Good food and beautiful music bring us happiness in similar ways
‘La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable bonheur’ (Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness): the words of 19th-century French culinary powerhouse Auguste Escoffier. That bon mot was much on my mind during a recent visit to Toulouse. After an admiring look at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, home of the city’s opera and ballet companies, we dined at the gloriously traditional Toulousain restaurant Le Pyrénéen. I ordered their speciality dish: kidneys and scallops, pan fried in butter and parsley. It’s not a combination for the gastronomically faint-hearted, but the resulting collision of flavours didn’t have me reaching for the culinary repertoire to sum it up; strangely enough, it had my brain heading for the equivalent musical surprise pairing.
I was thinking of Poulenc’s Concert champêtre, his 1928 slice of neo-baroquery, in which the harpsichord joins a modern-day orchestra in a combination that at first somewhat confuses the senses, but soon becomes a feast for the ears. It struck me that the performances consumed in the Théâtre du Capitole, and indeed in spaces ranging from minstrels’ galleries to medieval monasteries, function in much the same way as that buttery grande bouffe at Le Pyrénéen: good food brings us happiness in very similar ways to good music; we eat in much the same way as we listen; food and music have offered the same sensory indulgence across the centuries.
Music accompanying dining goes back to the dawn of civilisation
The relationship between music and food is something that’s been on my mind since March, when I was part of the team behind the first ever Classical Brunch at Spiritland, a listening bar in central London more associated with House music than Haydn. Our classical DJ set took in everything from Gershwin’s Three Preludes to the Shanghai String Quartet with Chinese folk songs, played out of some sizable speakers while our audience brunched. Those particular musical selections alluded to the way brunch really took off in the US during the Jazz Age, and is mirrored by Chinese dim sum. Dim sum evolved from a tradition established in 10th-century Guangzhou, where tea houses served small-portion meals called ‘yum-cha’, meaning ‘touch the heart’. As the yum-cha was consumed, singers would perform folk tunes to the early Song dynasty diners, ensuring that hearts were touched sonically as well as gastronomically.
Archaeological discoveries tell us that the idea of music accompanying dining goes much further back than that, however. When early humans gathered around a fire to share a kill or celebrate a harvest, drumming and chanting almost certainly accompanied the meal. In ancient Mesopotamia, banquets at the royal courts of Sumer and Akkad have been described as opulent affairs where musicians performed while the food was eaten. The Standard of Ur, a 4,500-year-old Sumerian artefact found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur (modern-day Iraq), depicts a banqueting scene in which a lyre player plucks away for feasting figures. In tombs at Thebes and the Egyptian village of Saqqara, wall paintings show harpists, flautists and singers performing as guests dine on roasted fowl, figs and wine.
Henry VIII - a musical monarch who combined music and food
One musical monarch who definitely consumed a roasted fowl or two in his time was Henry VIII. On a recent visit to Hampton Court Palace, I marvelled at what went on in the kitchens where Henry’s feasts were prepared – he was so into banqueting that he extended the kitchen to fill 55 rooms. The 200 members of the kitchen staff provided meals of up to 14 courses and delicacies included grilled beaver tails, whole roasted peacocks and swans plus the occasional boar’s head.
Just imagine what those dishes would have looked like as they were served up in Hampton Court’s Great Hall, a breathtaking chamber with a towering hammerbeam ceiling, walls hung with the Abraham Tapestries woven from silk and gold and silver thread, each replete with stags’ antlers and colour flooding through the vast stained-glass windows. These feasts were spectacle on a grand scale – those roasted swans were served with golden crowns on their heads – and music was the element that completed the culinary theatricality. Lutes, viols, recorders and virginals were played while it all took place.
Feasting often segued into dancing
Henry himself wrote music: his Pastime with Good Company would undoubtedly have soundtracked the consumption of whale meat and marzipan. And let’s not forget the tradition of the ‘subtlety’, an elaborate sugar sculpture presented between courses, often depicting biblical scenes or heraldic symbols. These sugary works of art simply had to be accompanied with a fanfare – what else? The serving of the boar’s head was a Christmas treat, accompanied by the ‘Boar’s Head Carol’ which describes said head as ‘bedeck’d with bays and rosemary’. The feasting often segued straight into dancing, so the tunes being played would shift into pavans and galliards when Henry looked like he wished to get his royal groove on.
Henry VIII was famously no friend of the monasteries: he and Thomas Cromwell oversaw the destruction of hundreds of them between 1536 and ’41. Before that extended moment of reckless dissolution, monks also used music as an accompaniment to communal dining. In Benedictine monasteries Gregorian chant accompanied the monks’ meals; it was music that helped elevate the ritual of eating into the sacred domain.
Telemann and his 'Table Music'
And now over to Germany. Georg Philipp Telemann was a composer born into a family with long-standing connections to the Lutheran Church in 1681; his father and grandfather were clergymen. But it was the glorification of mealtime music where he really excelled. In 1733, he published his Tafelmusik (Table Music) collection of overtures, suites and concertos, to be performed while the wealthy got gluttonous. First titled with a gallic flourish as ‘Musique de table’, the complete set of parts, engraved in copper, cost eight Reichsthaler, which was a very punchy price.
Over 200 subscribers were willing to hand over the money to Telemann in advance, with their name, social status and address published in the first edition. Try pressing ‘play’ on Musica Antiqua Köln’s recording and you’ll soon find that even a fish finger-and-chips supper feels more like an early 18th-century Hamburgian banquet.
Mozart and music for wealthy partying
When it comes to well-heeled aristocratic types being soundtracked while feasting, a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart knew just what buttons – or keys – to press. Some of Mozart’s most celestially beautiful music, his serenades, were composed for musicians playing outdoors while wealthy Viennese tucked into the canapés – the works were written for string ensembles and for wind bands, with winds carrying best across candlelit, ornate gardens bedecked for partying.
The Adagio from Mozart’s ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade K361 is the subject of one of the greatest literary descriptions of music in existence, as heard in the words of Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: ‘This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.’ Let it never be said that Mozart held back on the quality of his own brand of ‘Tafelmusik’. And while we’re on the subject of Shaffer’s version of Mozart, in that same play the young Amadeus tucks into some Capezzoli di Venere (Nipples of Venus), sugared confections not unlike the ‘subtleties’ I mentioned earlier.
Music and sound officially alter taste... and science proves it
Sadly, there were no Nipples of Venus available at our Classical Brunch in London, but DJ-ing opposite the immense Living Voice sound system while the crowd tucked into their chorizo beans and poached eggs, I was struck by the fact that we weren’t too far off the ‘musique de table’ that Telemann mastered. Nowadays, we can look to science to ascertain what lies behind the historic connection between food and music. Oxford professor Charles Spence is a pioneer in ‘gastrophysics’, demonstrating that music and sound significantly alter taste perception, a concept known as ‘sonic seasoning’. His research shows that high-pitched sounds enhance sweet notes, low-pitched sounds bring out bitter notes, and specific music genres can increase enjoyment of food by up to 15 per cent. Restaurants are now commissioning bespoke soundscapes to sonically enhance their menus.
Unsurprisingly, the ever-experimental chef Heston Blumenthal has created dishes designed to be eaten while listening to specific pieces of music – his ‘Sound of the Sea’ dish famously came with an iPod playing crashing waves and seagulls. I’m not convinced that such a soundtrack would change the fact that I find oysters inedible, but the intriguing thing is that Blumenthal is providing a modern-day take on Henry VIII and his ‘Boar’s Head’-based immersive experience. It makes me wonder if I ought to nip back to Le Pyrénéen in Toulouse and ask if they’d like a bespoke classical playlist for their Rognons aux Coquilles Saint-Jacques et Persil. A bit of Poulenc perhaps?
Georgia Mann and Rob Winter’s next Classical DJ set takes place on 15 and 16 August at The Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace, London.
