Music carries memories for us all.
I think that’s why my generation, and my mom’s generation, and my grandma’s generation, and all the generations dating back to the very first moment a person touched lips with an instrument—or what would one day become known as an instrument—are attracted to song. Music is organized chaos—it’s orderly noise that makes you stop what you’re doing and feel something. And I, like all my predecessors and peers, am desperate for a feeling.
The first time I heard—I mean really heard— Clair de Lune, L. 32 was on an overcast Thursday afternoon in Amsterdam. I walked through the galleries of the Van Gogh Museum, moved by masterpieces in the forms of texture and sound. Debussy’s delicate lullaby seemed to call Van Gogh’s paintings to life.
The climax of the song bursts forth as I set eyes on Sunflowers (1889), Van Gogh’s great treasure. In high school, I attempted a recreation of the painting with oil pastels, and it hangs downstairs in my mother’s basement. I never imagined I would see the real thing.
Amsterdam didn’t make much sense to me at first. It seems like the kind of place misfits aligned in their quirky escape from reality and closure, the sort of city where English was almost nobody’s first language, yet everyone used it to establish common ground. Many places in Europe are like this, it seems, but none quite like Amsterdam.
The city is notorious for acting as a beacon of debauchery and sin, with the Red Light District up and running again post-COVID-19 and a Coffee Shop on every corner (after repeatedly complaining about their bland signs, a friend gently explained that “coffee” didn’t refer to anything resembling a dark roast). After receiving a stern warning from our cab driver in Ireland about the importance of avoiding edibles in Amsterdam, my thrill for the destination began to wane. And yet, drugs, sex, and alcohol cannot be Amsterdam’s sole charms.
So few make it to the cultural, historical, and aesthetic side of the city. There is, of course, the Van Gogh Museum (whose collection, disappointingly, does not include Starry Night (1889)—we can thank the Museum of Modern Art in NYC for that) and the Rijksmuseum (housing some of the most beautiful art and history collections from Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Rembrandt). Historically, Amsterdam is perhaps most renowned for being the home of the Anne Frank House, whose diary from the Holocaust has impacted millions of lives since its publication in 1947. Amsterdam’s beauty is unparalleled and wildly diverse; the canals in the city’s center glimmer reflections of skinny buildings with oblong roofs. If one desired to catch a breath of fresh air, it’s rather convenient to catch the bus (or cycle, if you’re feeling ambitious) to the Keukenhof Tulip Fields, whose flora bloom in full color in April and May.
There is a rhythm to the city. There are more cyclers than cars, the multicolored bicycles stacked nose-to-nose on nearly every street corner, yet they manage to make it through the day without crashing into trams and pedestrians (mostly). People are constantly rushing in and out of Amsterdam Centraal, departing abroad or drinking in the fresh air of a new adventure.
Amsterdam’s architecture is reminiscent of a Wes Anderson film, bricks colored brown or blue or maroon or honeysuckle, the pointed rooftops jutting against a gray skyline in balanced harmony. The buildings hold a melody of their own, dancing across the horizon, the sunset coloring their muted paint into vibrant tones.
Sometimes I think God anticipated Claude Debussy’s composition, painting the colors of the world as Clair de Lune played artfully in the background of heaven. Vincent Van Gogh, I hope, would have created something magical to its notes, had he lived to see its performance. As Clair de Lune transports me back to that blissful day in April, the rain pelting softly against the glass window frames as I strolled along the galleries of the Van Gogh Museum, I think of how Debussy’s anthem might’ve saved Vincent. It isn’t that Clair de Lune is even that uplifting of a tune—rather, I feel melancholy when I listen to its delicate notes, the piano pulling me back to a place I felt utterly happy and complete. I smile, I grieve what once was, and I carry the memories with me. This is the process of healing; this is what music can do for a person.
I’ll never know if Clair de Lune possessed the power to piece Vincent Van Gogh back together. He died by suicide outside a French commune on July 29, 1890. Claude Debussy began composing Clair de Lune that very same year. Van Gogh wrote, “I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say, ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’” Likewise, Debussy said, “Music, don’t you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It’s not even the expression of a feeling, it’s the feeling itself.”
Van Gogh, Debussy, and anyone who has been given the opportunity to travel will understand that we cannot possibly escape this world without feeling. Not after seeing cities built from ash and haunted by history, cities who boast of being places where one can waste a life or be given that life back again.
Tot de volgende keer,
Hannah Rose Rob
Commentaires