The first edition of The Bluffer’s Guide to Music may have led the way, noting that a Bruckner symphony that starts as you leave London, can last a long way north on the M6. It was published in the 1960s, when Bruckner was always paired with Mahler, more for their assonance — and our ignorance — than for any musicological reason. Yet I’ll not forget that for me as a youngster exploring classical music, this facetious jape constituted a formative insight, suggesting a useful framework, a tool, in no way technical, with which to tackle all these sundry masterpieces scattered like viewpoints on the dutiful prentice path to the omniscient connoisseurship yonder, snagged hazily around the lofty peaks of the Third Programme...

Yes, well, perhaps I took a wrong turning or two. Nevertheless the idea has stuck. What is the music that goes with a given landscape or route, familiar or new? How to choose? What are the parameters?

There is a knack to the choice you make. We might raise it to a form of self-expression — a signal of your exuberance or subtlety. For instance, somehow to play intricately shining Venetian splendour such as Gabrieli or Monteverdi as one punts a Buick up Fifth Avenue has an aptness of juxtaposition as revealing as Scott Venturi’s notorious study of Las Vegas in terms of Florentine palace architecture. And those with an elegant taste for irony may prefer to match the Chopin waltzes with gridlock at the Hammersmith fly-over. Just another manic Monday, as the song goes...

The champion here has to be David Hockney, who began solving melancholy by driving out into the wastes of the desert with The Messiah at full tilt. Later he concocted a route round the mountains behind Los Angeles, to reflect a sequence of Wagner played the while, an instance of his characteristic backwards-twist logic, choosing the route to go with the music.

Fantasy can enter the equation. Certain stretches of the M8 as it strangles the nobility of Glasgow town called for the brutal lushness of the Rite of Spring, when I was a bell-bottomed tart in a Triumph Stag many years ago: it was the ideal crunching freeway music to the Bostonesque film I fancied I was starring in, drunk on the sheer exoticism of what was then the solitary stretch of sweeping urban motorway in Scotland. More recently I found that repeated play of the Sextet, written for Piano Circus by Chris Fitkin, gave the perfect accompaniment to the roads around Peebles — and would not have worked in East Anglia. Indeed, friends in Piano Circus told me they then pictured me tootling about in the Borders, like Toad in his banger perhaps, hood down, as they played the piece...

Though not strictly for a car journey, the same question arose for a glorious journey I made this summer, crossing the Nullarbor Plane on the Indian-Pacific railway. I was equipped with fathoms of Morton Feldman, music whose events are as etiolated as the verdure to each side of the endless desert, but it was the wrong choice: the emptiness of the view is a myth and every bush takes on vital interest as you scan in astonishment. Would I had had the Goldberg Variations — Alexis Weissenberg perhaps, endlessly repeated and pernickety, scrub by scrub — but managed with the sardonism of Hutch singing Cole Porter and Irvin Berlin, suitably swish for the accoutrements of the train, what’s more.

Then there’s opera and the terrible temptation to sing along. At least now in the age of hands-off telephones this exercise in dismembered embouchure attracts less attention from others doubtful of your chattering sanity. Rossini can be played and hahahaha’ed-to anywhere, so long as it’s bucketing patterns on the windscreen like cream out of control. Leaving town for the country requires Italian opera, Donizetti being very fine for journeys south, Bellini being better suited to itineraries away from the sun. To plunge into Devon to the sextet from Lucia is to be my next experiment — Callas, Berlin 1955, with the encore, thank you. On the Brecon Beacons or heading towards any rugged coast, my stand-in for Jon Vickers as Tristan has to be heard to be believed, as I swoop and swoon to little peaks barren like the choppiness of a hateful sea. The wonder is, the sheep safely graze, uncaring as a Breughel shepherd.

The choice cannot always be made on selfish grounds, especially when wooing. An apt choice of music may tilt the balance towards that precious first snog with the engine off carefully parked out of street light. A rule of thumb here is to opt for French music. In an age eager for confessions of such a nature I can hardly withhold revealing that my own experiments here suggest the piano concertos of Saint-Saëns to be the most fruitful accompaniment towards one’s evil ends.

No indeed, the car need not be in motion. Das Lied von der Erde — the final movement especially — heard in a misted-up Austin, equipped with almost madderized Meursault, parked overlooking the squally sea at Aberdeen, in drizzle, remains for me the definitive setting. It was impossible not to silence Donald Macleod’s announcement after that, and peer out towards the ewig of the North Sea, working the little chamois sponge the while. Sweetheart and I lasted little longer, alas, all the same; well, it was an Austin Princess...