Two paragraphs of inspired prose

No inspirations today. I tried writing a little bit, but discovered that there wasn't much meat to my topic, and reverted to reading instead.

These paragraphs are taken from two separate books by the same author, and I enclose them here not only because they were strangely uplifting (to me, at least), but also because they revealed the author's deep knowledge of musical excellence and its trappings.

Now it was the trombone again and a tangled, half suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody's final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque tutti. But fatally unvaried. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods. Before he left for Manchester he had let the pages go as they were. There was no choice. Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make. This should have been the symphony's moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction that was about to come. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void; one that only revenge could fill.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

This restraint, this cool, suits the blues, or Theo's version of it. When he breaks on a medium paced standard like "Sweet Home Chicago", with its slouching dotted rhythm - he's said he's beginning to tire of these evergreen blues - he'll set off in the lower register with an easy muscular stride, like some sleek predatory creature, shuffling off tiredness, devouring miles of open savannah. Then he moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger. A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a passing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two -or four -note clusters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction. Henry has told no one, not even Rosalind, that there are moments, listening from the back of a West End bar, when the music thrills him, and in a state of exaltation he feels his pride in his son - inseparable from his pleasure in the music - as a constricting sensation in his chest, close to pain. It's difficult to breathe. At the heart of the blues is not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy.

Ian McEwan, Saturday