I'm writing this to Laurie Anderson's album Big Science (those of you who were around in the early eighties may remember a weird and amazing piece called 'Superman' reaching the charts...). I know I'm not alone among writers in preferring to write to music, but one of the pleasures of blogging, surfing or getting hooked on some ridiculous online puzzle is that I can do it to music with words: Madeleine Peyroux is a current favourite, and Steely Dan an old one, while I clean the house and drive to Queen and Eric Clapton very, very loud.
Real musicians can't treat music as background in that way. Equally, I can't treat words as background to words: I have to write to instrumental music, or words I don't really understand. I can understand the Latin of a mass, but the words don't snag my ears, so that's okay. And it has to be familiar music too, so that I don't get too interested. Radio 3 is one of civilisation's great achievements, but just because of that, it's no use to me in a working morning.
There's something about the patterns in the music that makes my mind work better and more clearly. Baroque and classical (in the strict, Mozart-date sense) music seem to suit particularly well, and the big oratorios conveniently cover two or three CDs before you have to choose something new. Piazzola - Bach dancing Tango - is another favourite, and I'll forever associate him with Theo and Eva in TMoL. I've written much of the new novel to Purcell's Music for Queen Mary, though it's two hundred years too late for my fifteenth century people. His funeral music for her must be some of the most magnificently sad ever written. Matching the tune to the scene sounds a bit trite, a bit like some silly online quiz, or even, perhaps, like a cheap trick to get myself in the mood. But it's not silly to take seriously what you need in order to write. I'm enough of a professional to sit down and write at 8.30 every morning, so I need to make sure the mood - the emotional connection - is waiting for me, because I can't afford to wait for it.
And there's something else. As my sister said, 'Perhaps it shuts up the censor.' I'm sure this is right. Somehow, like a physiotherapist's TENS machine blocking the bio-electrical pain signals whizzing through your nerves from injury or childbirth to brain, music - the pure maths of frequency and overtones - blocks the wandering electrics of my mind. They're the signals I don't need for writing, that aren't engaged when the rest of me is, the idle stuff which the Anti-Writing Demon finds so easy to use. Left to themselves, without music, these little electrical charges of boredom, fear, criticism or despair scatter through me, spread into the rest of my brain, and suddenly writing becomes postponeable, unnecessary, impossible.
A delightful bonus of my habit is that even without listening to them 'properly' I've got to know certain pieces of music incredibly well: Chopin, Schubert, The Penguin Café Orchestra. I know nothing about music in the technical sense, though I've played instruments and sung in choirs. And yet these pieces I know from the inside: know intuitively, understand emotionally though not at all musicologically. And it's occurred to me, writing this, that when you're reading, or sometimes even writing, that's the zone you're in. In that place rhythms can make you laugh, tones and timbres shiver over your skin, patterns make you cry. It's music, in the end, which is the mathematics of love.
