Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  San Antonio

  The Composer’s legs dangle out the passenger-side window of the RV, his body jackknifed on the window ledge. The door to the RV is jammed, so with the strength of a gymnast The Composer has pulled his entire body up through the window. The rest of us stand outside the RV in our concert clothes, holding our instrument cases. A hardcore fan has followed us from the concert reception to the parking lot. “You play that flute really well,” he is saying to Kim. Patrick wears his official God Bless America Tour jacket even in the sweltering Texas air. His arms are folded across his chest as he stares skeptically at The Composer’s derriere, wiggling through the open window in the evening twilight.

  The jammed door is only the latest item on a growing list of our RV’s maladies. The side mirrors keep falling off and dangling dangerously in the breeze while we are driving, despite Patrick’s repeated attempts to hold them on with duct tape. The air vents in The Composer’s back room overheat, canceling the meager effects of the dying air-conditioning system. The DVD player and radio are both broken; our days of group movie watching long past, along with our ability to tune in to the traffic and weather stations. The catch-locks on the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are so shot that even with duct tape the doors fly open without warning; apples fall out of the sky and boxes of Cap’n Crunch sail through the air, covering us in peanut-butter-scented dust. The walls are filthy with six weeks’ worth of splattered food, the trash can smells bad even when it’s empty, and the linoleum beneath our feet is so sticky that we no longer worry about slipping and falling while the RV is in motion, so securely are the bottoms of our shoes fastened to the floor.

  The Composer hoists the rest of his body through the window and emerges through the jammed door a few seconds later. We troop inside while the hardcore fan stands in the parking lot, waving as Patrick puts the RV in reverse. Suddenly, the back end of the RV crashes into something hard and unmoving, throwing all of us onto the cereal-encrusted floor.

  We tumble back out of the RV to inspect the damage, wondering what on earth could have caused so hard a crash. It doesn’t take long to figure it out; there is a cavernous ditch between the parking lot and the road, causing the back end of the cabin to smash into the asphalt. Our RV hasn’t crashed into any obstacle on the road; it has crashed into the road itself.

  Patrick attempts to back the RV out at a different angle but only succeeds in banging into the asphalt a few more times. It becomes clear that we will need to build a bridge over the ditch. The hardcore fan points to a pile of rubble in the parking lot, full of bricks, fruit crates, cardboard, and trash. We tote all of this by hand and fling it into the ditch, until the parking lot is level with the road. The first bridge we make isn’t high enough, and the RV crashes right through it to the pavement again. We build a second bridge and Kim runs out onto the road to stop traffic while Patrick revs the engine. Then, like an elephant breaking free of its circus tent, our RV roars out of the San Antonio PBS parking lot. As we wave good-bye to the hardcore fan, we are grateful for our RV. Perhaps it’s because we all share a certain need to remove ourselves from the scene of our concert crimes as quickly as possible, but our RV, despite its many problems, has begun to feel like a home.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Dallas

  The club—really a poolside lounge at one of Dallas’s fanciest hotels—is full of blondes dripping with diamonds, their faces glowing with the flawless, glossy finish that can only be achieved by an hour-long sit-down with a professional makeup artist, their breasts sculpted into tanned teardrops by the best surgeons oil money can buy. One particularly stunning specimen—standing at least six feet tall, her perfectly proportioned legs, hips, and breasts accentuating the tailor cut of her red blazer and skirt suit—strides across the open courtyard in sling-back stilettos, puffing on a cigar with bee-stung red lips. A man in a business suit finds her, pulls her away from the crowd by the hand.

  I sit at a lounge table with Harriet and her friend Carol, a top violinist in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, who picked us up from our suburban hotel and squired us away to Dallas splendor in her shiny new BMW. While Harriet and Carol catch up, I try to smooth my wild hair into something less Unabomber-esque. Other than my concert dress, I didn’t pack any fancy clothes for the tour. I sit in the midst of the lavish Dallas scene wearing corduroy pants that have been rip-hemmed at the waist and ankles. Even with the rip-hem, the pants are much too long on me and I step on them a lot in the RV; the bottoms are filthy scraps of disintegrating corduroy, barely concealing the plastic American-flag flip-flops I bought at a JC Penney four years earlier.

  Harriet and Carol reminisce about past orchestras they’ve played in and swap gossip on the elite classical music world: which violinist is sleeping with which bassoonist, which cellist lost his mind and stormed out of rehearsal cursing a famous conductor. Carol is in her midthirties and has short hair that accentuates her heart-shaped face and hazel eyes. I’ve never hung out with a professional classical musician of her caliber, and I’m in awe.

  Carol is complaining to Harriet about the Dallas Orchestra’s season program. “They are doing all this nonsense to build their endowment,” Carol says. “They think all an orchestra needs to become top-tier is money, but the problem is that you can’t buy taste. It’s one thing to shamelessly insert Eine Kleine Nachtmusik into half the concerts or to go overboard on the Beethoven. But the I Love Lucy theme song? The Looney Tunes soundtrack? That’s just messed up.”

  Harriet nods sympathetically. “That’s right, that’s right,” she says.

  “We should not have to be playing Pink Floyd to get an audience,” Carol continues. “Next thing I know there’s going to be a laser show going on in the concert hall and teenagers will be in the box seats dropping acid. I did not spend my life getting this good to play soundtrack music.”

  “Soundtrack music,” I repeat. I’m not sure if I mean it as a question.

  “Yeah,” Carol says, looking at me with a wry expression. “My job is nothing like what you probably think it is.”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Dallas to Albuquerque

  You don’t notice it at first. You look out the window one moment and the country is as flat and hot and crowded as a Thomas Friedman column. But then, somewhere a few hours west of Dallas, you look again, more closely this time. There are fewer cars, then very few, then you are, as far as you can tell, a passenger aboard a single vessel sailing on an open sea, with nothing in sight but hundreds of miles of empty space. There are no Ruby Tuesdays, no Walmarts, no strip malls, no truck stops full of chicken gizzard buffets. The land birds of interstate travel that signify nearby islands of restaurants and gas stations—sandwich wrappers and soda cans and plastic bags—disappear. Some muscle between your lungs and your stomach loosens, and you are able to take a deep breath for what seems like the first time since the tour began. You become something both smaller and larger at once. There is plenty of space, you think. Plenty of space for us all in this land that stretches all the way to the dark-silver horizon. After six weeks on the road in which you have seen the same landscape over and over and over again, from Maine to Georgia to Arkansas (Walmart, Lowe’s, Cracker Barrel, repeat, repeat, repeat), you are unspeakably relieved to look out the window and see that this America—the empty, the uninhabited, the West—is still here.

  Somewhere in the background you hear The Composer ask Harriet, “What is Barcelona?” and for a moment, just before you make a mental note to mock this question with Harriet later in your hotel room (It’s a major city in Spain, you doofus!), you pause to marvel at the question’s Whitman-esque quality: What is Barcelona? What is America? What is the West? What is the desert? What is the sky? What is this emptiness? A child said, What is the grass?

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Phoenix to San Diego

  A few days after The Composer asks Harriet “What is Barcelona?” he asks
me “Who is John Kerry?” The RV is parked in a cactus-dappled desert a few hours from Phoenix, in front of Chee’s Indian Store (“1–2–3 Say Chee’s,” the billboards say). Harriet and I have bought beaded earrings and fry bread.

  I look at The Composer and say, “John Kerry is running for president,” and The Composer nods solemnly, as if, six weeks before election day, I have imparted rare knowledge.

  “Who do you think will win?” The Composer asks me.

  “John Kerry,” I say, fingering my new earrings. “Bush started an unnecessary war. People are going to judge him harshly for that. It will be hard for him to win after starting a war for no reason.”

  “It wasn’t for no reason,” Kim pipes up. “The terrorists—”

  “There weren’t any terrorists in Iraq!” I interrupt her. “Iraq is not Afghanistan. Or Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers were from.”

  “But Saddam Hussein . . .” she continues.

  “You can’t just invade a country for some made-up, imaginary reason,” I argue.

  “Says the white girl wearing Indian beads,” Harriet says.

  “Isn’t it true,” The Composer asks, trying to change the subject, “that if you run for president, you’re always on the road?”

  It is true, though until The Composer mentions it, I hadn’t ever considered it. Now I begin to notice that the God Bless America Tour is increasingly crisscrossing paths with both campaigns. And as someone who has been on the road nonstop for seven weeks, I begin to feel an affinity with both candidates. They wake up every day in a strange place, I think, eating strange food, sleeping very little. Their audiences, like our audiences, come from work or home, our performances a break in their daily routines. But for those of us touring America, there is no daily routine. There are no day jobs, house keys, dog walks. No homemade casseroles. There is no set bedtime, no familiar face on the local news, no houseplant to water. Every night we sleep in different beds and every morning we wake up and look at a different clock, set to a different time zone. The same invisible army that puts a USA Today under my hotel door and stocks the bathroom with fresh towels does the same for the president and his challenger. And, in a way, we are all selling the same thing: Listen to us, we say, and you will feel safer and calmer, more relaxed in a world full of unspeakable dangers.

  That night at our concert in San Diego, I look out at the audience’s faces as they watch the bald eagle swoop over the Grand Canyon. The Composer’s Titanic music swells in the background. There is something sinister about that eagle, I think. Something unsettling about the way such an image soothes people’s nerves from coast to coast.

  After the concert I watch the first debate of the 2004 presidential election in my San Diego hotel room. The first question of the evening is directed toward John Kerry: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States? Kerry answers like a groom at a wedding: I do. President Bush offers his rebuttal and the ceremony continues until it culminates in them shaking hands and fake-smiling and telling each other “good job.” 1–2–3 Say Chee’s, I think.

  Years later I’ll look back on the politics of the post–September 11th years as set to the soothing melodies of the pennywhistle. John Kerry, George W. Bush, The Composer—all are like the principal violinist on the deck of the sinking Titanic, who instructs the players: “Nice and cheery, so there’s no panic.” When the violinist’s body was found in the ocean a few days after the disaster, his violin case was still strapped to his back.

  The Geography of Music

  Buffalo, New York, 2003

  Music can shape geography. It can transform a landscape from something forgetful into something memorable.

  For instance, I’ll remember driving around the outskirts of Buffalo on a craft fair gig with Debbie, the red-haired flutist from the first gig in New Hampshire, and Morris, a socially awkward violinist. All weekend Morris will insist that we listen to sixteenth-century Spanish court music, compositions that were written and performed for Ferdinand and Isabella. It’s the music that greeted Columbus when he went to pitch his potential investors on an innovative sea route that would lead to Asia’s endless gold.

  “This album has been re-mastered,” Morris explains, and goes into the technical details of recording Renaissance music, the instruments, the proper acoustical venues, the recording equipment. Morris’s favorite track on the CD is a vocal ballad called “Rodrigo Martinez.” Morris turns it up to full volume and puts it on repeat. As we drive, gas stations and cow fields and suburban developments fly by, and the stately court music—with its trumpets and flutes and tambourines and the strong catchy beat of bass drums—transforms, like magic, the grim upstate wastelands of late-capitalism into majestic, pastoral vistas. The strip malls are timeless. The trailer parks are quaint villages. The abandoned gas stations are castles.

  “It sounds like they’re singing Rodrigo My Penis,” Debbie points out. And once she says it, it becomes impossible to hear anything else. The old-Spanish consonants are so soft that when they are sung a “t” sounds like a “p.”

  “Rodrigo My Penis!” Debbie and I sing in gleeful fake baritones as we sail through Buffalo, until Morris becomes so agitated that he turns off the music.

  But for years afterward the song will stay in my head. I’ll eventually download it and listen to it again, and when I do I’ll remember what upstate New York looked and felt like on a cold autumn weekend in 2003. I’ll remember the particular feeling I used to get after a long day at an Ensemble gig, a feeling of freedom, the wonderful liberty of listening to something—anything—other than The Composer’s music.

  One day I become curious and look up the translation of the song’s lyrics. It turns out that Rodrigo Martinez/My Penis is a Spanish madman who believes his geese are his oxen, confusing animals who make music for animals who perform hard labor:

  Rodrigo Martinez, he’s after the geese again, Hey!

  He thinks they are his oxen, so he whistles at them, Hey!

  Rodrigo Martinez, what a dashing fellow!

  With his flock of goslings, to the riverside they go,

  Hey! He thinks they are his oxen, so he whistles at them, Hey!

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  San Diego

  The Composer is waltzing with Kim to the Santana song “Oye Como Va,” but the song is in five and he’s waltzing in three and everyone on the boat—a moonlight cruise through Mission Bay—is staring at them. Salsa-dancing couples stop mid-sashay to make way for The Composer, who is dragging Kim in a forward line that is more tango than waltz. His face is turned away from hers and he is doing the velociraptor—that smile, all jawline and teeth, made unconvincing by the terror in his eyes. I watch the members of the live salsa band as they watch The Composer tango-waltz through the boat’s cabin. After the song is done the salsa musicians announce a break and flee the stage, but not before I notice a band member with a laptop computer that is hooked up to the speakers, and I wonder if the live salsa band is actually live.

  The next day I decide to get as far away from The Composer and the others as possible. I pack a plastic laundry bag with my journal, a newspaper, a bath towel, and a complimentary hotel bagel and march down to an isolated spot on Mission Beach, where I spend the entire day alone, staring into the Pacific, watching birds play in the surf.

  There are so many of them, diverse in colors and sizes, a whole Bird World flocking and dancing on the sand. There are large birds that nosedive deep into the water and explode out a few minutes later with fish wriggling in their beaks, their wings spraying sea foam as they ascend into the hazy yellow sky. There are elegant long-necked birds and birds with pencil-thin beaks. There are tiny birds that move in groups, leapfrogging over one another down the shoreline, picking at the sand for tiny scraps. There are boastful seagulls flapping up a ruckus.

  One small seagull finds a clam and pretends like it’s nothing so the other birds won�
��t fight him for it. He waits for them to walk away, nonchalantly scratching his feathers with his beak. But as soon as their backs are turned he breaks open the clam and strips it of its salty meat. Even birds know the value of a good fake performance.

  Another American Composer

  Copland’s Appalachian Spring was, unsurprisingly, a popular choice for classical concerts in Appalachia. We played various renditions and excerpts of it at school concerts, cloggers danced to its rhythms at heritage festivals, and church ladies hammered out the “Simple Gifts” theme on pianos and mountain dulcimers. Copland was perhaps the only American composer who classical music snobs and country bumpkins loved in equal measure. His compositions were held up as the paradigm of American classical music: Complex enough to be educational and aspirational, simple enough to hum along to, popular and catchy enough to be used in a beef commercial. (Sometimes you imagine that his “Hoedown” belches out of the RV’s exhaust pipe as you travel around America.) Copland’s music was beef all right, plus potatoes and apple pie. A real crowd-pleaser. What could be more patriotic? More heartland America? More classical-music-meets-Appalachian-high-school-gymnasium?

  In a college music history course, you’ll learn that Copland hadn’t been thinking of Appalachia when he composed Appalachian Spring. He had been composing a ballet for world-renowned dancer and choreographer Martha Graham and titled the piece Ballet for Martha, until Martha herself suggested the title Appalachian Spring shortly before its premiere. (She was inspired by a poem about a bubbling mountain water spring, not the season.) For years afterward, Copland was amused when people told him that they heard the beauty of Appalachia in his music. Like The Composer’s song titles—“Atlantic Sunrise,” “Starlight of Acadia,” “Ocean’s Cliff”—people thought the music had been composed to fit a specific geographical inspiration, when in fact the music was composed first, the geographical title an afterthought. The titles of The Composer’s compositions, you come to realize, share the same marketing strategy as flavors of herbal tea: Soothing; Energizing; Sleepytime; Tummy Tamer. Sometimes the customer just wants to be told what to feel.