Transpicious

What you just heard was a string quartet playing the opening strains of nearer my God to

the, a 19th century hymn written in 1841. The lyrics of the hymn describe the famous

scene in the book of Genesis, where the patriarch Jacob dreamed of a ladder stretching from

Earth to heaven filled with angels ascending and descending. The hymn is a heartfelt call

to be closer to God, to leave Earth, ascend the ladder, and like those angels live in God's

presence. The accompanying music is appropriately poignant and reverential. It was also, famously,

the closing number played by the band on the Titanic as the ship went down, or at least,

so we have been told. One of the most memorable parts of the Titanic legend is the detail

about the band playing as the ship went down. We're told that as the passengers scrambled

on to lifeboats, the Titanic's band set themselves up on the deck of the sinking ship. There,

they solemnly soundtracked the Titanic's last moments. Even after the final lifeboat had

been deployed, some passengers would remember hearing the sounds of the band still playing

on as the ship slipped beneath the ocean's surface. Philip Gibbs, author of the popular

magazine article, The Deathless Story of the Titanic, which was published just a few

weeks after the ship's sinking, would claim that the band, quote, played until they were

waste deep in water. One second class passenger who survived the wreck, a Canadian named Vera

Dick, would later tell The New York Times that she was sure that the final number she

heard the band play as she floated off in her lifeboat was the all-to-appropriate hymn

nearer my god to thee. The story of the band playing on fits perfectly within the larger

myth of the Titanic. The band's stubborn commitment to their duty and their dignified acceptance

of their inevitable fate seems like the most poetic example of the supposed heroism

...