In the name of more efficient distribution, music and literature are divorced at birth and fed back into the world by separate pipes. To fully enjoy or understand the music, we often need to reconstruct a context which has dropped away. The materials issued with a disc can be sketchy or misleading while a written History of Music is often a disconcertingly silent read. For a long time I had pillaged all the books for the respectable hard facts: names, dates, places, words of songs, opus numbers. The authorities spit out these facts time after time and arrange them like so many cherry-stones around an empty plate. Time spent unearthing these things in libraries, compiling endless lists, tended paradoxically to cast doubt on what I thought I knew at the start. Writing about music appeared to involve an oath to connect nothing, to question nothing and to disturb nothing. I began to query my own rôle as a gaoler of music, pinning down each composer, each work, in a separate cell. Because every time I thought they had been safely isolated or restricted to their proper cell-mates, I found evidence that the musical mad-house was alive with mysterious tappings on the pipes.

Music and facts seem like oil and vinegar anyway, always inclined to separate out with a preference for their own kind. It was only under certain conditions that a few facts would cluster together to form an idea and an idea is something that can be waved at a piece of music with intent, like Vermouth at a Dry Martini. The tomb does not always slide open as obligingly as Elgar's Enigma but when people start to get snappish and demand "Just what is it you are implying?" I feel I am getting somewhere, even if it is nowhere on any map.

Consulting a search-engine is increasingly like summoning up Erda in her blue cloud of knowledge and computers are helping us to piece together previously invisible bodies of information which had been spread across several disciplines. Any library-worm must have experienced from time to time a sense of ennui at the weight of so many unread books and so much unperformed music. It comes as a delightful surprise to discover that these sleeping giants have all along been conversing among themselves. Now we have the arts to question them, the only doubt concerns whether we can stir ourselves sufficiently to care about the answers they give.

Each of these pieces begins with art and goes trespassing outwards into the realms of politics and religion. The notion of music as displaying the outward signs of a hidden ongoing battle of ideas and influences can be startling and may even seem anti-artistic. The string quartets of Beethoven do not seem to connect with the ballot-box in any obvious way. Yet the creation of such a "pure" music, which nourishes the mind or soul and which in turn takes from the mind its iconic status as a human achievement, is an act of breathtaking Promethean disobedience. All the literature seems to discourage speculations about a flesh and blood invisible college so the rational thing is to call them spooks or faces in the fire.

Here is Elgar hobnobbing with heretics and aesthetes and seeking inspiration from the same fount as David Bowie. Almost by accident, we stumble on the solution to his Enigma which actually works. There goes Conan Doyle conjuring with ancient names and playing an occult game with Arthur Machen which had aerial consequences over the battlefield of Mons. Here comes James Joyce and Jack the Ripper, Mother Goose and a whole flotilla of Freemasons on a succession of spectral gondolas. In a tiny vignette we try to uncover the truth behind the startling allegation that Schoenberg pupil Theodor Adorno wrote all The Beatles' songs. There is alchemy and Bloomsday, Irish politics and queer fellows to follow. Then the Freemasons come around again and again till we get sick of them. In every case, the starting point is music and in every case we find ourselves a long way from home. If they are faces in the fire, well I hope you will think they were at least worth the price of the match.

© James Beswick Whitehead, March, 2001