(The Professor went to the window and opened it, letting the sour old smoke out and the noises of the city in.)
Listen (he said), listen to the great mechanical symphony, the big black combo. The airplanes are the double bass. Have you noticed how you can always hear one nowadays? When one walks out of the sky another walks in.
Presses and pumps round out the bass section. Listen to them rumble and thump! Tonight they've got an old steam locomotive helping. Maybe they're giving a benefit show for the old duffer.
Cars and traffic—they're the strings. Mostly cellos and violas. They purr and wail and whine and keep trying to get out of their section.
Brasses? To me the steel-on-steel of streetcars and El trains always sounds like trumpets and cornets. Strident, metallic, fiery cold.
Hear that siren way off? It's a clarinet. The ship horns are tubas, the diesel horn's an oboe. And that lovely dreadful french horn is an electric saw cutting down the last tree.
But what a percussion section they've got! The big stuff, like streetcar bells jangling, is easy to catch, but you have to really listen to get the subtleties—the buzz of a defective neon sign, the click of a stoplight changing.
Sometimes you do get human voices, I'll admit, but they're not like they are in Beethoven's Ninth or Holst's Planets.
There's the real sound of the universe (the Professor concluded, shutting the window). That's your heavenly choir. That's the music of the spheres the old alchemists kept listening for—if they'd just stayed around a little longer they'd all have been deafened by it. Oh, to think that Schopenhauer was bothered by the crack of carters' whips!