Music Mosaic - Clair de Lune

Click on this link: Clair de Lune to hear the music associated with this project as you scroll.

I was brave. I was daring, and though the future wasn't always clear for me, I was ready to take it on. I knew that I had empty canvas in front of me; one I could fill will whatever I wanted, and I knew who I was well enough to understand that I could do anything - even things that others thought to be impossible. Knowing who I was was the only way I survived. The only way I progressed. It was possible because I KNEW who I was. And one of the primary ways I expressed who I was, was through music. Particularly through playing my emotions through the keys of a piano. However, when I was 16, I lost my memory due to an unexpected 8-minute grand mall seizure. Everything was gone. This project shows the story of my loss of memory as well as finding a renewed sense of self. 

I chose this song because it was the first thing I remembered after I awoke from my seizure, weeks after losing my memory. The pictures in this mosaic seem to have no theme, and that is because my world was chaos when I woke up – I couldn’t make sense of anything! However, as time went on, I was able to make subtle connections here and there, slowly making sense of the seemingly nonsensical events taking place in my life.

One of my cinematic heroes, Gandalf the Gray, said in response to Frodo wishing his current circumstances had never happened, "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." In this experience, I went from myself, to nobody, to being a puppet moved by someone else pulling my strings, to realizing my potential again, and using my passions to revitalize myself. Of course I wished that this situation had never come to me, but I decided to make a conscious choice to LIVE. I was going to make the most of the time given to me.

I chose photos that had a wooden/hollow theme because good and bad come from those factors. I could look at my situation as being hollow and wooden like a puppet, with no control, or I could see my hollowness as a tool to create beautiful music like a piano. Each picture is close-up because that is how I viewed the world for a time. Paying attention to the finite details that could help give me clues as to who I might have been, and who I was supposed to become. In Annie Dillard's "Seeing," she discusses much about the critical importance of finding beauty in the simple things. What held me together was finding the utmost peace in a simple song - Clair de Lune. I could play it by heart, and that was all I had. The song begins in a beautiful, simple, yet very confident way with very particular chords, and it concludes with those same chord progressions only slower, lighter and more gently thought out. This became me. Before my seizure, I knew what I could do: I was confident, yet found joy in the simple. After losing my memory and beginning to regain a sense of who I was NOW, I found that my core hadn't changed. I was still me, only I saw the world from a gentler, more careful point of view, and I began to rebuild and reconstruct my own personal song. Things started to make sense again, only this time, I didn't have memories of regret or trial and error. This time, though beaten down a bit and weathered, I was free.