In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
James Elkins’s novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams is a propulsive and inventively told debut.
James McManus wrote of the book:
“The long life of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic and first-time novelist James Elkins an epic canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in twitchy, often hilarious prose. But all you need to know is that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls.”
Weak in Comparison to Dreams has a really unusual playlist. Partly because there is music in it—literally. There is sheet music in the novel itself. It’s all for piano, and most of it is playable. Some isn’t easy—I can’t play a couple of the pieces myself—and some is impossible, because it calls for microtones between the notes of the piano. (It could be done on a digital keyboard.) It’s also an unusual playlist because the music isn’t designed to be heard. I hope some readers will try some on the piano, but it’s actually meant to be seen on the page. The music is described by the main character in the novel, Samuel. Thanks to Unnamed Press, there is a vinyl recording of some of the music: I played it digitally from Finale and Sibelius files, and recorded the text that accompanies it. But I never imagined a record when I wrote the book! The innovation is to have sheet music in a novel, and to present it as an image, as a visual object that can be seen and enjoyed by anyone, because it’s described in ways that don’t require musical knowledge.
The playlist is also unsual because the composers are real, but the musical excerpts are not actually their work. I changed all the notes, rhythms, and harmonies so they correspond to the way Samuel remembers them. He’s an elderly narrator, over ninety, and this is how he thinks of the music. (It’s also a way to avoid copyright infringement, since I’m naming actual composers and mainly real pieces of music.)
Last and least, it’s an unusual playlist because some of these are little-known Soviet avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century: music Samuel likes because it reminds him of his life.
All the music in Weak in Comparison to Dreams is in the last third of the book. The idea is that the old Samuel is thinking back over his life, and trying to remember people he’d known forty years earlier. He has mainly forgotten them, but he finds that when he thinks of them he hears music. They remind him of these composers. So the pages with music are where Samuel remembers his earlier life, and the people in it, as music. The music is Samuel’s portraiture of people and places he’s nearly forgotten. Music, in this book, is portraiture.
1. Helmut Lachenmann, Guero
This is an experimental piece in which the performer sits at the piano, but doesn’t depress any keys. Instead they run their fingers up and down the fronts or tops of the keys, producing a kind of soft clicking that has no musical pitch. The score is very unusual looking; Lachenmann invented it just for this piece. Here’s an excerpt of my version of it, as it appears in the book:
Another Lachenmann piece in the book is called Child’s Play. It’s a sarcastic, exaggerated version of simple children’s melodies. Some of them are piercingly loud, with notes way up at the top of the keyboard, or down at the bottom. Harmless little nursery rhyme melodies are turned into nightmare dirges.
In Weak in Comparison to Dreams, Samuel thinks of Lachenmann when he remembers a year he spent, forty years before, touring zoos for a job he had. The caged animals upset him, and they sounded like the rattling of Guero or the shrieks of Child’s Play.
2. Beat Furrer, Phasma
Furrer is a contemporary Austrian composer. Phasma is a piano piece that’s exceptionally difficult to play. The performer puts their forearms down on the keyboard, elbows out, and plays clusters of notes, very quietly and precisely.
The measures are divided into groups of five notes, and each measure has a different rhythm. In between those note clusters, the performer has to play other notes (on the bottom stave) that weave between the clusters in a different rhythm. (My version is sometimes literally unplayable, because that’s how Samuel pictures it.)
Furrer is mechanical, cold, and yet entrancing, and Samuel thinks of him when he is remembering a woman named Viperine, whom he knew forty years ago. Viperine was an enigmatic person. At first Samuel wasn’t sure of her gender, and during the year he knew her, she was repellent and difficult but hypnotic, like Phasma.
3. Sergei Protopopov, First Piano Sonata
Protopopov was a Russian avant-garde composer with an unusual theory of harmony. His First Piano Sonata opens with a small measure showing off his theory, which he got from his piano instructor. In Samuel’s imagination (in his defective memory) the entire piece follows exactly the same pattern, page after page. In Weak in Comparison to Dreams I fill several pages with these notes, which rise and fall like ocean waves, and never give way to other textures of music, as they do in Protopopov’s actual sonata.
This is Samuel’s way of remembering the strange, oppressive experiences he had in the year that’s described in the first part of the novel. The title points to what happened to him: his days were so oppressive that he started having nightmares, and they became stronger and stronger until he died, in his dreams.
4. Julius Weissmann, Tree of Fugues
This isn’t in the vinyl recording. Weissmann was a Nazi-era composer who wrote docile fugues in the style of Bach while his hometown was bombed by Allied forces. He spent the war imagining that he was in eighteenth-century Germany, like his idol Bach, happily composing music for churches and the nobility. I take him as an example of someone who wished to live inside his dreams.
5. Ivan Wyaschnegradsky, Preludes and Fugues
He’s not on the vinyl either, because it would have taken me too long to program an electronic keyboard to make his music. Note the strange “sharp” and “flat” signs:
This is adapted from one of Wyschnegradsky’s pieces that uses quarter tones, and these are his special symbols for half-flats and half-sharps. Wyschnegradsky had several specially constructed pianos that permitted him to play these pieces. He also composed pieces for two pianos, so that one could be tuned a quarter-tone flat. You can hear his actual pieces on Youtube. Quarter tones are especially grating. (Other microtones are much more subtle. There are many systems, and the actual composer experimented with several more complex microtonal systems.) Because this music sounds so sour, and the quarter tones are so unpleasant against the normal pitches, I used Wyschnegradsky as a way for Samuel to remember his marriage, which did not end well. He remembers talking to his wife: his tones were like the ordinary pitches, and her voice was always exactly a quarter tone off. At first, early in their marriage, they both thought they fit together perfectly. Then they realized they were perfect opposites.
James Elkins is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an art historian and critic as well as a recognized authority on the experimental use of images in works by W.H. Sebald and Anne Carson to Claudia Rankine and Teju Cole. Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York and for the last twenty years he has lived, studied, and taught in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books on fine art and photography which focus on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is his first novel.