Detail questions about V

[Tim Ware]

I know that I, being a musician/composer, winced mightily when I read
"minor fourths" in _V._. It gave me that uncertain, disquieting feeling of
"Jeez, if he's this far off on music, about which I know quite a bit, then
what of all these other "facts" that I have to hope don't wander so far
off. 

"Minor fourths" is an expression I've never run across anywhere else, in
music school, playing with many other pros, &c. As Brian said, it doesn't
really make any sense, unless he's speaking of a minor IV chord in a
progression.

TW

On Tue, 25 Jun 1996, Brian D. McCary wrote:

> 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
>