Poets have been inspired by music for centuries, but with the arrival of recordings and the possibility of repeated listening there was an extraordinary upsurge in poems about specific pieces and named composers. There followed a century of responses, fascinating to the poetry lover, delightful to the music lover, and irresistible to those who are both. In putting together Accompanied Voices, I have drawn chiefly on this hoard of largely overlooked material – often by major poets. The result is, I believe, a unique book. Not only is it an anthology of some of the most memorable and accessible international writing about classical music, and a moving commentary by one set of practising artists on the work of another; it is also something of a guide in verse (the language which comes closest to music itself) to the great composers of the past five hundred years. My hope is that the reader might find the same pleasure in turning these pages that they would find in putting on a CD and listening.

When there is any news coverage at all of classical music, it tends to be about scandals, ageing audiences or funding cuts. Meanwhile, I suspect that things are much as they ever were: there are still young people out there being swept away by their first experience of The Rite of Spring, just as there are grey heads puzzling over a new Maxwell Davies Naxos Quartet. Or perhaps it is the other way round. The late Robert Tear, who was a poet as well as a wonderful tenor, even wrote in the Guardian shortly before he died that he would like to let music lie fallow, to ‘give audiences time to really want to hear music again. Having been starved of it for five years, they would demand it.’ While less confident than Tear, I do believe that music is not only the food of love but the food of life itself. It is this conviction – and, in my case certainly, a spirit of envious rivalry – that has moved so many poets to write about it.