An Interview with Ira Braus, author of Classical Cooks
Conducted by Peter Bates
Author Ira Braus has published a book about food in classical music, called Classical Cooks. The book 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 gastro-musical association. Audiophile Audition interviewed Mr. Braus, who talked effusively about his book and the ideas it proposes.
Please supply a few words about the process of imagining, building, and compiling this book.
As a child, I’d always listened to radio shows like “Breakfast Symphony” and “Lunch with Mozart,” so I naturally associated food with music. Later, I noticed that my music teachers often used food imagery to verbalize musical ideas. One teacher compared the rubato (rhythmic flexibility) used in playing Brahms to “pulling taffy.” Another wanted to hear more “fat” in my youthfully nouvelle cuisine rendition of the “Arietta” in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.32, op.111.
Work on the book started when I studied musicology at Harvard during the mid-1980s. It all came together when I learned about the mannerist music of late 14th-century Avignon, a repertory famous for its pungent dissonances and syncopations. Avignon was/is the garlic capital of Mediterranean France, a venue of the earliest European garlic festivals.
Equally important was my study of composers’ letters. They revealed how naturally the composers mixed the culinary and the musical. So when a raft of gastromusical books like Al Stankus’ Jazz Cooks, and June LeBell’s The New York Philharmonic Cookbook appeared around 1990, I knew that I had to write Classical Cooks. All the more so, since gastrohistorical books on painting and literature were coming out as well – I’m thinking of The Toulouse Lautrec Cookbook and Keats’s Porridge.
You maintain that “the gastromusical metaphor helps us to better digest the sounds, sensations, and structure of music.” Can you elaborate?
Let the classical cooks speak for themselves. The “enlightened” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88), rejecting the music of his father’s generation, compares its “baroque” ornamentation with overly-spiced cooking. Erik Satie likens the ripe chromaticism of Wagner’s music to sauerkraut and compares it unfavorably with the fresh (diatonic) flavor of French music. Last not least, the young Sergei Prokofiev flinches at the cloyingly sweet berries he samples on a visit to the country, an edible metaphor for what he calls Chopin’s “effete” nocturnes.
We know you coined the term “gastromusicology.” How about the concept? Has anyone else noticed the connection between food and music?
“Gastromusicology” derives from “gastrohistory,” an academic buzzword distantly related to postmodern studies, a mix-and-match epistemology. Clearly, I’m not the first to mark the connection between food and music: there have been numerous orchestral cookbooks and humorous articles published in academic music journals. But I am probably the first licensed musicologist to treat the subject seriously.
In your book you say that gastromusicology can help explain musical styles, such as the “persistent buzz, the hum of continuous thematic development” in those great coffee consumers, Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach. Were they what they consumed?
Yes, the three Bs consumed, and were consumed by, coffee. Unhappily for gastromusicology, Bach and Brahms left us sparse sketch material. But Beethoven left hundreds of such pages, many of which resemble the coffee grounds left in his cup while drafting all the sublime quartets and symphonies.
You mention in your text that you contacted some living composers and got them to contribute. What were some of their reactions? For example, did some need more convincing than others?
Some composers, like Elliott Schwarz, were delighted to answer the query I sent out. (He was actually a food journalist at one time.) But the late Daniel Pinkham –reputedly a superb cook — refused, saying “This is the most bizarre questionnaire I’ve seen in my life.” Most of the other composers queried – including George Crumb and Milton Babbitt — were flattered at being immortalized gastromusicologically.
In the first section, Course 1, you compare Bach’s English Suite No.4 to a meal – Prelude (appetizer), Allemande (bouillabaisse), Courante (cod in cream sauce), Sarabande (succulent steak), Minuet (salad), Gigue (ice cream cake). Do you think Bach, consciously or unconsciously, thought along those lines while composing?
Any answer to your question is inspired guesswork, but I’d say yes for two reasons. First, the humble Bach may have savored memories of repasts with, say, Prince Leopold, while cooking up the “courses” of his own suites. Second, he might have emulated predecessors such as J.H. Schein, composer of “Banchetto Musicale” (‘Musical Banquet’), or G.P. Telemann, composer of “Tafelmusik” (Table Music). Telemann was ranked ahead of Bach by the good burg(h)ers of Leipzig for the Thomaskirche job. But was he the better chef? Bach scholar Christoph Wolff might be able to answer the question more knowledgably.
When reading your humorous style, one is reminded of Nicholas Slonimsky’s The Lexicon of Musical Invective. Was he an inspiration for the anecdotal sections of your book?
Indeed! I couldn’t have written Classical Cooks without having read Slonimsky’ s Lexicon. I originally thought of inviting him to write a foreword but then decided against it, since he was pushing 100 at the time and not in the best of health.
Have you sampled many of the classical cooks’ recipes you provide in the book?
I’ve sampled the Debussy and Ravel recipes, as prepared by conductor/cook, Ertan Sener, to accompany a lecture I gave for a music appreciation series he ran at the Simsbury (CT) Library four years ago. Frankly, I’d rather not sample most of the recipes, since food intolerances force me to follow a diet typical of a Vietnamese rice farmer. But I do appreciate, vicariously, how the energies of staple Western foods inform composers’ works. Just listen to the way Brahms’s enthusiasm for pot roast echoes through the beefy finales of his symphonies. Or how Wagner’s passion for zwieback resounds in his crunchy scoring for brass instruments. Or how Ravel’s liking for Pernot morphs into the dry wit of his Tombeau de Couperin.
Do you ever play music to match what you’re cooking and eating?
Generally, I do not, for reasons implied in the answer to the previous question. But I think of say, a vegetable egg fu yung , when playing a piece like Debussy’s Pagodes. The opulent texture of this food nicely complements the sumptuous Chinoisierie of the music. (Savor those fluffy chords in the bass!) In all honesty, I can say that I made this connection well before learning, from memoirs of the composer’s friends, that they had swooned over the omelets he cooked for them at his flat on the Rue Cardinet.
CLASSICAL COOKS is distributed through Borders (on-line orders only). The hardcover edition costs $30.99 (+postage); softcover, $20.99 (+ postage).
