Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

9. Nourishment, Body and Soul: Modern Performers, Diverse Tastes

215 Nourishment, Body and Soul Modern Performers, Diverse Tastes colin lawson Music and food enjoy each other’s company to an enormous degree. In fact, having one without the other is, for some, unthinkable . They certainly attract a common vocabulary, with the word taste somewhere near the top of the list. One could easily substitute music for gastronomy in the recent claim that “taste (as discrimination of flavor) is a function of refinement; empirical tastes are determined and organized according to cultural meanings and usages.”1 Music and food coincide in Orsino’s celebrated lines in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where he reflects that too much music might have the power to cure him of love in the same way that overeating might remove one’s appetite: If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. Unsurprisingly, parallels between the delights of culinary and musical tastes have been prominent in a variety of primary sources throughout history. Chapter Nine 216 Theorizing and Contextualizing Taste All matters relating to the senses are difficult to describe in words but often present some striking analogies. In the food industry , a common word to describe flavor is note, while texture is a popular term across both areas. C. P. E. Bach, in rejecting the music of his father’s generation, compared its baroque ornamentation with cooking that has been overspiced. Erik Satie likened the ripe chromaticism of Wagner’s music to sauerkraut and compared it unfavorably with the fresh flavor of French music. Prokofiev flinched at the cloyingly sweet berries he sampled on a visit to the country, an audible metaphor for what he calls Chopin’s “effete” nocturnes.2 A recent book humorously correlates the respective musical and culinary talents of composers living between 1350 and 2000. It also suggests ways for listeners to distinguish composers ’ styles by way of gastromusical association.3 Author Ira Braus claims the dubious distinction of having coined the term gastromusicology, maintaining that “the gastromusical metaphor helps us to better digest the sounds, sensations, and structure of music.” More conventional literature revolves around music, musicians , and recipes, such as Al Stankus’s Jazz Cooks and June Lebell’s Kitchen Classics from the Philharmonic.4 The history of music demonstrates that food can play a significant part in the creative process. The influence of food and drink on the professional lives of singers and players has been a regular feature of didactic treatises. Music teachers (at least in print) have tended to counsel a moderate lifestyle, advice that has never quite reflected the world of reality. In addressing the management of the physical demands of musical performance, a recent edited volume focusing on strategies and techniques to enhance performance identifies maintenance of a good diet as a key factor in preventing injury.5 The book also addresses the various effects of drugs, ranging across alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, antidepressants, betablockers , tranquillizers, amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, hallucinogens, and opiates. The authors’ advice inevitably errs on the side of sensible consumption, with exercise and psychological Nourishment, Body and Soul 217 treatment preferred to beta-blockers as a cure for bad performance anxiety. Appropriate quality and quantity of food intake has often featured among advice for performers, though such generously proportioned and hugely successful singers as Jesse Norman and Luciano Pavarotti are hardly encouraging role models. Indeed, some of the stories surrounding the career of Pavarotti stretch the limits of credibility. Recounts Leone Magiera, who often conducted Pavarotti: “The lightning cracks outside the window were terrifying. We were on a tiny twelve-seater plane, from Romania back to Italy, and seemed to be flying straight into the middle of a storm. At one point the turbulence got so bad that our airhostess gripped her rosary and started praying. It was then, amid all this panic, that Luciano Pavarotti piped up. ‘OK, there’s nothing for it. If we’re going to die, I want to die eating.’ He promptly grabbed an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits and wolfed down the lot.”6 Nevertheless, private flights were definitely Pavarotti’s preferred way of transport, so as to facilitate moving the mountains of food that traveled with him. “He was always devastated when he got to immigration—usually in America, for they had the tightest controls on imported goods—and his cured hams and pigs’ trotters got confiscated.” On...