The Fourth Factor

I am hanging out with co-workers and getting to know somebody who’s apparently just been hired. Her name is Marie, and she’s from Canada. In addition to working here, she’s a grad student working on a music degree, which she's now almost done with. She's currently working on the composition that will be her thesis. She shows it to me – via some sort of electronic device, I think.

The music is notated on manuscript paper, but instead of the usual note shapes, there are little horizontal rectangles that stretch out for as long as the note is held, rather like a midi display. The inside of each rectangle is patterned in ways that indicate something about the music. I hear it in my head as I read, with the patterns calling up images and connotations in relation to it.

The first bar begins with two long Gs an octave apart played by instruments in the violin family – I don’t identify them explicitly in the dream, but given that it’s written in the bass clef, almost certainly cellos. The rectangles contain the patterns signifying darkness and light. The impression this makes is hard to describe. Poignant, maybe – a suggestion of a cavernous space vast enough to hold them both at once. It continues, but I can’t remember the part after that so well.

16.5.20