Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  “I take it there are no foot stickers that come with your cheeseburgers in Moscow?”

  “No,” he says, taking another deep sniff. “Only America has fake fute smell. If you want to smell fute in Moscow, you have to smell a real fute.”

  Needmore, West Virginia

  1989

  You don’t remember if the car died suddenly, or if the engine slowly dwindled to silence. You don’t remember if there was smoke from a blown transmission or if it was an electrical failure. All you remember is your dad carrying your violin in one hand, holding your hand in the other, as you abandoned the car in an isolated holler called Needmore (“Needmore!” you’d shout as you drove through on better days. “You Need-more people!”). Hand in hand, the two of you begin to walk. The nearest gas station (and pay phone) is over the next mountain, a 2,000-foot vertical climb and descent. It is late afternoon in early spring; the holler is dark and cold. But there you are: a father, his eight-year-old daughter, her pint-size violin, and a 2,000-foot mountain. An Appalachian tableau of a family on its way to the upper-middle class.

  When your dad was ten years old his own father died suddenly, plunging his once prosperous Washington, D.C., family into poverty. Perhaps because he lost his own father so early, your dad values time with you and your brothers above all things. The idea of driving together to violin lessons—hours of uninterrupted time in the car—appeals to him. Your mom, on the other hand, is more practical. Her large energetic Italian immigrant family worked their way toward the American Dream in the West Virginia mills and mines. You imagine the conversations your parents must have had about your request, your dad saying Violin lessons? Why not!, your mom listing all the sensible reasons for why not (four to six hours of driving over the mountains each week, for starters).

  But on your eighth birthday, there it is: a three-quarter-size violin, the thing you have most wanted, the shield against mountain fog, the talisman against fake, corncob-colored sunshine. And it comes with another, even more generous present: weekly violin lessons in Virginia. In the days before your first lesson you open the hard black case and run your fingers over the shiny amber wood and bleached white horsehair. You slide one of your fingers underneath the strings and pluck them while thinking the words fragile and delicate, words that you like because they sound like what they mean. You put your nostrils over the instrument’s f-holes and inhale the varnishy scent. You glide the amber-colored cube of unmarred pinesap rosin out of its pink box and smell it, too. You push the palms of your hands against the plush blue lining of the case, snap and unsnap the case’s shiny silver lock. You take the violin out of its case and cradle it with more care than when you hold your two-month-old baby brother.

  The next Tuesday, after a two-hour drive to Virginia with your dad, you arrive at a sun-filled house, where a room with hardwood floors and enormous windows serves as a music studio. The first thing you tell your teacher, who is young and pretty with long, curly hair, is that you want to learn how to play a song you heard once, four years ago, when you were four. In a squirrel cartoon.

  She opens your violin case and takes out the instrument with startling quickness.

  You persist about the song. She must know it. After all, it is violin music and she is a violin teacher.

  “Do you know the name of the song?” she asks while tightening your bow.

  You do not. But you can sing it for her. Except, it’s impossible to sing a song composed for a twenty-piece Baroque ensemble playing five parts plus harpsichord. But you try anyway. Now, years of musical training later, you can explain in technical terms what you did: You sang four equal beats of one pitch, lowered your pitch by a perfect fifth for another four beats, raised your pitch by a diminished fourth for four beats, and then lowered it again by a perfect fifth for the last four beats. Those are the technical specifications of the four measures of the main theme from the first movement of Vivaldi’s “Winter.” But the technical language feels empty. It does not explain why it was so important to you, at eight years old, to know this music better. It does not explain why these four measures of music had come to represent your most important thoughts about yourself and the wild, unknowable world around you.

  “I don’t know it,” your teacher says with a tone of finality, and she shows you how to rosin your bow.

  “Maybe it is Brahms,” you suggest.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “It’s music about Anne Frank,” you insist.

  This gets her attention. She looks at you and then your dad. Your dad starts to explain, stops, and shrugs.

  “Let’s start with ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’” she says.

  As she introduces the rhythmic variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—the standard beginning lesson in the Suzuki method—your mood plummets. She demonstrates the four variations by using silly mnemonic devices that mimic the four basic rhythms: Mississippi Hotdog, Peanuts and Popcorn, Run Pony Run Pony, and Mississippi Alabama.

  Your dad, who is observing in the corner, loves this idea.

  “West Virginia Coleslaw, West Virginia Coleslaw,” he starts singing.

  “Ha! That’s right!” your teacher smiles at him. “You could use that instead of Mississippi Hotdog.”

  “Mississippi Indigestion, Mississippi Indigestion!” he sings, getting carried away.

  You fume inside. You have not spent years begging for a violin to waste time fooling around with kid stuff like hotdogs and ponies. You want to understand the seriousness of life and death, the creeping fog.

  In the weeks afterward, you practice “helicoptering” your bow onto the strings. The idea is not to crash, but to land gently, like a butterfly. You are skeptical of this idea. You might be a little girl, the smallest little girl in your second-grade class, but you are no butterfly. You are loud and chatty and move around too much and bang into things. Your parents and teachers are always telling you to “settle down.” Every day you practice helicoptering your bow and every day you become more aware that your violin is going to demand things from you that have never been demanded, a level of focus and precision that you are not sure you can give. But after a few weeks of work so hard that your face sweats as you helicopter over and over again, your bow lands on the strings as silent as a moth. The first lesson in making music, it turns out, is making silence—the blank canvas, the empty room, the white page. A void that must be made before it can be filled.

  The guiding philosophy of the Suzuki method is that children should learn music as if it were a language, and that they should begin lessons as early as possible, ideally at the age of two and no later than five. Research by Oliver Sacks and others has confirmed this claim. After a certain age—somewhere between eight and twelve years old—the window for learning a spoken or musical language with native-level proficiency slams shut. As an eight-year-old scratching out your first notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle,” you are the musical equivalent of an eight-year-old who has never spoken a word: already years behind.

  Because you had begged your parents to take lessons, and not the other way around, you are more motivated to learn than other students. (You will discover that most kids who take violin lessons say that their parents “make” them do it, an idea you find puzzling.) Even so, you are overwhelmed with the daily realization of just how difficult learning to play the instrument will be. It takes months before you can play a recognizable tune, and the endless scratching and screeching offers no positive reinforcement, just boredom and a sense of futility, not to mention a painful throbbing in the soft neck tissue under your chin and sore fingertips that flake like paper and burn like chapped lips.

  But the weekly journeys to violin lessons are not just about you—they involve your entire family, and everyone is becoming exhausted. You live in a town that is surrounded by mountains, a region of dramatic, steep cliffs and plateaus that form the Eastern Continental Divide in Appalachia. Getting to your violin lessons in Virginia requires driving over a half-dozen wheel-spinning, stomach-c
hurning, ear-popping mountains on the West Virginia state highway system—a series of potholed secondary roads with no passing lanes. Eighteen-wheelers filled with coal or live chickens gasp up the mountains and zoom down, sometimes losing control of their brakes. The entire trip, including your thirty-minute violin lesson, takes anywhere between five to eight hours, and that’s if there isn’t a freak mountain blizzard.

  Every Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. you leave your second-grade classroom two hours early and walk outside to the mountain-shadowed parking lot. On the few Tuesdays when your dad isn’t working, he waits there in his Nissan. You head through the first mountain gorge and then he stops at a gas station for snacks—Fritos and Coke for him, Oreos and strawberry milk for you. After your lesson, he takes you to eat fried noodles with duck sauce and wonton soup at a Chinese restaurant in a college town of 22,000 residents. It might as well be Hong Kong for how cosmopolitan it seems to you, a girl from an isolated town of 2,000 people and no McDonalds, let alone a Chinese restaurant. On the way back home, your dad plays his new cassette tape of Les Misérables, despite the fact that it is full of curse words and prostitutes. He explains the French Revolution to you as though you can understand it, and you feel like you do understand it, that people who are cold and hungry might get so angry that they’d burst out singing in forceful British accents. You ask him to play and replay Cosette’s lament, which evokes the general idea of the mountain fog, though not as well as Vivaldi’s music. Still, the Les Misérables tape becomes another way in which you equate childhood sadness with music, perhaps because by equating despair with music, you don’t have to equate it with the faces of your second-grade classmates, who are rowdier, meaner, stinkier, and more humanly complex than the silvery-voiced, one-dimensional, fictional orphan Cosette.

  Trips to violin lessons with your dad allow you to pretend, for at least a few hours, that you are not an eight-year-old girl wearing a pink “Almost Heaven: West Virginia” t-shirt with a rainbow and unicorn on it, but are instead a serious adult person with serious adult person things to say. His attention to you and only you makes you feel important, special, loved, and, most of all, grown up. But more often, violin-lesson duty falls to your mom, who is on maternity leave from her job. With your dad at work, she retrieves one brother out of kindergarten and buckles the other brother into an infant car seat. With the four of you loaded into a Dodge minivan, there is no pretending that you are anything but what you are—a kid whose whole family is sacrificing a lot to give her something she wants. The baby wails in pain from the ear-popping altitude change every time you ascend or descend a mountain. Your mom comforts him while navigating treacherous mountain curves and icy patches—coal trucks on one side of the road, sheer cliffs on the other. After your lesson she straps everyone back into the minivan and drives through a KFC window for baked chicken, biscuits, and plain milk. Then the long drive back, this time in the dark. While driving, your mom tests you on your multiplication tables and your kindergartener brother on his ABCs. She instructs you on how to feed the baby and pulls over to wipe the vomit off your shirt when someone gets carsick. When she wants everyone to shut up—what she calls “quiet time”—she pops in one of the two cassette tapes that reside in the minivan: Wee Sing Silly Songs (“There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza dear Liza!”) and a Disney soundtrack compilation (“Look for the bare necessities—old Mother Nature’s recipes!”). Two to four hours later, you climb out of the minivan exhausted and nauseated, your face plastered with biscuit crumbs, chicken grease, and baby spit, your ears ringing with “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”

  If someone had asked you at eight years old what the point of these weekly trips were, you would have given the simple answer: The point of these journeys was the violin lesson, even though sometimes you never made it to the actual violin lesson. (After your dad’s car breaks down in the chilly holler of Needmore, the two of you walk hand in hand along the roadside, toward the two thousand-foot mountain. Your dad sticks out his thumb to passing cars and four West Virginia gals in a pickup truck stop in front of you. Your dad climbs into the open truck bed while you sit inside the cabin on one gal’s lap. The women offer you a wine cooler, to which you reply with a polite “No, thank you,” which makes them laugh. As the truck hauls ass up the mountain, you swivel your body around, checking to make sure your dad hasn’t been flung over the side of a cliff. He sees the expression on your face and waves at you, smiles, gives you the thumbs-up.) But years later, as you find yourself traveling tens of thousands of miles across America as a professional violinist for the The Composer’s Ensemble, it strikes you that in addition to the violin lessons themselves, you received weekly lessons about being on the road. How far you have to go and how much it takes out of you (and the people around you) just to get to a place where it’s possible to learn something.

  First Gig

  New Hampshire, 2002

  After an eight-hour drive from New York City and a night in a hotel, Yevgeny pulls the car up to a grassy yard with tents in Wolfeboro, a town near Lake Winnipesaukee. The scent of grease-fried sugar wafts out from a funnel cake vendor. Children line up at a face-painting station. The sights and smells remind you of something familiar, though you have never before associated it with the world of classical music: the county fair.

  But it isn’t exactly a county fair—it is much too small. Becca had called it an “art fair” and you had pictured something fancier, something like Tanglewood—more “art” than “craft.” But this gathering is most certainly about the crafts: fabric purses, handmade candles and soaps, wooden wind chimes. Even though the fair has not yet officially begun, dozens of middle-aged women wearing bright sun visors and Capri pants cluster around the vendors’ tables.

  Yevgeny lugs a canopy tent to a designated spot in the maze of tents and sets it up. He runs back to the car to get the amplifier, microphone stands, and speakers. His eyes are puffy with fatigue, his skin a yellowish-gray, his pale hair slicked to a level of comic Russian severity. He wears a long-sleeve black shirt with black dress pants and black shoes. What he looks like is a Hollywood parody of a KGB agent, complete with a carefully guarded black case, which one might mistake for a sniper’s rifle rather than a violin. The other craft fair vendors—middle-aged Americans wearing t-shirts and shorts—stare at Yevgeny in terror.

  You begin to unpack the boxes of CDs, but you pause when you come across a box full of VHS tapes. Unlike the CDs, which feature glossy nature photographs on their covers, the VHS tape cover has a crudely drawn cartoon of a ship. It is titled The Composer: The Pirate.

  The pirate?

  You want to ask whether The Composer is, in fact, a pirate, but Yevgeny is busy attaching a Sony Discman to the amplifier. He takes what appears to be a blank CD and puts it in the Discman. “We don’t play all the songs,” he tells you. “This CD is just the ‘greatest hits.’”

  “So how will I tell the customers which song is on which CD?” you ask. “I still can’t tell all of the songs apart.”

  “It won’t matter,” Yevgeny says. He gestures at the crowds of women who are clustering around the sales table and whispers, “They won’t know the difference either.”

  You are still pondering this when Debbie, the flute player, arrives, having driven to Wolfeboro from her nearby home. She appears to be in her twenties and has red hair, an ample bosom, and a British accent. She’s wearing pink pants, pink athletic shoes, and a black t-shirt—concert attire that clashes with Yevgeny’s all-black KGB outfit. She gives you a wary once-over and then turns to Yevgeny.

  “Have I been fired yet?” she asks him.

  “No, you’re not that lucky,” Yevgeny replies. “Are you ready?”

  Debbie nods and takes a plastic pennywhistle out of her purse. Yevgeny pushes the Play button on the Sony Discman.

  The small hairs on your face and arms are dancing—a chilling, vibrating sway. You stare into the mouths of the speakers, which are only a few feet away and seem to be emitting a stiff breeze. It t
akes you a moment to realize that the wind you feel on your face is actually sound. Your rib cage vibrates; sound waves buzz and bounce around cavities that must be your lungs. For a moment, you lose your breath.

  It is loud. Rock concert loud.

  You stare at Yevgeny and Debbie. Debbie is blowing through a pennywhistle—a Celtic flute similar to the plastic recorders kids play in elementary school. Yevgeny is bowing the strings of his violin. But it doesn’t seem possible for such a loud sound to be coming out of these two instruments, especially not a violin. Then again, you have never played with an amplifier and background music before. Maybe that is what makes the sound so . . . so . . . perfect.

  For that is what it is: Sound that is unbelievably polished, especially for the low-quality acoustics of an outdoor setting. They sound damn good for two people playing in an open-air tent, you think, staring at them with your mouth agape, which causes your teeth and gums to vibrate.

  Yevgeny glares back at you and makes a jutting motion with his chin. You realize he is motioning for you to pay attention to the customers. You spin around to find that there is a crowd of almost fifty people in front of you. Where did they all come from? How did they get here so fast? Their hands are all over the CDs, obliterating the neat stacks you made minutes before, their eyes squinting at the pricing chart: One CD for $12, two for $22, all the way up to ten for $80. And then, for the first time, you hear the question that you will hear, word for word, thousands of times over the next four years:

  “What’s he playing now?”

  You jump into action. “This one!” you yell over the din of the speakers, shoving copies of Morning Meadow into everyone’s hands. While the customers examine the CDs, scrutinizing the meadow cover art as if it might yield clues about the music, Yevgeny and Debbie launch into another song, from another album. Debbie emits a piercing melody on the pennywhistle that sounds very familiar, though you can’t place it. “What’s he playing now?” the customers demand. Their numbers are multiplying. You push copies of Oceans of April into as many palms as you can, the plastic wrappings on the CDs pulsing with sound vibrations underneath your fingertips.