Nicholson Baker's Travelling Sprinkler is lovely. A story of a poet, not writing poetry, being comfortably and uncomfortably middle-aged, thinking about music and learning to write songs.
He writes something true about temperament and tuning. Something that should probably go in the Analogy Library:
“Here’s the first thing you need to know: The orchestra doesn’t play in tune. That’s what makes it sound like an orchestra. It can’t be perfectly in tune. If it was perfectly in tune, it would have an entirely different sound. It’s a collective musical instrument that is always slightly out of tune with itself."
He captures that first rush of hearing stereo:
"I put the headphones on, and I lowered the needle on Zubin Mehta conducting The Rite of Spring, and suddenly I was there, enclosed in the oxygenated spatial spread of stereophonic sound"
"I couldn’t believe how big a world it was—how much bigger and better stereo was than mono. The human ear had figured out something many eons ago, millions of years ago, in the sacred springtime of the world, long before there were humans, in fact—something basic that very smart scientists took a while to figure out: You need two ears"
And he makes me feel old by describing someone with an obviously dwindling career whose tastes and assumptions very closely match mine. It's the flip-side of coming top at culture.
"Underworld is good. I discovered them by chance on a long plane flight. I was poking at the touch screen, looking for something to listen to after watching a very good documentary on Picasso and Matisse—Matisse comes off well, and after his operation he uses a pair of large shears to cut colored pieces of paper—and I saw a song on a list called “Bigmouth.” It was a dance number with an insanely honking harmonica and no words, and it was by Underworld, a band who had also created something called “Mmm… Skyscraper I Love You.” Back in the eighties they were doing things I would like to have done—chopping up found voice clips ahead of the game—although they were too tolerant perhaps in their early days of zappy saw-toothed sounds, as everyone was. The song I liked best by them was a more recent one called “Bird 1.” “Bird 1” is about something—I don’t know what—something about a white stick and a shaft of sunlight and a fly and a chainsaw of tiny firecrackers. I’m always a sucker for a shaft of sunlight. It’s stoned, I guess. It’s “poetry.” The chorus is splendid. “There is one bird in my house,” sings the main Underworld man, Karl Hyde. Not “a bird,” but “one bird.” There’s basically only one chord for most of the song, as well as one bird. There are a great many words in the song, however. Most of them don’t rhyme, and as in many great songs, the words aren’t terribly important. I would like to write something like this."