Setting your cell phone ringer to an excerpt from the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee *

Steve Giasson. Performance invisible n° 70 (Adopter comme sonnerie de téléphone cellulaire un extrait de l’hymne Nearer, My God, to Thee.) Performeurs : Daniel Roy et Steve Giasson. Crédit photographique : Daniel Roy. 22 décembre 2015.

Steve Giasson. Performance invisible n° 70 (Adopter comme sonnerie de téléphone cellulaire un extrait de l’hymne Nearer, My God, to Thee.) Performeurs : Daniel Roy et Steve Giasson. Crédit photographique : Daniel Roy. 22 décembre 2015.

Steve Giasson. Performance invisible n° 70 (Adopter comme sonnerie de téléphone cellulaire un extrait de l’hymne Nearer, My God, to Thee.) Performeurs : Daniel Roy et Steve Giasson. Crédit vidéographique : Daniel Roy. 22 décembre 2015.


(To commemorate, for example, various seemingly unimportant past events: The fanfare of the American Confederate Army played the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee while the defeated survivors returned from Pickett’s Charge, the assault against the Confederate Infantry Union defence line on the 3rd of July 1863, the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee was sung by passengers and crew members while the SS Valencia sank off Cape Beale, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, on the 22nd of January 1906.

A legend recounts that this hymn was also played by the orchestra of the Titanic while the ship was sinking, on the 15th of April, 1912.

In the 1980s, CNN founder Ted Turner commissioned a video recording of a military band interpreting Nearer, My God, to Thee, so that it could be broadcast continuously in case of nuclear holocaust potentially wiping out all life on earth)