From 'The Moldau' to the Mississippi, a flood of images

Music has a way of putting places in my mind's eye. Listening to it, together with reading, is almost as good as traveling -- and better in the sense that you don't need tickets or suitcases.

"Music lets you travel through time and space while you sit in your chair," says John Mauceri, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

I love going to the Grand Canyon with Ferde Grofe's 1934 "Grand Canyon Suite" and rambling over the Left Bank to George Gershwin's 1928 "An American in Paris." Some years ago I drove the back roads of West Virginia accompanied by Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring," trying to decide whether the music or the scenery pleased me more.

I can't hear anything by Richard Wagner without thinking of Germany, except "The Ride of the Valkyries," the composer's nationalistic signature from "Die Walkure," the second opera of the "Ring of the Nibelung" cycle. Thanks to its use in the film "Apocalypse Now," that music inevitably transports me to Vietnam by helicopter.

Claudia Macdonald, a musicologist at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, said the rise of nationalism in the 19th century helped spark the composition of music associated with place. An example of this is Robert Schumann's "Rhenish" symphony, which claims the Rhine Valley, oft contested by France and Germany, for Deutschland -- in music, anyway.

These days, on Rhine River cruises, the "Lorelei" song is played when vessels pass a 433-foot promontory near the hamlet of St. Goarshausen, where a nymph lured boatmen to their deaths, according to legend. When I heard it there last December, it sounded tacky and cliched, one of the dangers of place-associated music.

How long must San Francisco suffer one crooner or another pining about having left his heart there? It embarrasses me to admit I once let myself be totally undone by a bad recording of Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York." A New Yorker at the time, I was on a bus headed for Buenos Aires and desperately homesick. By the time Sinatra got to the part about his "vagabond shoes," I had tears in my eyes.