Perfect Fourth: It Must Be Wednesday

"Today," the priest declared, "is the octave of Easter." Now that caught my attention and gave me a sufficient homily's worth of musings: the week as our western arrangement of whole and half tones, the days as scale degrees, the hours marking major and minor tendencies.

My dad never liked Wednesday, when "nothing's fresh and new, and nothing's quite yet ready to end." Now I can't help but laugh imagining my dad, a man of the fields, sharing some innate musical sense with those whose modes treated the perfect interval as a dissonance to be avoided. I dread Tuesdays; could that have cultivated my (indulgently) introspective playing of Schoenberg's Op. 11, with its constantly kaleidoscoping major and minor thirds? Measuring the days as harmonic intervals all depends on where you locate a tonic, I guess, whether it's Sunday, Monday, or Thursday. What sound is the hour when the damned parking tickets sprout from under your windshield wiper?