Venues matter in Glasgow's history of its Dear Green Sounds

One recent example of many. Last autumn, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra gave a performance of Berg's opera Wozzeck at City Halls that I'll never forget. It wasn't a lavish production - only a handful of props and costumes - but the sound was immense. I'm sure the decibels broke recommended levels during that coruscating orchestral scream when Marie submits to the Drum Major's sleazy advances, or those terrifying crescendos that well up after Wozzeck has done his violent worst. There was a sense of being overwhelmed by something bigger than the characters, bigger than ourselves, and the collective emotional wreckage among the audience that night was undoubtedly part of what made the performance unforgettable.

Venue matters, and venues matter. Why do we bother leaving the house to hear music? We could easily experience more perfect performances and more perfect sound quality without the faff of jumping on a bike or bus or subway, without the coughs and crowds and ticket prices and uncomfortable seats. I could have stayed at home that soggy Thursday night and listened to the same Wozzeck when it was broadcast a few weeks later on BBC Radio 3. And yet... And yet every night we head out in our droves to pubs, clubs and concert halls to hear music made live.

Venues matter for the community they bring together, for the collective experience of a hundred jaws dropping simultaneously at the beauty or devastation or comfort or thrill that great performances can unleash. Which brings me back to those sentimental, more ineffable reasons for my love of City Halls. There are, objectively speaking, more glamorous stages with finer acoustics elsewhere in the world. But City Halls is my local; my Thursday-night regular; my comfort zone. I bump into folk I know there. I go there when my mood is cheerful, anxious, giddy or blue. I've taken along my mum, my boyfriend, my neighbours and colleagues; I've dashed out for fish and chips during intervals and afterwards made new friends arguing the technicalities of Boulez performance practice in the pub around the corner. All of this matters because no venue is a clean slate. Every space has its set of associations that work their way into the way we experience live music.

Something else I love about City Halls: its refined whites and golds are offset by the deep purples and dark-stained wood of the Old Fruitmarket. I love the incongruity of hearing Robin Ticciati conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a lithe, blithely daring account of a Haydn symphony then skipping across the bar into a thicket of bantering fans at a Shooglenifty gig in the Fruitmarket. Something about that genre clash feels so, well, Glasgow. This city has always been a crossroads: Gaels and Romans, Irish and Highlanders, recent ethnic communities too numerous to list here. Each has added its sounds to the mix. In 2008 Glasgow became a UNESCO City of Music - joining the ranks of Gent, Seville, Bologna, Bogota, Brazzaville, Hanover, Mannheim and Hamamatsu - thanks to the many and motley musics that have been made here over the centuries. How and where they coexist is part of what makes the city tick.

This week saw the launch of a new book about the history of music in Glasgow. Dear Green Sounds was commissioned by UNESCO City of Music, published by Waverley Books and edited by me. It all started three years ago when UNESCO's Svend Brown dreamed up a book that would encompass everything from medieval chant to rock, pop, folk, electronic, classical and any other musical denomination going in Glasgow. As editor that was a daunting prospect, to say the least, and Svend and I talked long and hard about how to approach such an unruly, disparate and disputed subject: after all, there are people with lifetimes' worth of passion and expertise devoted to every obscure nook and cranny along the way.

What an affectionate, agonising, endlessly entertaining education it has turned out to be. I found myself going down marvellous avenues I never knew existed. I asked around; I appealed to every music fan I knew, the nerdier the better. I looked into how such topics are treated in other cities and realised that broad-reaching studies are all too rare: mostly the musical past is divvied up into genres and periods and personalities. I spent long days and weeks in the Mitchell Library archives, riveted by Herald reports of Glasgow's 19th-century concert life. I launched debates with musicians and musicologists that raged late into the night: how best to structure a narrative through 700 years of musical history? There was never any suggestion of a dry chronology or history textbook, and neither did chapters titled 'folk' or 'classical' or 'pop' make much sense. Music, audiences and Glasgow are far more messy-edged than those kind of labels generally imply.

Fundamentally this is a book about music and place and the push and pull between the two, and gradually it became clear that the spotlight needed to be on venues themselves: those storied stones and stages that have hosted musical life since the foundations of the city. Each of the book's 20 chapters focuses on a Glasgow haunt and the performers and audiences that have called it home. There are streets, pubs and clubs, music halls, piping colleges and recording studios as well as concert halls, cathedrals and ballrooms. High praise is due to the book's contributors, who unearth whole worlds of fabled events, fond memories and fresh insights. Between them, they capture how a city has shaped the music that's been made in it - and how that music has shaped the city. Venue matters and venues matter.

"At the Barrowland Ballroom - known, almost universally, as the Barras - excitement begins brewing on the outside," writes Graeme Virtue in Dear Green Sounds. "The street-facing side of the five-storey building is dominated by an enormous neon sign, the word 'Barrowland' announced in snazzy red neon with a rakish curve and a constellation of animated stars. It's part Hollywood, part gaudy Las Vegas. The massive neon layout costs around £10 an hour to run and, since this is thrifty Scotland, it's only switched on when a gig is actually scheduled."

Vic Galloway celebrates an altogether less conspicuous edifice. "183 West Princes Street: a small, rented flat in the West End of Glasgow. It might not sound like the birthplace of a musical breakthrough," Galloway muses, "but the global terms 'indie-pop' and 'post-punk' can be traced back to this address - and to the man who lived there." Enter Alan Horne, Orange Juice and the epoch-defining Postcard Records. Since reading Vic's chapter I give a wee nod to Number 183 every time I walk down West Princes Street.

Tom Service remembers transformative experiences hearing the Berlin Philharmonic under Kurt Sanderling at the Royal Concert Hall. "For a teenage classical music fanatic and first-time Bruckner listener like me, these concerts were revelatory in their power and intensity," he writes. "Sitting above the violas in the GRCH's balcony that night was one of the defining moments in my musical life." Service doesn't pretend that the GRCH offers particularly decent acoustics or stylish visual aesthetics, and he is candid about the politics of 'Lally's Palais' and the municipal 1990 agenda. What he celebrates are those ineffable, experiential factors, and he does so with all the fondness of an old friend.

There is real poignancy, too, in the chapters that deal with what's been lost. Stories of the Apollo are the stuff of outlandish legend: "Was Freddie Mercury dragged off that vertiginous stage by hysterical fans? Did AC/DC's Bon Scott really take a wrong turn backstage and end up out on the street, only to be refused re-entry by stony-faced bouncers? Was the general manager once used as a battering ram?" Nostalgic hyperbole notwithstanding, Graeme Virtue notes, "the Apollo crowd soon became notorious as a creature from Greek mythology. As well as bellicose heckling, they were prone to unpredictable singing en masse and some bands took to calling them 'the Glasgow Choir'..."

For me, the most emotional chapter tells the story of St Andrew's Hall, Glasgow's senselessly lost orchestral gem. Hugh Macdonald opens by describing a walk along Granville Street. "You may be taken aback by the impressive ionic-pillared facade framing what is now used as the main entrance to the Mitchell Library. You might well wonder why this Greek-inspired grandeur, with its caryatids and dramatic statuary, seems to have so little in common with the domed baroque architecture of the library's North Street facade at the other end of the block, assaulted as it is by a constant roar from the deep canyon of the motorway that yawns incongruously below. Then, looking up, you see five names etched into the stone: PURCELL - BACH - HANDEL - MOZART - BEETHOVEN. And you realise that this was once the entrance not to a temple of learning, but to an important concert hall."

St Andrew's Hall was one of the world's greatest, celebrated alongside Vienna's Musikverein and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. For nearly a century it attracted the finest conductors and orchestras to Glasgow - then suddenly it was gone, burned down by the flick of a cigarette during an amateur boxing match (Scotland vs Romania; Scotland lost). The hall could have been rebuilt but wasn't: the library wanted the space, the city planners were conspiring to create a culture district downtown, and priority went to the tangle of motorways that made Charing Cross the no-man's-land it is today.

Glasgow has ever had its share of hard knocks, and I love the energy that comes from a city that knows how to pick itself back up. There seems an irrepressible urge to make art here, no matter what (in the words of Tommy Cunningham of Clydebank's Wet Wet Wet, "it was either crime, the dole, football, or music - and we chose music"). There will, I know, be heated arguments over what could and should have been included in Dear Green Sounds: the venues that got away, personalities omitted, stories told through alternate lenses. To my mind that's all good. What are arguments if not a manifestation of the passion this book celebrates? I hereby brace myself.

A final thought. This book is a celebration, but also a caution. In an age of overstretched arts funding, when it is increasingly difficult for small, non-mainstream venues to stay afloat amid commercial heavyweights, Dear Green Sounds is a testament to what a diversity of live arts does for the wellbeing of any city. The Victorians knew full-well the power of live music and rallied on an industrial scale: with the wealth of the Empire's Second City, merchants woke at 6am to sing madrigals and more than 100 choirs were going strong by the turn of the 20th century. Glasgow had something to sing about and knew how to make its voice heard. Here's to another 700 years of raucous live music in this beautifully irreverent city.

Dear Green Sounds is out now from Waverley Books. As part of the Aye Write! festival, Kate Molleson, Svend Brown and Hugh MacDonald will discuss St Andrew's Hall on April 19 at noon; Ewan McVicar will reminisce about the Scotia Bar on April 19 at 7.30pm; and Kate Molleson, Vic Galloway and Geoff Ellis of DF Concerts will look at Glasgow's wider rock music scene on April 24 at 9pm - all events take place at the Mitchell Library