If there are some days when music is the spontaneous dance partner of time, then last Friday was a typical example of this choreographed interplay.

Having woken up with a stiff neck, which made the slightest twist to the right a very painful affair, I decided against using either my bicycle or motorbike for work. Instead, I opted for contingency plan 645 – the bus which passes through Xemxija Bay on its way to Sliema while travelling along the scenic Bugibba sea front and Bahar ic-Caghaq coast road. To contrast with this visual tranquility, I opted to listen to the soundtrack of Natural Born Killers, which in itself is an album of contrasts. Leonard Cohen’s Waiting for the Miracle or The Future for soothing, seductive tones and L7’s Shitlist or Jane’s Addiction Sex is Violent for an injection of adrenaline.

I had another soundtrack lined up for my lunch breaks at work and the return trip home: Amadeus. There’s one track in particular from this double CD that I never get tired of listening to - Requiem, K.626: Introitus; just over 11 minutes of sheer aural pleasure.

Back home, I stripped down into a pair of shorts and T-shirt, strapped myself onto the rowing machine, donned my headphones yet again and set my MP3 to a compilation called Club for Heroes. This contains some of the most popular tracks of the 80s: Visage’s Fade to Grey, Ultra Vox’s Vienna, Talk Talk’s Talk Talk, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love and Teardrop Explodes’ Reward.

Until then, all the music I’d been listening to were my selections. However, while having supper I tuned in to Radju Malta. That Friday happened to be the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, an important day for the Catholic Church in Malta, and so the state radio had a program dedicated to the event. Besides giving very interesting information about this feast, they also played the complete album of Karl Jenkins’s Stabat Mater. How satisfying to be completely overwhelmed by compositions of such touching beauty … all the more when I was least expecting it.