Music to play while travelling

Driving from London up to the north-west Highlands of Scotland the other week, I made my own version of a songline. A songline, according to Aboriginal cultures, is a musical route across the land. OK, my songline didn't have much to do with ancient creation myths: you might more conventionally call it a pile of CDs. But the way the music seemed to imprint itself on the landscape made for some spine-tingling moments. I found the nostalgia engendered by the high-NRG pop of the 1980s and 90s perfect for long motorway stretches, in a relentless 70mph kind of way, but when I reached the Lake District and the beautiful Borders country further north, I needed something with a longer line, to echo the lengthy contours of the mountains and valleys. So I popped on some Wagner. I chose Parsifal, the Good Friday Music from the third act , in which Gurnemanz tells Parsifal, the returning hero, how nature is a transcendent vision of God's benevolence. The music, the Lakes and the Borders seemed to shimmer with a shared radiance. The combination induced in me a possibly dangerous reverie, although there were times when the music's climaxes were out of sync with the scenery: old Gurnemanz's most visionary utterances and Wagner's most voluptuous music occasionally coincided with a passing petrol station. I didn't manage what David Hockney used to do in California: he came up with an hour-and-a-half-long drive through the Santa Monica hills that perfectly fitted the music of Parsifal. "It matches everything the eye sees and the ear hears," he said . Reaching Assynt – past Inverness, past Ullapool, and into some of the most awesome mountainscapes on Earth – my songlines took a lyrical, literary turn. In the village of Inverkirkaig, there's a monument to Norman MacCaig , the poet, walker, fisherman and teacher who spent as much time as he could in this magical place, inspired by its peaks, lochs, people – and music. MacCaig's poetry contains some of the finest writing about music I've read. He turned this landscape before me into sound, weaving together the names of hills and composers: "And God was Mozart when he wrote Cul Mor ." MacCaig's poem Moment Musical in Assynt culminates with a paean to his favourite hill, Suilven , which dominates this terrain with its seemingly impregnable cliffs and crests. "I listen with my eyes and see through that/ Mellifluous din of shapes my masterpiece/ Of masterpieces:/ One sandstone chord that holds up time in space:/ Sforzando Suilven reared on his ground bass." That image of holding up "time in space" has a Wagnerian resonance. When Gurnemanz leads Parsifal to the Grail ceremony for the first time in the opera, he sings: "You see, my son, here time becomes space." MacCaig's writing presents a problem, though. It makes any actual music seem an impertinence, an unnatural and unneeded accompaniment to the geological masterpiece that is Assynt. Yet I found something that fitted the bill – something that had, on the face of it anyway, little to do with Scotland or the Highlands, with fiddling or bagpipe music, or with work by a Scottish composer. Fishing around for a CD, I grabbed Dvořák's Eighth Symphony . Listening to its joyous, earthy energy, I nosed the car round a bend on the single-track road and, just as Dvořák's finale exploded, I found myself gazing out at a glistening sea, bound by a rugged coast and bejewelled with the Hebridean islands. Of course, this was nothing more than a coincidence of Czech music, Highland landscape, and the tempo of my driving, but the combination was like 3D poetry – my very own Hockney moment in the heart of the Highlands. My cultural life On my bedside table: War and Peace, a rollicking Russian read. Nice one, Tolstoy! On my iPod: Arnold Bax's second symphony. It's at the Proms next week. On my TV: The Code, with Marcus du Sautoy, my favourite bald mathematician. In my diary: I'm off to the Lucerne festival – to see Claudio Abbado. Can't wait.