And then comes the money. It comes at you from all directions. From loud, sun-burnt ladies and their shy, baseball-capped husbands:
I’ll take this one and this one. Oh! And this one!
What’s he playing now?
This one?
Hey, Jean! This is what he’s playing now!
Oh my God! It’s so relaxing! It’s beautiful!
Is that The Composer?
“No,” you shout. “That is Yevgeny.”
Well, who is The Composer?
I’ll take five CDs over here!
“He’s . . . um . . . a composer. He writes the music.”
He’s not here?
“No. But here’s a picture of him,” you shout, pointing at The Composer’s photo on the cover of The Composer: Live from New York. You stare at this photo for a moment. It was taken at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The Composer looks young and strikingly handsome. He is thin and square-jawed with a healthy mop of brunette hair that looks precisely the way a tortured composer’s mop of brunette hair should. He is wearing a blue-trimmed tuxedo and his conductor’s baton is frozen in the middle of a dramatic upbeat. If Hollywood made a movie about a serious conductor, you think, they would cast someone who looks exactly like The Composer.
But who is The Composer?
The customers keep asking, “What is he playing?” You are puzzled by their refusal to acknowledge Debbie, but you soon realize that most of the customers still think Yevgeny is The Composer.
Some customers are already familiar with The Composer’s music. “I already have this CD and this CD,” these veteran customers say. “So I need to get this one and this one.”
And some customers have even met The Composer in the flesh.
“I remember when The Composer played at Maine Mall,” one man says. “How is he?”
“Oh, fine,” you reply, unsure if it is okay to admit you’ve never met the guy. “He’s doing just great.”
The more you attempt to answer inquiries about The Composer’s character and whereabouts, the more you become intrigued by the mystery of him, a man making thousands of dollars in CD sales without showing up to his own concert. You picture The Composer wearing his conductor’s tuxedo while reclining on a beach chair and sipping a daiquiri. You picture The Composer trekking through the Amazon, swatting at mosquitoes with his conductor’s baton. You picture The Composer marching through Europe, piping on a pennywhistle, a dancing crowd of street urchins following behind him.
“Miss! Miss! What’s he playing now?”
You shove the album Oceans of April into their hands.
“It sounds like Titanic!” a customer yells.
The other customers agree. “It does—it’s Titanic! He’s playing Titanic!”
You nod warily, unsure whether they think this is a good or bad thing, although it is, without a doubt, a very true thing. You hadn’t realized it until now, but the song that Yevgeny and Debbie are playing is sharply similar to Céline Dion’s famous ballad “My Heart Will Go On.” But it’s been almost five years since the movie was released. Do these people really want to buy a knockoff of an old movie soundtrack?
I love Titanic! the customers shriek.
You collect handfuls and handfuls of cash. If you sell over $5,000 worth of CDs, you and the musicians will each receive a $50 bonus. You can already tell that you are going to top $5,000 in sales, which, considering the bargain prices and the backyard-like location of the concert, is a lot of CDs.
After several more customers mention Titanic, you begin to realize that most of The Composer’s compositions sound very Titanic-esque. And you notice that the more the songs sound like Titanic, the more the customers want to buy them.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Atlanta
Because we play along with a CD, our concerts never change, have no chance of spontaneity or deviation from the norm. Every night The Composer presses Play and we go along, like musical machines. Patrick mans the film projectors and watches us from the back of the auditorium. His arms are folded across his chest, the corners of his blue eyes moist with tears, his mustache quivering.
The concerts begin with the song “Sea Flower.” The keyboard and violins open the piece, but like second-tier ballerinas we are dancing on the side of the stage, setting the scene for the real star. By the fifth measure, as is the case with all The Composer’s songs, the pennywhistle—the prima ballerina—steals the show. The pennywhistle’s first notes are in the lower register of the instrument, but then the tune soars upward, higher and higher to the utmost rafters of the human ear. On the giant projector screens an eagle flies high in the sky, then swoops downward toward the Grand Canyon.
The impact on the audience is a sort of emotional hostage-taking: YOU WILL FEEL SOMETHING VERY POWERFUL RIGHT NOW, the eagle sings in the voice of a pennywhistle. YOU WILL SWELL WITH VAGUE BUT IMPORTANT-FEELING EMOTIONS FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON. Then, the violins return for a few sighing measures, as if to say, let’s be reasonable. Can’t we just have a nice, calm, sensible song? NO, the pennywhistle-voiced eagle responds. I DEMAND ALL OF YOUR EMOTIONS. GIMMEE! GIMMEE! So the violins go along with it, climbing higher and higher into their nose-picking regions. The high-definition nature footage sweeps the audience over the Maine coast, over bucolic dunes and quaint lighthouses until—lo, the Atlantic! Spread out like time immortal! You, the audience member, are flying! You are the eagle!
An Important Reality
New Hampshire, 2002
During the course of your first day as an employee of The Composer’s Ensemble, a subtle but crucial reality begins to dawn on you: The audience members at the craft fair can hear very little of the sound that Yevgeny and Debbie are producing with their instruments. While Debbie’s pennywhistle is shrill enough to be heard for the highest notes, Yevgeny’s violin is almost inaudible against the blast of the background track.
This realization comes in stages. It is obvious from the start that the speakers are very loud, far louder than the loudest sound that can be produced by a violin. You scrutinize Yevgeny’s fingers. Yes, he is actually playing. There isn’t a way to “half-play” or “fake-play” a violin or flute, especially after years of learning how to play for real. They are playing, but standing only a few feet away, you aren’t hearing them. Whatever sounds they are making are being drowned in a shiny sea of CD-produced music. The microphones in front of them are turned to the lowest volume (later, when you begin playing at the gigs, the microphone in front of you will often be dead). What you are hearing, instead, is a flawless, audio-mixed studio recording of other musicians playing the same music. This is why it sounds so good. This is why the customers are so enraptured. When the human ear hears the sound of a violin, and the human eye sees a black-clad Russian violinist playing, the human brain does not stop to question whether these two phenomena are related. The “concert” you are witnessing, you begin to realize, is an optical illusion. A very, very good one.
In between customers, you steal sly looks at Yevgeny. His playing form is effortless. If you angle your ear behind the giant speaker, you can sometimes manage to hear a few notes he is producing; they are pitched to perfection with a beautiful, distinct tone that could only be produced by this particular human being with this particular violin. After a few hours, he begins to play with his eyes closed. Debbie stares into space with a bored expression. Good performing violinists often appear to produce sound with their whole bodies, every tendon and nerve on high alert. But Yevgeny and Debbie look like two middle school students in the back row of an orchestra they have been forced to join. They look lazy. Listless. Bored.
As the day wears on, you realize why Yevgeny and Debbie perform in such a lackadaisical state. It isn’t laziness; it’s conservation of energy. Most orchestral performances include breaks: within the music itself, between the songs, at intermission. And most concerts last no more than an hour or two, including those breaks. But Yevgeny and Debbie have been performing nonstop in
two-hour sets for eight hours, with only a few minutes’ pause between sets and a thirty-minute break for lunch. The craft fair concert, you now realize, is more of an athletic challenge than a musical one, akin to dribbling a basketball for eight hours—easy at first, but difficult after an hour or so. With the temperature in the tent in the high eighties, you wonder how Yevgeny, dressed from head to foot in black, is still standing.
But from where you stand at the CD seller’s table, The Composer’s music drifts on the breeze, pulsing the small hairs on the back of your neck. You feel a powerful surge of exhilarating contentment. You are young and free and you have the world’s best job. Anything can happen. You are the luckiest girl in the world!
And suddenly, you have a disconcerting thought: The Composer’s music is artificially enhancing your emotions—the way a film soundtrack makes a banal conversation between lovers seem epic. Yevgeny and Debbie are playing a piece called “Ocean’s Cliff.” It begins with soft, rolling piano chords—the acoustic of water—and a pennywhistle solo that sounds like a sea spirit beckoning from the deep. And then the violin joins in with dramatic octaves, like waves. You are happy, it is your first day of work as a professional musician, and the New England summer day is all lush sunshine, soft grass, warm breeze. But like a psychedelic drug, the music is augmenting the colors around you, amplifying your happiness until the moment feels more significant than other moments of happiness, as if this is the most important moment of happiness in your life. You realize that you have just experienced your first Composer-induced trance, a flying-at-the-bow-of-a-ship-and-Leo-is-kissing-you moment.
Later, after an afternoon rush of customers has dispersed, Yevgeny asks if you would like to try playing a few songs on his violin.
“Yes!” you shout, brushing funnel cake crumbs off your hands and leaping to take his violin from him.
“Start with ‘Autumn Radiance,’” Yevgeny says. “It’s the easiest one.”
“No problem,” you say, shaking out your shoulders like a gymnast about to jump onto the balance beam.
You lift Yevgeny’s violin to your chin, angling it toward the microphone. Yevgeny pushes the Play button on the Sony Discman. You look at your sheet music, but you can’t find your place. If you don’t know where the beat is, you have no hope of counting your way into the place where you are supposed to begin playing. In an orchestra, the conductor inhales a gulp of air right before the first downbeat of his baton. The orchestra breathes with him and that’s how everyone starts at the same time, breathing together, like one organism with forty sets of lungs. But with no conductor and no discernable downbeats, you are still holding your breath.
Yevgeny stops the CD. He looks annoyed.
“You’re waiting too long,” he says.
“Right,” you answer, embarrassed.
He presses Play again.
This time you start at the right place, but after just a few notes you lose your way again. From behind the speakers, the CD is difficult to hear. You are in a musical vortex, thrashing out random bow strokes this way and that, hurling wrong notes in every direction. Any moment now Yevgeny will call off the whole attempt and grab his violin from your unworthy fingers.
Instead, he shrugs and turns his attention toward a crowd of new customers. After three minutes that feel like hours, the song ends. You look up from your useless sheet music. Dozens of people crowd the CD table. They gaze at you, applauding, and the looks on their faces are more than appreciative—they are adoring, awestruck, rapt. They are flying at the helms of their own personal ships. The fact that you haven’t really been playing has made no difference in sales. It’s an important realization: Your silence sells music.
But this does not trouble you, not at that moment. Instead, you feel relieved. If no one can hear you play the violin, you won’t be fired for being a mediocre violinist. It isn’t just about needing money. You are desperate for something that this job is already giving you, though you wouldn’t have been able to say what.
Years later, you will recognize the same desperation in other young people, especially young women, and you will know: You were desperate for the respect the customers gave to you as a professional violinist, respect you had never experienced in previous jobs as a waitress, receptionist, or assistant. In those positions, you acted flirtatious yet docile. You endured condescension and even harassment by imagining the work was temporary, though it never quite felt that way. The pose felt intertwined with a more permanent position: female. But playing the violin for money had no such associations. What you felt that day in New Hampshire was freedom. You wanted it so badly you didn’t dare question whether or not it was real.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Baltimore
“Some people out there have cancer, guys,” The Composer says.
This is his nightly preconcert pep talk. He wants us to smile while we are playing, but we never smile big enough, or continuously enough. The one exception to this is Harriet, who, as The Composer tells the audience each night, has “the biggest, most beautiful smile.”
“It’s just really important we go out there and smile and touch their hearts,” he continues. “Okay? If we do that, it will be so cool. So just remember to smile, okay?”
If The Composer is not satisfied with the amount of smiling during a concert, he speaks to us again after the performance, pleading with us to consider that the audience is full of people who are sick and old and going through horrible pain. These people turn to him, The Composer, for relief. His music allows them to relax and think nice thoughts. How are they going to relax and think nice thoughts if we aren’t happy and relaxed and smiling? Objections pertaining to the difficulty of smiling with a violin under one’s chin are ignored. The implication is that if we forget to smile, we could kill someone.
To be fair, there is no one more dedicated to smiling during concerts than The Composer himself. But his smile is so forced that only his most stalwart fans are left undisturbed by it. His face freezes into a triangle-shaped rock, his eyebrows arch upward in an unconvincing pantomime of mirth, his lips force their way into a toothy smile that is all hard angles and sharp lines. One of the very few negative reviews of The Composer on Amazon puts it this way: The nature footage is beautiful but I was distracted by the psychotic grin on the conductor guy. An unsatisfied viewer on Netflix writes: I found this video unsettling. The musicians are all smiling too much, as if they’ve been indoctrinated into a cult.
After thirty minutes of music, it is time for The Composer’s halftime speech. Harriet, Stephen, and I sit down in plastic folding chairs, our instruments resting in our laps.
“I am so very blessed to see you all tonight,” he begins, speaking into a live microphone. “We’re all just so . . . um . . . grateful . . . blessed you could come.”
The official objective of the God Bless America Tour is to help raise money for local PBS stations. During his halftime speech, which, like the music, never changes night after night, The Composer launches into a brief, awkward spiel, preaching to the pledge-drive choir about the wonders of public television. He claims that as a kid he watched PBS programs, that this is what inspired him to become a composer. And then he gets to the story everyone wants to hear, the story about the The A-List Hollywood Celebrity.
“So . . . uh . . . as you know, our God Bless America special is narrated by The Hollywood Celebrity,” he begins. “And it was so cool . . . I got to go out to Los Angeles to work with him. So I thought I’d tell you about it.”
The Composer’s Story About The Hollywood Celebrity is this: The Hollywood Celebrity is a really fun guy. A really cool guy. A really awesome guy who is also really fun. The Hollywood Celebrity rode to the recording studio on a motorcycle. Which was really cool. And fun. But the funnest, coolest thing is that The Hollywood Celebrity cares about PBS. Enough to take time from his glamorous Hollywood life to work with the humble Composer.
The audience is enraptured by this speech, and it is quite amazing
to think of The Composer and The Hollywood Celebrity in the same room together. I bet they both smiled a lot. Perhaps there was even a smiling contest, and The Hollywood Celebrity discovered that he had finally met his match. But left unmentioned during this speech is that The Hollywood Celebrity, however much he may care about PBS, may have also been motivated to narrate the God Bless America special because The Composer paid him tens of thousands of dollars to record a few minutes of narration.
Also unmentioned during the speech: When it comes to supporting PBS, The Composer is the real superstar. Other than a small trickle of revenue he receives from the CD sales table at the concerts, The Composer is not getting paid by PBS for the tour. The audience members have “won” admission to the concert by pledging donations to their local PBS stations. The money for the RV and the hotels and our salaries is coming out of The Composer’s own pocket.
And it is this fact, more than anything else, that makes him a mysterious figure to me: So much about The Composer—his music, his performances, his smile—is ripped off, imitated, or downright fake. But when it comes to the most genuine gesture an American can make—giving away money—The Composer is the real deal. The profits from his CD sales are spent doing free tours for PBS and producing benefit CDs for charities. On some nights after our concerts, he gives away as many CDs as he sells.
After impressing the audience with stories of The Hollywood Celebrity, there is one last thing The Composer must do before completing the concert.
“On my new CD, Wildflower Sunrise, I tried to compose a waltz,” he says in his trademark high-pitched whisper, an affected stage voice he uses that sounds half Michael Jackson, half surfer dude. “I thought it would be really cool. And I was wondering . . . um . . . if I gave you this CD for free, would anyone out in the audience like to . . . uh . . . like to waltz with me?”
Sounds Like Titanic Page 5