Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  You follow the sound of the pennywhistle to a white tent situated between the Koch ballet theater and the Metropolitan Opera House. The Composer sits on a folding chair arranging his CDs on the sales table. You recognize him immediately from the photo on his CD cover, taken just a few dozen feet away inside the grand Alice Tully concert hall, where he conducted one of our nation’s most elite orchestras. In person, you realize he is even more youthful and handsome than his CD cover suggests. He is thin with a generous scoop of dark hair, large brown doe-eyes, high cheekbones, and a square jaw.

  “HELLO, SIR!” you yell over the music. “I’M JESSICA HINDMAN, THE VIOLINIST.” The Composer looks up at you with a dazed expression. He gestures for you to come back behind the speakers.

  “Thanks for coming,” he says in a voice so soft you have to lean toward him to hear it. “It’s cool you made it. We’re going to have a lot of fun today. It’s going to be awesome.”

  You nod enthusiastically. Cool. Fun. Awesome.

  You notice the flute player standing in the back of the tent, a petite woman in her early thirties with wispy strawberry-blond hair and small blue eyes. The Composer returns to his seat without introducing you to her, and you wait for her to say something first. You unpack your violin and rosin your bow. Finally, you smile shyly and introduce yourself.

  “Kim,” she says in response, looking away. She leaves her post behind the microphones and walks behind The Composer, whispering something in his ear while glancing back at you. You shift on your feet, pretending to examine every millimeter of your violin. Have you done something wrong? Can they tell your violin is cheap? That you are really just a poor college student masquerading as a professional musician?

  “Do you know the songs?” The Composer asks.

  “Yes!” you say, hoping to win him over with the brute force of your enthusiasm. “I’ve practiced and I’m close to having everything memorized.”

  “So . . . um . . . you know, when the music starts, you keep playing . . . no matter what.”

  “Of course,” you say, smiling your biggest, most compliant grin. “I understand how it works.”

  You start the set list. Kim plays her part flawlessly, sending the notes of the almost-Titanic soundtrack sailing high into the air over Lincoln Center. She is actually the flutist who performs on the CDs, so her instrument and playing style in the tent is a perfect match with the recording coming from the speakers.

  Even though you know no one in the audience can hear you, you want to make sure The Composer knows you can play his music. Whenever the music calls for a note to be emphasized, you play it with dramatic vibrato that gives the notes a bold, pulsing tone. You sway with the watery crescendos in “Ocean’s Cliff,” and you use your entire bow for the violin solos in “Birds of Moonrise,” making dramatic lifts and sweeps with each passage.

  Two hours later, you take a ten-minute break. The Composer walks over to speak to you. There is something about his demeanor that reminds you of a kitten. He has a frightened yet confident look in his darting eyes.

  “Hey . . . um,” he says. “Melissa?”

  “Jessica,” you say.

  “Yeah. You’re doing a really great job. Really great,” he almost whispers, staring above your head. “Really nice . . . but . . . um . . . it’s really important to remember to play very quietly. Can you play very quietly?”

  “Yes,” you say, your voice coming out as barely a whisper.

  You put a small black rubber mute on the bridge of your violin and spend the next two hours playing so softly that you can’t even hear yourself. You play all of the notes with your fingers but use only a single bow hair, producing an almost inaudible puff of sound. When you take your next break, The Composer tells you that you have done “a really awesome job.”

  “The only thing is,” he says, “could you smile a bit more?”

  “Okay,” you say. Then you realize you aren’t smiling when you say it. So you smile (you’ve already learned to do so on command from years of life in the body) and The Composer smiles back.

  And you begin another two-hour set.

  The afternoon sun beats down and the temperature inside the tent creeps upward. Your wool skirt—which seemed sensible in the cool hours of the September morning—becomes sweaty and itchy around the waistband. As you enter your sixth hour playing along with the CD, you begin to struggle. In high school you occasionally attended eight-hour practice sessions for regional orchestra events, but those rehearsals always involved sitting on stage in an air-conditioned auditorium with frequent breaks while the conductor focused on different sections of the orchestra. You have never played like this—nonstop, for hours, in heat, like a musical automaton. Sweat trickles down your spine, your throat becomes parched, and a bagel you wolfed down during the break churns like wet cement in your stomach. You shift your weight from foot to foot as your new shoes cut bloody blisters into your heels. You curse yourself for playing so exuberantly in the first hours of the gig. One by one your muscles begin to protest: first your shoulders, then your back. By hour six, flames of pain engulf your chin, neck, arms, wrists, and hands until even the wisps of nerve endings in your fingertips are ablaze. By the eighth hour, you stoop in front of your microphone like an elderly woman, barely able to move your arms.

  To take your mind off your increasing pain and exhaustion, you study The Composer’s interactions with the customers. Unlike the ones in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, almost none of the New York City customers have heard of The Composer or his music. They stride up to the CD table in their weekend loafers, gumming the lids of their Starbucks cups.

  It sounds like Titanic, they say.

  The Composer nods.

  Who is The Composer?

  “I am,” he says.

  That is all the information they need. They don’t ask what song is playing now, or remark that the music is beautiful or relaxing. They don’t justify their purchases to everyone around them by proclaiming that they need relaxing CDs because they are divorced, or work with children, or have diabetes. You wait for someone to say that listening to a Titanic knockoff soundtrack will be an ironic guilty pleasure, enjoyed between finer pastimes such as going to gallery openings and reading the New Yorker, but no one does. Instead, they take out their leather billfolds, snap out crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, tell The Composer they’d like one of each of the nine CDs, nod to you and Kim, and leave as quickly as they came. One man leaves two twenty-dollar bills for you and Kim as a tip. And it occurs to you that the only major difference between The Composer’s customers in rural America and his customers in Manhattan—the epicenter of elite musical culture—is the amount of money they can spend on CDs, and the speed at which they part with their cash.

  At 6 p.m. The Composer cuts the power to the music. You peel your violin from your neck. The rosewood endpin has cut into the soft flesh above your carotid artery, leaving a large hickey-like sore. The fingertips on your left hand are grooved in the shape of strings, and the thumb on your right hand has been deformed by eight hours of pressing into the frog of the bow; it is now a half thumb. When The Composer hands you your money—$150 for eight hours of playing plus the customer’s $20 tip—your hand wavers under the bills with a Parkinsonian tremble.

  Let Us Now Speak of The Money

  Let us now speak of The Money that The Composer put into your trembling hand, your need for it, your relationship to it. Let us say that your need to make tuition money—lots of it, fast—made you different from your classmates, many of whom had attended prestigious boarding schools where tuition matched or even exceeded Columbia’s. Let us say that being different at Columbia, like any place, led to a certain isolation, and that this isolation was sometimes self-imposed, a way to protect yourself against the rage stalking the periphery of your consciousness. Let us acknowledge that as a doctor’s daughter, your family was upper-middle class by the time you graduated from high school, and that to be upper-middle class in Appalachia is to be rich. Let
us also acknowledge that groveling for tuition money because one’s parents have never heard of Columbia and refuse to pay its exorbitant tuition is, within the Ivy League, to be poor. Let us confess that to be rich in one world and poor in another is a confusing situation for an eighteen-year-old to find herself in.

  Let us add that a mind-boggling number of Columbia students hailed from a socioeconomic class you’d never come into contact with before: the richest of the rich. Several of the parents who moved their kids into your freshman dormitory were household-name celebrities. Let us speak of private planes, of multiple mansions, of oil investments, of foreign royalty. Of Congress and the White House and Wall Street and Hollywood and the personal connections to all of these represented by your classmates. Let us now speak of The Money, a subject that always feels like it needs permission to be discussed aloud, a treacherous minefield in which you operated as a double agent. Let us now speak of The Money, a subject even more taboo at Columbia than rape.

  Let us emphasize that, surprisingly, your biggest problem with The Money did not stem from your need for more of it. Yes, there were moments when you were blindsided with feelings of self-pity, moments when you wept in the damp, empty laundry rooms of dormitories during spring break, all of your friends having departed for Paris or Tahoe or New Orleans or St. Maarten. But these moments were rare. You did not mind having to make money for tuition, even via ridiculous and unhealthy schemes like egg donation, nor did you bemoan your inability to spend money as freely as your classmates. Let us confess that your struggles for The Money became a point of pride, one of the few points of pride you could locate on the map of your general mediocrity.

  Let us now emphasize that your real problem with The Money was a cultural, geographical problem, sown deep in the soil of your mountain-shadowed childhood. Your problem with The Money was the fact that its very existence went ignored at Columbia. Your problem with The Money was that it was a subject that intrigued and embarrassed your classmates (and some of your professors) in a way that made you suspect they had never considered The Money before.

  Let us say that it bothered you, a doctor’s daughter, to be the only emissary of the Appalachian poor to the coastal rich. Let us say that the kids in your high school—the ones who dropped out to work nights at the chicken plant, the ones who were snatched up by the tables of Army recruiters in your high school’s main corridor, the ones who disappeared into pregnancy, vocational school, alcohol, or drugs—would probably never have chosen you to be their voice, but that you spoke for them anyway because it enraged you when Columbia students attributed their life successes to hard work and talent, when plenty of hardworking, talented folks you knew were spending their days serving chicken-fried steaks and scrubbing floors and sweating through basic training. Let us confess that you were better able to see these injustices now that you were, for the first time in your life, the person whom others thought of as poor.

  Let us now speak of the children of the American suburbs, a group with its own culture and subcultures, a species as foreign to you as wild chimpanzees, their hometown neighborhoods so stratified and gated and segregated that the kids who lived in million-dollar houses rarely mingled with the kids who lived in $800,000 houses. As someone who had grown up in towns that were their own contained worlds—not satellite neighborhoods orbiting massive cities—such minute segregation by income was a new concept. Let us say that the thing you most wanted to articulate to your classmates was information about a world outside suburban and urban wealth, a world beyond elite boarding schools (the names of which you were beginning to learn in order to navigate the large groups of people at Columbia who already knew one another from high school), a world in which most people don’t go to college at all—which is not, not, not the same thing as being lazy or stupid. Let us say that people in Appalachia are no smarter or dumber than people from other places. Even as you tried to impart this information, you failed miserably. What you ended up imparting, more often than not, was this: The Appalachian South equals funny accents, pickup trucks, racists, venison dinners, buttermilk biscuits, sweet tea. Let us acknowledge your failure to do justice to the wonderful and miserable complexities of the culture in which you were raised, and let us hypothesize that many people who you grew up with would have done a better job of it.

  But let us also say that your admission to Columbia—very likely a result of your geographical and cultural identity, one you were savvy enough at seventeen to play up in a college admissions essay full of dairy cows and country music—came without any allowance for the fact that to admit a token Appalachian kid is also to be responsible for her acclimation to a world in which she is culturally and financially foreign. Let us suggest that you had been set up by a system to confirm the Northeastern elite’s preexisting biases about the rural South.

  Let us acknowledge that out of the nine hundred students in your year, at least a few had to be poor (and not just Columbia-poor, like you, but poor-poor). Perhaps a few were also from Appalachia. Even as these students must have existed, you rarely met one of them, possibly because you were all working so much you didn’t have time to find each other at social events. Or perhaps you did meet but never identified yourselves, too embarrassed or exhausted to bring up the taboo subject of The Money. Let us acknowledge that just outside the campus gates, on the streets of upper Manhattan, were plenty of people who were definitively poor, who lived in a poverty that was far deeper and more complex than having no tuition money. One homeless man screamed nonstop for hours outside your dormitory window each night. Those screams sounded primal and terrifying. Let us confess that you learned to ignore these screams, could even, by the end of your sophomore year, sleep through them.

  Let us explain that the Ensemble gigs—which you started working every weekend and almost always involved long journeys by car or plane—began on Thursday nights and ended on Sunday evenings: a seventy-two-hour work cycle with no time to study or write papers. Let us acknowledge that during the week you worked additional jobs. Let us confess that you struggled with addiction, that what began with coffee and then cigarettes accelerated into Adderall and cocaine, and that you used these stimulants to stay awake Monday through Thursday in order to work and study. You intended to graduate a year early to save money; because of this you signed up for heavy course loads. Let us acknowledge that stimulant abuse cut into The Money that you were staying awake to earn.

  Let us acknowledge that after you exhausted the scholarships, the money from egg donation, the jobs, and the maximum amount of student loans one can take out, your upper-middle-class parents ended up paying (“loaning” was the word they used) the remaining tuition. Let us state for the record that by the time your parents did this it was too late; something deep within you had changed. Perhaps it happened during the Air Force ROTC drills, or the night with Rose in Penn Station, or at the egg donation clinic. Perhaps it happened after the seventh hour of an eight-hour stretch playing the violin like a robot. Perhaps it happened when you realized you had stayed awake too many days working and studying, that your neurological and cardiovascular systems were mortal, that your body was begging you to lay off the stimulants to go to sleep. Whatever the cause, it happened: something inside of you broke down, disintegrated, evaporated. Poof. Something inside of you shed its soft skin and became tough. Too tough.

  Let us quote Virginia Woolf, who famously wrote about her days of needing The Money: “I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness those days bred in me.”

  And let us confess that for a few years you blamed your parents, and then yourself, for this too-tough thing inside of you, this fear and bitterness, when in truth it was not your parents’ fault, nor yours. In your own ways, you and your parents were equally clueless about The
Money, vulnerable to its complexities and confusions and emotions, all of you facing a two thousand-foot mountain barrier to accessing another, unknown world. Let us say that there was little to guide you but love, luck, and violin music.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Nashville

  The Composer tells us, “There are people out there dying of cancer, guys,” and though Harriet and I make fun of him for it when he’s not around, he has a point. A disproportionate number of our audience members are elderly or ill or survivors of life’s grimmest ordeals. After each concert, The Composer listens to each and every person. If there are four hundred audience members and it takes three hours, he will listen to them until the last person has left. Sometimes the stragglers follow him back to the RV, as if they are hoping we will take them with us on tour. They tell The Composer that they have gone through cancer, that their son was killed in a car accident, that their husband was in the hospital for months after his last heart attack. They tell The Composer that his music is what helped them go on. Sometimes they claim his music cured them of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure. The Composer calls these fans “hardcore.”

  Sometimes these hardcore fans are kids. The Composer talks to each one and asks them if they play an instrument. If they do, he tells them to keep at it. To practice. To watch PBS specials of great performances. To do well in school. The kids do what I remember doing when adults spoke to me like this: They act shy, but they are listening.

  Unlike the craft fair and mall gigs where customers sometimes ask, “Are they really playing?” no one in any of our PBS concert audiences ever questions the authenticity of our performance. The idea of sitting through an hour-long “concert” that is mostly a CD recording is likely too embarrassing to even contemplate, let alone ask one of us about.