Word: hymning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
Kubrick's vigilant camera follows the 843rd squadron into the air, where expatriate Texan "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) and his crew are shocked by their orders to deliver approximately 60 megatons of nuclear devices to sites in Russia within two hours. Over the strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Slim's Texas drawl offers a few inspirational words to the crew: "I reckon you wouldn't even be human beings if you didn't have some pretty strong feelings about nuclear combat." The boys drop their new issue of Playboy, Slim replaces his flight helmet with a Stetson...
...with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." Christian, yes, in residue. Though Potter gave ecclesiastics the willies with his God play (Son of Man) and his Devil play (Brimstone and Treacle), he could still recite, as meaningfully as if it were a pop standard, the words to an old hymn: "Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?" Socialist, yes, decrying British mercantilism that turns everyone "from a citizen into a consumer. And politics is a commodity." Apocalyptic disgust? Plenty, even at the end. He told Bragg he had named his cancer Rupert, for Murdoch, the media warlord...