“It was a revelation to learn,” he once wrote, “that by some curious kind of musical magnetics, the fourth step of the scale was pulled down to the third, and that the seventh was pulled up to the eighth. Nobody has ever explained it scientifically, but if you take the simple phrase of music that goes with ‘Shave and a haircut, two bits,’ you’ll find that the note that goes with ‘two’ is carried, whether it wants to or not, to the note that goes with ‘bits.’ It’s almost impossible for it to go anywhere else.” The note that goes with “two” is the
