DAY 4 — Eight New Yorkers are on board the Titanic anniversary cruise to perform the very last song the original ship’s band performed — believed to be “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — as it went down.
The band’s name: The Unfinished.
“I wrote on Facebook that I was doing this,” said second violinist Andrew Mayer, 23. “And someone responded, ‘Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure I’d do that.’ ”
Kevin Carpenter, the 35-year-old conductor, got similar reactions. “People said to me, ‘You’re doing that on purpose?’ ”
Though all of the band members are professional musicians working in and around the city, none of them knew each other before this cruise aboard the Azamara Journey.
They were cast, online, by a German film company, and are filming a documentary about their attempt to complete what the Titanic’s band, as we all know, could not.
The Unfinished will play over the site of Titanic’s wreckage at the memorial service to be held at 2:20 a.m. tomorrow, the very moment the ship fully pitched below the water.
“It’s eerie,” said Mayer. “It’s really morbid to think that we’ll be right over the spot where so many bodies were strewn. It’s just horrific.”
There were eight musicians employed on the actual Titanic, but until that fateful night, they had never played together. In the waning hours of the ship’s life, they were gathered by bandleader Wallace Hartley, and made their debut as an octet in a valiant attempt to calm increasingly terrorized passengers.
The Titanic’s band, Hartley included, were traveling as second-class passengers, and as such were forbidden to dine or socialize in the ship’s first-class areas.
Mary Amanda Fairchild, the Azamara’s harpist and a Titanic fanatic — especially where the band is concerned — believes that the octet began playing together inside. As the situation grew more dire, five of the eight went outside. Three of those men were swept out to sea as the deck listed downward, and then the other two, until finally three were left, playing from the stern of the ship.
“I guess the word ‘courage’ comes to mind,” Mayer said. “But I would’ve been possessed.”
Marco Brehm, 54, is playing the double bass for The Unfinished, and brought his 110-year-old instrument aboard for the occasion. He said that he feels both honored and unsettled.
“The idea of playing on the spot where their souls left their bodies — it’s just . . . ,” Brehm shuddered. “I don’t know.”
None of the musicians conscripted for The Unfinished have any real connection to the Titanic. Since they’ve been onboard, however, they say they’ve come to feel a sort of kinship with her passengers.
“There is a kind of similarity with 9/11,” Brehm said. “Both tragedies occurred at the dawn of a modern age, and both rocked humanity’s faith. They said, ‘This ship is unsinkable,’ and of course people believed it — believed in the mastery that man had over nature. When the Twin Towers fell, it was a similar feeling: ‘How could this happen?’ ”
For first violinist Sho Omagari, a Japanese native who has lived in New York City for the past 14 years, the parallel he draws is to the devastation wrought by last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
“I just went back home,” he said, “and right now, everyone’s idea that humanity can protect against nature has totally changed. Everyone’s now thinking about how they can prepare for the next time. And they know it’s never enough.”
And then there’s someone like Carpenter, who has suffered so much loss that grief is familiar and, in some ways, comforting. Carpenter’s mother died of brain cancer when he was just 18, and his father died of a broken heart four years later. Carpenter often performs at funerals for free, just because he wants to help fellow sufferers in the best way he can.
“And this,” he said, “is, in a way, a very glorified funeral.”
The band rehearsed for the first time outdoors yesterday afternoon and came to another poignant realization: They had never before thought how physically painful it was for the Titanic’s musicians to play in the bitter mid-Atlantic cold.
The outdoor temperature on this cruise has hovered around the 40s, but the Azamara has encountered so much wind and rain, it’s felt more like 20 degrees.
On her last night, the Titanic encountered a cold front coming from Canada; the air was near freezing, and the water minus-2 degrees Celsius.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘You can’t be a wuss,’ ” said violinist Mayer. “It was so much worse for them. I can’t even imagine how cold it was. But there’s a merit in pushing through that.”
SOLEMN TRIBUTE: An octet of New York musicians rehearses yesterday on the near-freezing deck of the Azamara Journey, preparing to play early tomorrow over the Titanic wreckage. (NY Post: G.N. Miller)