Setting aside the dismissive maxim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, Eleanor Chan’s Duet is a book about looking at music. The visual, she argues, has been ‘vital to the way that music has gained meaning and been disseminated throughout the centuries’. So she encourages us to see music as well as to listen to it, taking us on a whistle-stop tour around buildings, books, scores, instruments, sculptures, paintings, clothes and caves to show how our eyes and ears have guided each other for millennia.

Chan describes herself as an art historian, practising painter and singer, but writer should certainly be added to the list. Much of Duet has the flair of a novel. I won’t forget her evocation of a shaman painting in the caves of the Périgord, or her description of a box of postcard artworks sent to her by her godmother. ‘Some of them are furry-soft at the corners and riffled from where I have taken them out and shuffled them like a deck of tarot,’ she writes, ‘telling fortunes with sheaves of Alberto Giacometti, J M W Turner, Leonora Carrington, whole moods and lives through paint and ink and line.’

Chan takes an informal approach to geography and chronology: magpie-­like, she plucks from history moments and images that shine brightly. Chapters are divided thematically (for example, venues, instruments, musical notation), an approach which allows Chan to traverse time and space at speed. We’re in sixth-­century Ethiopia one minute as St