‘There are no words’, George Steiner quotes Eugene Ionesco as saying, ‘for the deepest experiences. The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself. Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.’ He is, of course, playing with words, their capacity for paradox and irony, even as he seemingly laments their inadequacies. However, he also acknowledges a truth recognised by all as the fact of death leaves us with no vocabulary beyond a phatic communication, a murmuring of platitudes. There are no words for the deepest experiences but there are sounds, music, with the ability to circumvent the cul de sac of language and break through a disabling solitude.

When words are exhausted, become the vapid slogans of politicians, prove inadequate to the experience they would articulate, silence is one option, perhaps the purest if also the most isolating, but there is another. It is true that those who wander down the street, headphones clamped in place, literally march to a different drummer to those who slide past them like so many ghosts. They are, though, tapping into a common predisposition towards a rhythmic structuring of time, a shared emotional susceptibility to melody and key, the rise and fall of insinuating notes. There are commonalities which bypass social, racial, class and national divisions and have the ability to arc across time.