Even technophobes felt sadness at the death of Steve Jobs, that a man so energetic and charismatic should die so young. But us luddites also felt a little bemusement at his sudden posthumous status – did Steve Jobs really change the world? Well yes, I guess he did: I was listening to my iPod as I saw the news the old fashioned way – on the front page of a daily paper.

My iPod is one of the small ones that only holds a few hundred ‘songs’, so once a fortnight I empty it of everything but the truly sacred and rip a load of music from CD that’s either entirely new to me or that I haven’t heard in a while and want to bone-up on.

Not long ago this site was extolling the virtues of the iTunes’s ‘shuffle’ feature, which plays random tracks from your library. Some people see shuffle as a heinous crime against completism and the epitome of an ‘excerpt’ culture. But shuffle is what you make of it, and for me it’s a provocative, nourishing and beautifully simple piece of technology that puts a strange and alluring angle on the world of music. I only use it sparingly, but it has changed the way I understand a lot of music. 

Shuffle is tantalising simply because you don’t know which of your chosen tracks you’re going to hear next. But it can also put your musical learning curve on the sharpest of ascendancies. There’s nothing like it to cut through clichés and received wisdoms. Orchestrations, key schemes, harmonic tendencies, modal inflections – all thrust up against one another. You think you’re listening to Schoenberg and actually it’s Ravel. You get the blazing ecstasy of an immolation abutting the introspective purity of a Goldberg variation. There are few better ways to learn about the individualism of a composer than to hear his or her music up against someone who’s lazily touted as their strongest influence.

Sometimes though, shuffle doesn’t seem all that random. Now and then it will give you a mini-season of a single composer. Occasionally it even seems aware of its own surroundings. Making a long trek home over London late one night last week, I experienced one of my most memorable musical smorgasbords courtesy of shuffle.

As I was carried down the escalator at Camden Town tube, the Vivace giocoso of Aulis Sallinen’s Third Symphony seemed to be conjuring a strange, twisting underworld. Strings snapped and thwacked as I weaved in and out of the hoards to catch the waiting train; the panic was ratcheted-up with curious keening horns and coruscating metal sheets of snare drum as the carriages rattled through the tunnels.

But as we slid into Euston, the Sallinen frenzied itself out. A brief, pregnant silence, and the organ of Wells Cathedral gently breathed a muted, reassuring major chord and the cathedral choir started to chant Psalm 108. They sang with clipped warmth; meanwhile I processed alone down an empty tile-clad tunnel towards the Victoria Line.

But the piece de resistance was what followed. Somewhere around Green Park, Tchaikovsky’s young soldier Vaudémont started singing – slowly discovering his love for the blind princess Iolanta. As he realised her predicament, he tried to explain light, colour, the richness of the visual world. Tchaikovsky’s music rumbled upwards to almost unbearable emotional strength and the carriage filled with beautiful people – interacting with extra acuity through adrenalin, alcohol or simply lack of space. There we all were – thrust together like the solider and the prince.

Vaudémont threw everything at it and Iolanta responded. They broke free into an ecstatic musical embrace just as the doors zinged open at Brixton. We all dispersed, but on the top deck of the bus from there, Iolanta and Vaudémont moved on to their rapturous harp-twanged duet – a musical motor driven by instant love and supported by the nigh time energy of Brixton and Tulse Hill. Just as I put my key in the door, Tchaikovsky’s strings sealed it with a soaring, surging kiss. 

It’s strange how all this ‘old’ music feels so close to life when you hear it unexpectedly while commuting alone. At its best, it’s as if everyone and everything around you is somehow purposefully choreographed to it. That’s the music itself, of course, but you only make the connection – and what a transformative connection it can be – because of people like Steve Jobs.