Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  If faking is pedagogy, what did I learn as a fake violinist? One thing is certain: I didn’t learn how to play the violin. The Composer’s music was too simple, too syrupy, to lead to any vast improvements in my violin technique.

  Instead, what I was putting on, in my fake violinist role, was what it would feel like to be an actual, real, world-class musician. What it would feel like to tour the country and the world and be greeted by thousands of adoring fans. What it would feel like to be on television. What it would feel like for the world to see me as a serious professional classical violinist.

  It was only by playing make-believe that I was finally able to put my violin under my bed where it presently gathers dust and is taken out only for the weddings of friends too cheap to hire a real professional.

  Faking violin stardom ultimately allowed me to return to what captivated me at four years old when I first heard Vivaldi’s “Winter.” It wasn’t the desire to be seen as talented. It wasn’t to utilize the violin as an antimisogynist prosthetic, or a ticket to the big city, or worldly success, or respect. It wasn’t The Money. It was simply this: I loved a song. Playing the role of a famous, world-class violinist allowed me to return to the feeling that playing the violin doesn’t require anything more than loving a song. Or anything less.

  As Mr. Rogers says at the end of the trumpet factory episode, right after he explains that as a kid he pretended he was a songwriter on TV, right before he begins to sing on TV:

  “It helps to play about things. It helps you to know how it really feels.”

  What I Like to Fantasize

  I like to fantasize that my last gig with the The Composer’s Ensemble was set to the soundtrack of The Shawshank Redemption. Who wouldn’t want to imagine such a thing for a last day on the job? It’s a much more suitable soundtrack for job quitting than Titanic. You know the music I’m talking about: The music that plays while Andy escapes through the tunnels of shit. The redemption part.

  The music starts with a calm sea of violins. You look around the mall in Bridgewater, New Jersey, at the bored, polo-shirted guys selling cellular plans, at the punk girls with facial piercings folding stacks of Chinese-made denim in the clothing store. You smell pretzels and strong perfume and some other American smell you can only label as heating-duct fabric softener. You watch the faces of the customers in front of the CD table where The Composer sits, his back to you. The customers have large bodies and small feet. They sway off-beat to the music like engorged kelp, held to the sand by mere threads.

  You need air.

  The violins aren’t calm anymore. They begin to rise up. Higher. They build a skyscraper of sound, supported by brass scaffolding.

  You struggle to the surface, above the rising crescendo of notes. You swim through the food court. You flail and you grab. You reach the exit. Your ears breech the lip of the water. The cigarette-scented winter wind hits your face. French horns lead the orchestra to the climactic note. The doors to the mall close behind you, swallowing the mall sounds. You have left it behind. Left it all behind.

  One thing I’ve learned about movie soundtracks: They make endings seem less complicated than they really are. In real life, endings are long and messy. In real life, redemptions occur only when everything else has fallen into a deep and enduring silence.

  Who Is The Composer? Finale

  What I say:

  The very last time I see The Composer, he comes to pick me up in an old, beat-up car full of empty cereal boxes and granola bar wrappers. It’s rumored that the Ensemble lost a large chunk of money on the China tour. The Composer is now, for the first time since I have worked for his Ensemble, booking and driving to small gigs at the mall. Not that he minds, I don’t think. He wrote me an email to confirm this gig. It said, “We are going to have lots of fun!”

  It is a cold Saturday morning, New York City in January. The Composer sits in his car outside my apartment building. He is not doing the velociraptor or using his whispery stage voice. For the first time since I’ve known him, he is acting like a normal person, just a regular guy coming to pick up an employee to do a weekend job.

  We head over the George Washington Bridge to a mall in Bridgewater, New Jersey, one that isn’t particularly big or glamorous, one that is sure to be empty in the post-Christmas doldrums.

  After going with The Composer to China, I performed in two other television specials, but turned down other gigs. Because I now have a debilitating psychiatric condition, I have moved back to New York City needing a job—any job—with health insurance, which, after a few months, I am able to get. I spend my weekdays in a windowless cubicle in Upper Manhattan, where I work as a secretary, a job with full benefits. It is not musical fame, it is not saving lives in the Middle East. I dress in boring black secretary slacks and fill out Excel spreadsheets and make shitty photocopies and even shittier coffee. But I have come to see the job as its own sort of success, one that I can do well despite having several panic attacks per day. My new job means nothing other than a regular paycheck, health insurance, and full tuition reimbursement should I ever want to go to graduate school. It is not the sort of job to brag about over cocktails at a young Ivy Leaguers’ night. But I can go see a doctor whenever I want, and a doctor is the only way I am going to recover enough to get another job. (Needing a job with health insurance to recover enough from an illness to get another job: an American paradox.) My secretary job, I am beginning to see, is no small thing, not for people my age. For a middle-class salary, regular work hours, and basic health care have become luxury items, the millennial generation’s equivalent of the sports car, the seaside vacation house, the boat.

  Perhaps The Composer can sense, on this cold morning in January of 2006, that this will be the last time I’ll ever work for him, the last time I’ll ever see him. Perhaps he knows that I am about to become one of the many musicians who have left his Ensemble, never to be heard from again. (“This is where your circle ends,” he had said at the end of the God Bless America Tour. “My circle goes on.”) Whatever the reason, he begins to talk to me about his life. During the hour-long ride to New Jersey, he tells me more about himself than he has in the past four years, more than he ever revealed during a fifty-four-city tour around America, a six-city tour of China.

  And it is only because he lets me in, finally, to see his real self, with his real flaws and vulnerabilities, that I will not repeat here what he told me that day. It was the only conversation I ever had with him that felt real, and because of its realness, it will remain private. What I can say is this: The most ridiculous of tics and habits of human nature—eating only Cap’n Crunch, fleeing a room several times to check to see whether one has to pee—are based in the deepest, most sincere feelings: the desire to be loved and praised. The desire to be recognized for a special talent, a reeyell gift.

  But what happens in the absence of a reeyell gift? What are one’s options in America, land of the exceptional, if one is born average?

  It’s with this private conversation, in a car, on the way to play music or something that sounds like it, that I am finally able to see The Composer not as what he does, but who he is. He’s a person waging a battle I know intimately, attempting to slay Mediocrity with the sword of Work. He’s a person who, like me, struggles with life in the body. He’s a person who, like me, is afflicted with symptoms of American madness: self-denial in the service of self-aggrandizement. A malignant fear of the possibility, reality, certainty of failure.

  We arrive at the mall and The Composer sets up and we begin our hours and hours of playing the same songs over and over again. People come up to The Composer and tell him it is beautiful music. That it sounds like Titanic. That they fucking love Titanic. That Titanic music soothes them in a way that other music does not.

  For the music of Titanic is not just music. It’s also a story, and over the course of the four years I worked for The Composer, the music and the story became one and the same. The story of Titanic was never really about a sinki
ng boat. (“I know what happens at the end!” my mom called out to me one Friday night in late 1997, when I was sixteen years old and Fernando picked me up to go to the movies. “It sinks!” she yelled after us.) Yes, it sinks, and at sixteen, this seemed like the main event to me. I did not go see Titanic again, did not understand the national obsession over it, did not understand the newspaper articles about hordes of people going to see the movie a second, third, thirtieth time. After all, there had been plenty of great disaster movies before, some with compelling love stories and moving soundtracks.

  What made Titanic different, I came to realize, was its frame narrative. The movie begins not with any of the main characters, but with a team of cynical submarine operators making a fake, melodramatic documentary—a public relations ploy to justify their quest for sunken treasure. But their cynicism and fakery are no match for Old-Woman-Rose. In telling her story, Old-Woman-Rose controls the disaster. It does not control her. Titanic is a movie that argues less for the promise of romantic love than for the idea that horrific events can, through storytelling, be contained and controlled. That even when the most unimaginable disaster strikes, there will be survivors to tell its tales.

  The desire for postdisaster control was so strong in Americans during the years I worked for the Ensemble, the years 2002–2006, that even the slightest sound of a pennywhistle was soothing. It made them think of Old-Woman-Rose in her bed, just before the credits roll, strengthened their resolve to believe that even the most shocking national tragedy will evolve over time, become a story told by old women with good senses of humor, women who go on to live full lives and have the photos on their nightstands to prove it, their memories more precious than their diamonds.

  And The Composer—a man who could not recognize Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a man who did not know who John Kerry was on the eve of the 2004 election—The Composer knew this: Americans needed music that gave the illusion of control over disaster.

  This is who The Composer was: A person who did not understand America’s basic facts, but wholly and completely understood its deepest feelings, its most powerful fears and desires.

  And I came to understand that I needed the same things, that the only way to surface from my own panic was to hope it was temporary. To hope that somewhere, in the future, was an older version of myself able to transform disasters into stories.

  I look at her now, my younger self. She is working so hard at so many things. She’s playing the violin underwater and wondering why no one can hear her. She has no idea why she has disaster-brain, no idea why she has lost the ability to know the most basic things about her own body. Still, she teaches me something important: In the midst of panic, something compels her to take a look around, to take note of her surroundings, to remember what she sees.

  We played on the stage of a courtyard in a midscale New Jersey mall, where people watched us from the second-floor balcony, under a soaring skylight. It was a stage built for musicians like The Composer, for musicians like me, musicians who are a few notes shy of the real thing.

  Hanging from the balcony above the stage, there was a painting that I gazed at while I was playing. It seemed that this particular painting could exist only in this particular place at this particular time, with The Composer’s music playing underneath it. The painting depicted an American flag superimposed over some sort of catastrophic explosion in outer space. There were New York City firefighters and there were white-gowned angels, and they all seemed to be floating somewhere around the moon.

  Epilogue

  The Composer smiles out at me from a photo on the Internet. He is wearing a tuxedo on a world-renowned concert stage. He has his arm around Kate Winslet.

  In the years since I quit playing for the Ensemble, The Composer has gone on to perform many more PBS specials and concerts in our nation’s finest concert halls, many of which include the same recordings that I once played along to in front of a dead microphone. He has also recorded concerts with school children that, as far as I can tell, must be live. It appears that he has never given up his relentless work habits. His concerts continue to raise large amounts of money for PBS and charities.

  In recent years there has been brief national outrage when “live” music has turned out not to be. Consider the New York Times article that rocketed to the “Most Emailed” list the day after President Obama’s 2009 inauguration: “The Frigid Fingers Were Live, But the Music Wasn’t”:

  It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close. The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

  And at Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, Beyoncé’s lip-synching of the national anthem caused an even bigger controversy, dominating the national headlines for days. Granted, the musicians at both inaugurations were playing along to their own recordings, whereas The Composer’s musicians play along to recordings done by other musicians. But in my view these are all symptoms of the same contagion: the public’s insistence that live music be not only live but also utterly, flawlessly perfect. Which is to demand that it be inhuman.

  Learning how to play the violin—learning to listen, really listen to sound—taught me that audiences mostly listen with their eyes. It’s human. Our eyes are far more developed than our ears. Evidence for this can be found in the syntax of the way we talk about live concerts. People say they are going to go “see” a concert. “See Beyoncé.” “See Itzhak Perlman.” “See the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.” I don’t believe in the supremacy of live performance; it’s too tempting to use one’s eyes, rather than one’s ears, to listen.

  I believe in the value of trusting one’s ears and trusting one’s own emotional response to music. Even if that music happens to be, or happens to sound like, the soundtrack to a movie.

  Thank You, For Real

  An enormous thank you to my agent, Allison Devereux, and my editor, Tom Mayer, for their aesthetic integrity, ingenious editing, and encouragement. Thanks also to Emma Hitchcock, Nneoma Amadi-obi, Erin Winseman, Nina Hnatov, Ed Klaris, Alexia Bedat, and everyone at Norton.

  Thanks to those who read and believed in and helped with this project from the very beginning: Priya Swaminathan, Rachel Carter, Abigail Rabinowitz, Rachel Aviv, Alicia Oltulski, Sara Bailey Nagorski, Josh Garrett-Davis, Michelle Legro, Isankya Koddithuwakku, Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Glenn Michael Gordon, Murwarid Abdiani, Julia Sterr, and Rita Zakes Cameron.

  Thanks to those who taught me how to write: Brenda Wine-apple, Ann McCutchan, Bonnie Friedman, Nicole Smith, Richard Locke, Lis Harris, Patricia O’Toole, Paul Elie, Darcy Frey, Nicole Wallack, Leslie Sharpe, Mat Johnson, and Leslie Woodard. Thanks to Rebecca Fadely, Bonnie Gochenour, Sherri Jarrett, Steve Livesay, Beverly Bisbee, and the many other kindergarten to twelfth-grade teachers I had who showed up each day and taught their hearts out. Thanks also to my violin teacher, Catherine Nelson, who taught me just how difficult and beautiful it is to play for real.

  Thanks to the Toulouse Dissertation Fellowship at the University of North Texas. Thanks also to New Mexico Highlands University and Northern Kentucky University. I should probably also thank Columbia University, but I think I’ve thanked it enough in the form of the thirty egg-children I sold to pay its undergraduate tuition.

  This book took many years to write and revise. During that time, thanks for keeping me real: Hillary Stringer, Matt Davis, Chelsea Woodard, Latoya Gordon, the Mendoza family—Tony, Riley, Concha, Catherine, and Miguel—India Long, Lindsay Smith Ferrer, Margot Fitzsimmons, Kelly Moffett, Andy Miller, Steve Leigh, Emily Detmer-Goebel, John Alberti, Kris Yohe, Kimberly Gelbwasser, Tracey Bonner, Lynn Moulton, Lorena Marques, Katie and Greg Mercer, Helen Blythe, Nathan De Lee, Jeannie Hindman, Ellery Hindman, and Donna Woodford-Gormley and son, Carl.


  Thanks to Philip Glass, whose violin concertos and soundtracks inspired late-night writing sessions, and to the writers named in the book who taught me what to do.

  A heap of gratitude to Edith Yokely, Angela Palm, and Justin St. Germain. Thanks also to Sergei Kogut, Joel Resnicow, and Julie Bruins.

  Thank you to the person known in this book as The Composer.

  Above all, my gratitude and love to my parents, Don Hindman and Susan Chiccehitto, for always, always getting me over the mountains. And my brothers, Andrew and Alex, for coming along for the ride.

  Sounds Like Titanic is a work of nonfiction. Names and potentially identifying features of individuals, as well as minor details of chronology, have been changed, and dialogue has been reconstructed.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  All rights reserved

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  ISBN 978-0-393-65164-5

  ISBN 978-0-393-65165-2 (ebk.)

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