foreboding undertone that captured my imagination.

When I sang ‘They That Go Down to the Sea’ in the 1980s it was a recent addition to the repertoire. Hubert Sumsion had premiered the anthem in 1979 at the age of eighty, following a distinguished career that included being simultaneously organist of Gloucester Cathedral and director of music at Cheltenham Ladies’ College for over forty years. The composer was also richly decorated for his contribution to church music, his honours including the CBE and numerous awards from the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Organists and the Royal School of Church Music. ‘They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships’ is just under seven minutes in length, and is based on a dramatic organ part over which the choir voices rise and fall in imitation of the great waves that are part of the anthem’s subject. The verses of the anthem taken from Psalm107, which the RSCM described as ‘word-painting’, created a fearful picture in our young minds. Rather than the devil-may-care vigour heard in The Navy Hymn or in the tunes of reels and other working songs of the sea, ‘They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships’ evoked the sea’s extraordinary power, its thousands of miles of unknowable depth and its drowning vastness:

They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;

These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders, his wonders, his wonders, his wonders, in the deep.

For at his word the stormy wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves thereof.

They are carried up to the heav’n, and go down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.

So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, he deliv’reth them out of their distress.

For he maketh the storm to cease: so that the waves thereof are still.

Then are they glad because they are at rest and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be

The Old Testament vocabulary that advocated for sinners to be thrown into the pit was familiar to us choristers. We regularly sang hymns marked with an asterix, which denoted a sensationalist subject matter not always suited to more sensitive congregations. The setting Sumsion had given this psalm, in which the souls of those at their wit’s end melt in the great waters, was evocative of the depths and cold currents of the sea bed, a place of incomprehensible yet powerful darkness or, as Rachel Carson described it, ‘unvarying cold and eternal night’.

In 1975, four years before Sumison’s premiere of ‘They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships’, the young British composer Gavin Bryars had released his debut recordings: two sidelong pieces that bore the influence of contemporary American New Music and shared certain structural similarities with minimalism and the compositional methods of John Cage. Bryars had begun the first piece, The Sinking of the Titanic, in 1969 when working part time as a tutor at Portsmouth Art College. The work was inspired by the famous sea tragedy and has a sense of depth and awe at the limitlessness of the sea that is equal to the biblical fear of Sumison’s adaptation of Psalm 107. The foreign topography of the sea bed is the location for Bryars’s score, in which a mournful string part repeats, modifies and reflects itself in the manner in which sound travels underwater, by echo, or as notes drifting, carried along by a submerged, barely perceptible current.

‘I had this idea of music existing underwater and being heard underwater,’ Bryars told me in his studio in rural Leicestershire. ‘It meant that the environment which it was in was the ocean, and sound will travel four times as fast underwater as it does in the air, therefore it will travel much greater distances, hence the use of sonar in the transmission of information between dolphins and whales and marine mammals in general, they use vocal sounds underwater, and they can carry for many miles. So the way in which the sound would travel great distances and bounce back and be deflected was part of the realisation of the piece.’

Bryars based his score on the chords of the Episcopalian hymn ‘Autumn’, which eyewitnesses stated was the final piece of music played by the ship’s string orchestra on the Titanic as it gradually started to sink towards the ocean floor. Whether ‘Autumn’ was the ship’s eulogy has subsequently been debated, but what is agreed with some certainty is that the orchestra continued to play as the ship submerged.

‘The one reliable witness does say that they were still playing as they went down and he was Harold Bride, the only wireless operator to survive,’ Bryars continued. ‘So he was used to interpreting sonic information, and he was interviewed when the survivors arrived in New York.’ Bryars had undertaken meticulous research before he began the composition of The Sinking of the Titanic. He had requested a copy of both the Board of Trade report and the ship’s building plans, and through studying these documents he was able to establish the means by which a string orchestra might continue to play on a ship that had essentially been vertically upended, as he explained:

This small ensemble played ‘Autumn’ as the boat sank. And in Bryars’s imagination, their music fell with them to the deep, as the sound they produced reverberated on the undertow of the swell beneath the tides and was carried on its currents out towards the darkness. ‘Autumn’ provided Bryars with the basis for his composition, and its tune is repeated throughout as the primary musical motif. As well as a string ensemble similar in composition to the one that entertained passengers on the Titanic, Bryars used recordings of clock chimes, wood blocks that replicated the sound of dripping water, as well as fragments of Morse Code signals and interviews with survivors. The gradual introduction of these details has the effect of submerging the listener deeper into the composer’s repetitive score, a process that resembles the fate of those aboard unable to survive; here the sinking of the title reflects the immersive properties of the music and the moment when, at the conclusion of the piece, anyone who has found themselves lost in Bryars’s chord progressions might sense they have yielded to an experience with a powerful undertow.

Few pieces concerning the sea that surrounds us have such a sense of the scale of the ocean. One of the lasting effects of listening to The Sinking of the Titanic is to feel as though one has witnessed a passage to another world. Bryars also reflected that the disaster signified the passing of an era. ‘It’s a kind of threnody, in a way, it’s a sort of requiem’, he told me.

There’s a sense in which Victorian England ended in 1912, when Victoria died, and the nineteenth century ended then, rather than 1900. It was a moment when people had thought that science, technology, industry could conquer everything, and suddenly, at a stroke, a ship which had been foolishly billed as unsinkable was struck down on its maiden voyage, with all the most privileged people in the world on board. It was just one of those things, God saying, ‘Hang on, you’ve got it wrong.’ And it was almost as if a new century started from then, which involved uncertainty, involved hesitation. The First World War was just as if some people hadn’t realised that was the moment, and it dragged on for a bit longer. And there were other kinds of disaster, like Scott of the Antarctic, which suddenly struck regarding imperial power and control, like ownership of the world was gone. In a way, the Titanic is almost like an emblem of that.

The end of the seafaring empire Bryars described would have an effect on the population of the towns and cities that had grown dependent on its economy, in the form of ports, shipyards, docks, ferries, trawling and fishing fleets. Almost half a dozen locations can claim a relationship or sense of ownership with the Titanic, either through its construction or its maiden and final voyage. ‘Southampton, Belfast, Liverpool; Cork makes a claim, because Cobh was its last point of call, where it dropped off the pilot, and the last photograph of the Titanic was taken by an Irish priest from Cobh, of it going out to sea; all major shipbuilding ports that have become marinas, or a Tate Gallery in the case of Liverpool.’ The heritage industry being more important than any other.

Bryars had begun composing while living in a port himself as a part-time lecturer at Portsmouth School of Art, in a spirit that reflected the institutional bohemianism of art colleges in the late sixties and early seventies; where comparative, often experimental ideas were taught and explored in parallel with the core syllabus, or what might have passed as a syllabus during the ferment of the era.

‘I started teaching at Portsmouth when I came back from America, where I’d been working with John Cage. There was a course called Complementary Studies, which could be done alongside the main,’ Bryars told me. ‘But the difference with places like Portsmouth and a couple of others was that they employed musicians as art teachers. I used to work with the students on performing experimental music, and this meant doing things where their imagination was at a premium, and it didn’t demand specific musical abilities.’

It was while lecturing at Portsmouth and reflecting on the period he had recently spent with Cage, whose ideas of chance and indeterminacy can be heard in The Sinking of the Titanic, that Bryars was inspired to begin a separate, very English project.

One day, we were just chatting, three students and me, and we had this idea of making an orchestra that played proper classical music. Their knowledge of classical music was not from being classical music lovers or knowledgeable about music history; it came from whatever they heard in popular culture. And so we did the William Tell Overture because that was the theme music to the Lone Ranger cowboy series. The things we knew were Also Sprach Zarathustra, because of 2001, and similarly, the Blue Danube. We were like a rather low-grade Classic FM.

The orchestra was formally constituted in order to enter a talent show the art college had organised, and given the name the Portsmouth Sinfonia. The word ‘sinfonia’ is mostly used as a name for a chamber orchestra; having given themselves the challenge of performing as one, it was now necessary for Bryars and his colleagues to each choose a role and indeed an instrument.

One or two people already had instruments, which they played in a rudimentary way. I bought a euphonium from a bicycle shop. Some people could just about read music, others could see the shape of the notes and work out where they were, and then we also had to have a conductor, a guy called John Farley, who knew what he should look like and what the gestures were. He had a beautiful frock coat, long flowing black hair, a great profile, and this beautiful, dignified, haughty way of presenting himself.

In photographs the various members of the Sinfonia have the unmistakeable air of wry detachment that the enterprise necessitated. Their hair is long, regardless of gender; their clothes are scruffy and they more readily resemble a University Challenge team representing a plate glass institution than an orchestra. But they also have the stoical air of resignation seen in classical musicians the world over, clutching their instruments for comfort as they are corralled into posing for an album cover.

‘We were English and mostly well brought up, and we also had a great sense of humour and a sense of the absurd. We also knew that to do things like that well you have to do it with a straight face,’ Bryars said. ‘And the thing was, the Portsmouth Sinfonia was hilarious, but the hilarity came from the huge gap between what people knew we were trying to do and what we actually achieved. That was the funny thing about it.’

As the Sinfonia’s confidence grew, the orchestra was invited to play at other art colleges, the progressive venues on London’s South Bank and more esoteric locations such as Wormwood Scrubs. The members also felt sufficiently emboldened to attempt a studio recording.

‘We cut a mono version of the William Tell Overture and put it on one of those flexi discs you used to get with Private Eye. We mailed them to various people around the world who we knew or admired. We sent one to Mao Tse Tung – whether he got it, I don’t know; we sent one to Rodney Marsh at QPR; we sent one to Leonard Bernstein, to Pierre Boulez, and lots of other people.’

The various activities of the Sinfonia, which might reasonably be described as ‘actions’ or happenings if the warmth and humour at the heart of the enterprise were not so evident, soon came to the attention of Brian Eno, then a student at Winchester Art College, who had previously taken an interest in Bryars’s activities and attended performances he had given in the Purcell Room at the Royal Festival Hall. Bryars and Eno struck up a friendship that resulted in Eno both becoming Bryars’s lodger and joining the Sinfonia as a clarinettist.

‘After he’d been at Winchester Brian moved into this one-room flat I had in Kilburn, and I think he joined the Sinfonia when he was in Roxy Music. That then gave us the inroad to a proper recording studio, which we didn’t have before, and by then we did have more repertoire.’

Eno is credited as the producer on the resulting album Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics which was released in 1974. He can be seen on the record’s cover in significantly less make-up than he wore as a member of Roxy Music. The record is a seductive combination of hesitancy, incompetence and the peculiar rigour associated with British amateurism. It can also be heard as the culmination of various strains that had developed over the previous decade: the academic inquiry of experimental music, the flourishing open-minded approach in education represented by art schools, and the idea that a record label saw fit to release a record of ad hoc student tomfoolery.

The album contains attempts at or, if one were being generous, interpretations of the Sinfonia’s repertoire: ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets and ‘The Blue Danube’. There is a pleasure, almost catharsis, in listening to this music decades after its recording. In the hands of the Portsmouth Sinfonia Also Sprach Zarathustra, familiar to contemporary audiences as the portentous soundtrack to the moment when an ape discovers violence in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, achieves a semi-controlled hysteria. The listener, already familiar with the drama of the score and its culmination in an ecstasy of high notes, can only listen in trepidation as the moment nears when the musicians are required to play at the upper end of their register. The joy in hearing the Sinfonia’s unsuccessful but valiant attempt to stay loyal to the score is immeasurable.

Although Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics sold modestly, to say the least, the reputation of the Sinfonia had grown sufficiently for the ensemble to perform at the Royal Albert Hall, the home of the Last Night of the Proms and the bedrock of the more conservative classical music establishment.

‘The Sinfonia was at its largest when we played at the Albert Hall; there must have been fifty of us. We did the “Hallelujah Chorus” there. Our solution was for everyone to bring three friends, which meant immediately we had a 150-strong chorus ready to join in.’

Bryars’s career as a composer continued in tandem with the activities of the Sinfonia, and had seen the completion of a new work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Eno, who can be seen singing heartily during the Sinfonia’s Albert Hall performance of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the scant few minutes of footage that exist, had left Roxy Music at the time of the Classics. His interest in New Music had developed, as had his ideas about recording and what he termed ‘generative music’, compositions created by effects and machines that played themselves, and he suggested to Bryars that a record company might be founded in order to release their experiments.

‘Brian and I had a meeting in 1973 at Island Records,’ said Bryars, ‘to discuss putting this stuff out on a new label, which Brian would supervise. Then, there was the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the three-day week, 55-mile-an-hour motorway speed limits, all that, and the whole oil shortage, and because vinyl was a by-product of the petroleum industry, any experimental vinyl work was stopped. So it didn’t happen.’

The plan was revisited two years later. Eno was convinced that the reputation contemporary experimental music had for inaccessibility was undeserved, and there was a significant number of composers working in the field whose methods could produce recordings that were attractive and approachable. With a mixture of wilfulness and playfulness the new label was to be called Obscure Records. ‘Brian asked Michael Nyman and myself to help him as advisers. The two of us worked with Brian, because we were friends and Nyman and I were next-door neighbours.

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the companion piece to The Sinking of the Titanic, is a composition of equivalent emotional weight, and at around twenty-five minutes, of equal length. It is based on a tape recording of a homeless man singing the phrase ‘Jesus’ blood never failed me yet / This one thing I know for he loves me so’ under the arches at Waterloo, made by a documentary maker friend of Bryars, which the composer then looped to form a thirteen-bar rhythm track from his voice.

Bryars’s use of this tragic, almost pitiful recording is unflinching. For the first three minutes of the piece the voice is heard alone on a loop as the listener becomes familiar with the background sound of seagulls and the occasional snatch of voices in the distance. A string arrangement is gradually introduced, and over the course of the ensuing twenty minutes Bryars’s ensemble, which includes Michael Nyman on organ and Derek Bailey on guitar, accompany a loop of the man’s fragile voice in a gentle and, due to the imperfection of the loop’s time signature, a literally staggering waltz.

Although the homeless man’s circumstances are tragic, Bryars’s score reserves judgement and instead offers empathy in its accompaniment as it supports his singing and, therefore, his situation. Jesus’ Blood resists the mawkish or sentimental, although listeners who were feeling life’s woes themselves might easily find the piece overwhelming.

‘People are affected by it,’ Bryars told me. ‘There are people who hate it violently, but almost as many people who like it.’

Bryars first became aware of the reaction that the recording elicited by chance. One day while lecturing in the Fine Art department of Leicester Polytechnic he had run the loop through a recorder in the faculty’s small studio while he took a break to drink a cup of coffee. The studio shared a door, which Bryars had left open, with one of the college’s large open-plan painting studios. Bryars returned to find that the mood there had become subdued, and in one corner of the room he noticed a student weeping. During the time it had taken Bryars to drink his coffee the tape had continued playing on a loop and reduced some of the students to tears and created an atmosphere of poignancy throughout the studio.

There is an unassuming but overpowering spirituality contained in both The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, one set in the past during a moment of national tragedy, the other recognising the condition of a man incapable of making ends meet as he nears the end of his life.

‘Both pieces do involve ideas about mortality, about the passing of time, but for me, the man singing “Jesus’ Blood” is clearly religious,’ Bryars said. ‘He was the only one out of all the people who was interviewed by this friend of mine when he was making his film who didn’t drink, so he was entirely someone who was living rough, and what I heard in his voice was this great kind of simple faith, but a great humanity, a rather curious optimism, it was a kind of a whole human-ness of the man … and yet the words – if anybody had been let down by Jesus, he had. He was close to death; he had nothing. But he didn’t think so.’

At the time of its initial release Chris Blackwell, the MD of Island Records, was among those who was mystified, if not horrified by the recording. The mogul had a system of listening to forthcoming releases while simultaneously holding a conversation on the telephone. Few records he heard distracted him from concentrating on his call, but in the case of the Bryars recording he was unable to sustain his equilibrium and snapped.

Eno felt confident that despite the low profile New Music experienced as an abstruse or academic genre, he knew of enough people working in the field whose output was engaging and melodic and capable of reaching an audience, albeit a small one that would respond with interest to experimentation. It was also an approach Eno himself was taking to his own release on Obscure Records and the label’s third, Discreet Music: his earliest attempt at producing a record of generative music. The liner notes to Discreet Music contain a diagram of how the title piece was created, accompanied by detailed descriptions of the equipment Eno utilised and an explanation of the process of repetition, echo and delay by which he was able to produce the melodic, contemplative sound forms on the record.

Once Eno had established his methodology he allowed the music to create itself by a theoretically endless pattern of repeating itself, with each repetition producing a subtle change in character and tone. The track ‘Discreet Music’ lasts for 45 minutes, as that is the maximum length of audio that can be contained of one side of vinyl played at 33 rpm. The system Eno had established in his studio would have allowed the music to continue for as long as he was prepared to keep the machines running. On subsequent recordings he would develop and modify these methods and, by coining the term ‘ambient’ to define them, pioneer an entire genre.

Side two of Discreet Music consists of another long piece, Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel. For its recording Eno asked Bryars to act as the conductor. Members of the ensemble, which included many of the same musicians who had performed on The Sinking of the Titanic / Jesus’ Blood Has Never Failed Me Yet, were each given brief excerpts from the score, which were repeated several times, along with instructions to gradually alter the tempo and other elements of the composition. ‘Obscure itself was not a big label,’ Bryars pointed out. ‘At first it was only available on mail order, it was never promoted.’

Eno’s burgeoning career as a record producer also hindered the label’s momentum. ‘As Obscure developed from 1975 to 78,’ said Bryars, ‘during that time Eno became increasingly involved in working with Bowie, and there was always a problem, because Brian had to supervise everything, he had to proof everything, he had to verify everything, so if Brian was away, nothing happened. “Can we do this?” – “Sorry, no, Brian’s in Berlin for a few weeks with David.” So that was what limited it. Over the four years, we got ten albums, which is not bad and it’s actually an interesting document as a whole.’

To test his intuition that recordings of the modern instrumental music usually written about in specialist publications, and played in the side rooms of distinguished concert halls such as the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank, could prove accessible, Eno had selected an album containing The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet as the debut release for Obscure Records. Although a marginal concern for the management of Island Records who funded the label, there was little theoretical or detached about Bryars’s record. Both pieces are now considered to represent an apotheosis of British experimental music of the period; a compositional style that drew on similar influences as its American progenitors, John Cage in particular, but imbued them with a sense of memory and place. Bryars’s works were written at a meditative pace, compared with the frantic tempos often used by the New York minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich. They ebb instead, with an English reserve, until the listener subsides, finally overwhelmed by the weight of their emotion and its accompanying release.