The Sound Of One Ear Chewing
Sarah has written before about the unmistakable link between musicians and cooking, and this past Sunday, as I was scouring the wires for orchestra news to plug into ArtsJournal's weekend edition, I came across a piece from Paul Horsley, music critic of the Kansas City Star, which really attempts to get at the heart of the matter.
Horsley, I suspect, started out writing this article as one of those humanizing personality pieces in which the arts reporter shows his subject to be just a regular guy, no matter how formal he may look on stage in tux and tails. But in the course of writing about a dinner party among musicians of the Kansas City Symphony, he must have had his interest piqued enough to do some serious research into whether there might actually be a connection between the way our brains process music and food...
"Most musicians agree that their discipline often fosters a highly sophisticated sense of taste... Numerous members of the Kansas City Symphony are so passionate about cuisine, it’s like a second profession."
That's all well and good, and my anecdotal experience would suggest that it is probably true of most orchestra rosters these days. But Horsley's not content with the anecdotal...
"Sensory perception happens in the brain’s cortex, the gray covering of the brain, and each sense activates a different area. For hearing, those areas are on the sides of the brain. Taste and smell are more deeply planted... We do know, however, that eating is a multisensory activity, and thus it involves the orbitofrontal cortex, which responds to enjoyable sensations and works to produce in us our sense of enjoyment when we experience these."
Heavy stuff, and certainly more than I ever think about while spending a rather unreasonable percentage of my downtime baking homemade bread, curing my own Canadian bacon, perfecting pan sauces, and trying desperately to come up with a perfect summer soup that will wow even my brother, a professional cook in Oregon. But I love the idea that there may be more to my and my colleagues' obsession with food than simple gluttony. Who knows, maybe the next major cultural crossover won't be between disparate musical genres, but between the acts of listening and eating...
(Oh, wait. Aaron Kernis and the Italian futurists already took care of that, didn't they?)
Horsley, I suspect, started out writing this article as one of those humanizing personality pieces in which the arts reporter shows his subject to be just a regular guy, no matter how formal he may look on stage in tux and tails. But in the course of writing about a dinner party among musicians of the Kansas City Symphony, he must have had his interest piqued enough to do some serious research into whether there might actually be a connection between the way our brains process music and food...
"Most musicians agree that their discipline often fosters a highly sophisticated sense of taste... Numerous members of the Kansas City Symphony are so passionate about cuisine, it’s like a second profession."
That's all well and good, and my anecdotal experience would suggest that it is probably true of most orchestra rosters these days. But Horsley's not content with the anecdotal...
"Sensory perception happens in the brain’s cortex, the gray covering of the brain, and each sense activates a different area. For hearing, those areas are on the sides of the brain. Taste and smell are more deeply planted... We do know, however, that eating is a multisensory activity, and thus it involves the orbitofrontal cortex, which responds to enjoyable sensations and works to produce in us our sense of enjoyment when we experience these."
Heavy stuff, and certainly more than I ever think about while spending a rather unreasonable percentage of my downtime baking homemade bread, curing my own Canadian bacon, perfecting pan sauces, and trying desperately to come up with a perfect summer soup that will wow even my brother, a professional cook in Oregon. But I love the idea that there may be more to my and my colleagues' obsession with food than simple gluttony. Who knows, maybe the next major cultural crossover won't be between disparate musical genres, but between the acts of listening and eating...
(Oh, wait. Aaron Kernis and the Italian futurists already took care of that, didn't they?)
Labels: food, music and psychology
posted by Sam at
11:25 PM
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