Like ritual, live music is an activity that renews itself and its participants every time it occurs. Great locations for music, like great mosques or cathedrals, tend to resonate with accumulated energy even when silent.
All of the venues, festivals and cities on this very personal list exert their own geographic, historical or architectural character on the sounds you may hear on a visit. They are places where I've had peak musical encounters, or where I would bet money (in some cases, a lot of money) on the chances of meeting with some special fusion of sound and place.
Most require serious planning, and in some cases even a little cunning, for you to get hold of the appropriate open sesame. Even then, uncertainty is always part of the experience, because live music is never the same twice. These days, we can listen to everything on an iPod, and make any kind of music the soundtrack for the banal travelogue of daily life. But the full effect of a live performance in a unique place still can't be squeezed onto a hard drive.
Hearing music outside your own little environment used to require real effort, and even risk. Blues and folk archivists John and Alan Lomax spent months in the 1930s driving over back roads across the American south, searching juke joints and prisons for blues and folk musicians who hadn't yet been "tainted" by the spread of commercial recording. J.S. Bach walked more than 300 kilometres to hear Buxtehude play the organ, more than two centuries before the invention of credit cards and travel insurance.
Even with great planning and hard trekking, memorable music sometimes appears when you least expect it. I wasn't looking for anything special one winter evening in Seville, for example, when a tight procession of people carrying a life-sized effigy of the weeping Virgin Mary appeared in an otherwise deserted street. At nearly every corner, the procession stopped in front of small altars set in the walls, and the crowd began to play and sing a beautiful, flamenco-based form of religious music that I would never have heard had I not been out walking that particular night.
But as Pasteur said, chance favours those who are prepared to take advantage of it. If you want to hear the magic, you'd better head for where it lives.
Teatro Amazonas Opera House
Manaus, Brazil
Like the dot-com billionaires of the late nineties, Brazil's 19th-century rubber barons thought the party would never end, so they built this extravagant theatre at a remote river junction in Manaus, the city at the heart of one of the world's most forbidding jungles. Their folly was commemorated in a feature film by Werner Herzog, whose Fitzcarraldo (1982) remains a landmark of gonzo adventure filmmaking.
By all accounts, the recently refurbished opera house is a jewel, whose wild impracticality (it seats only 700) hasn't stopped the decade-old Amazonas Opera Festival from offering four fully staged productions this spring: Ponchielli's La Gioconda, the two Otellos by Verdi and Rossini, and Carlo Gomes's Fosca. Last year, the festival offered Wagner's complete Ring Cycle, a first for Brazil.
A film festival takes place in the theatre every November, while other events, such as rock shows and concerts by the Amazon Philharmonic, happen less regularly. The White Stripes, for one, performed there last June, at about the same time Jack White stepped into an Amazon canoe to be married to model Karen Elson.
Barcelona
Other European cities flaunt their musical lives more openly (see London, below), but Barcelona has wonders no other town can match.
