Detail questions about V

[Brian D. McCary]

First, a music question.  At the end of Chapter 2, we read:

"Horn & alto together favored sixths & minor fourths and when this
happened it was like a knife fight...." ect. ect.  (p 48, Bantam) What 
are these minor fourths?  In tempered instruments, the fourth is the same 
in both major and minor scales, as is the fifth and the root.  You have
minor seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths.  By standard notation,
minor fourths would simply be major thirds, which would hardly invoke
knife fights.  Are these minor fourths due to the natural horn?  I love
this whole section, where we hear McClintic for the first time, 
but I've never quite understood this part of it.

	Secondly, I found two instances so far where TRP drops out of his
normal voice and speaks directly to the reader.  One is just after the 
minor fourths passage.  ""Since the soule of Charlie Parker had dissolved
away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of 
nonsense had been spoken and written about him.  Much more was to come,
some is still being written today."  (p 49)  Seems like the is makes the
second clause a direct editorial comment outside the story.
	The second instance was the first paragraph of chapter 4, "In its
course he touched upon metempsychosis, faith healing, extrasensory
perception, and the rest of a weird cannon of twentieth-century metaphysics
we've come now to associate with the city of Los Angeles and similar
regions."  (p. 83)  Again, the "we've" seemed unusually direct and inclusive.
	So I'm wondering if these were just stylistic hicupps that he didn't
catch in the proof-reading, or if there is something else happening here that
I'm not catching.

Brian McCary