Introduction and motivation
Flour and water
On a hot Spanish summer afternoon, in 2019, I mixed some flour and water in a jar and left it to sit on the kitchen counter. This action, simple enough, had something momentous about it. Two days later, the substance in the jar looked basically the same, except for a couple of tiny bubbles I was able to spot through the glass. I discarded most of it, not without a pang of regret at the act of wasting food, and mixed the remainder with some more water and flour. Again, two days passed, and by then, the substance had transformed into something rather different. It had risen, and trapped in it were thousands of bubbles of gas, large and small. It had a not-so-subtle but nevertheless pleasant aroma of yeast and yogurt. I had succeeded in making a sourdough starter.
I started baking bread with it, a couple of loaves a week. After the first attempt, the result of which looked more like a thick pancake than a loaf of bread, there was, almost with every new bake, a growing sense of understanding and improvement. I had been reading Richard Sennett’s fascinating book The Craftsman (2008) and became aware that there were many similarities between the rhythms of my bread baking and those of my music making. Human skills are developed by following a series of stages: first, one ingrains a habit; then, the established habit is questioned, thereby expanding one's skill; and after this, the new skill needs to be ingrained as a new, better habit, so that it may be used with confidence and fluency. This process is cyclical, and creates a rhythm that is common to all crafts (Sennett, 2013, pp. 200-203). Thinking about my musical practice in this way, and having the clear example of a newly-acquired and quickly-developing craft, my bread baking, made my musical practice more effective and healthier, because my strive for perfection was replaced by a strive for more efficient habits, which could be questioned and improved as many times as needed.
During my bachelor studies in modern flute at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Tilburg (one of the departments of Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten), I was informed that, as part of my graduation recital, I would have to design and carry out an interdisciplinary performance, in which two or more art forms would be combined. I decided to explore the parallels that I was finding between baking and cooking on the one hand and composing and playing music on the other. In April 2021, I premiered, together with Julia Hernández Sánchez on the baroque violin and Alex Baker on the viola da gamba, A Year in Four Bites. The setting of this performance resembled, more or less, that of a concert, with the audience sitting in a semicircle around the musicians. However, each audience member received, at the beginning of the performance, a plate with four small dishes on it, which I had cooked using preserves that I had made during one entire year. The performance included not only musical and culinary elements, but also featured texts that were written and read by each of the musicians. At certain moments, the audience would be asked to eat one of the four dishes, which had been paired with a particular piece of music that I judged would suit it. I found the process of creating this performance, and in particular, of pairing the different musical and culinary 'bites', so interesting and enriching, that I decided to make this the topic of my master’s research.
Writing like a gardener and the mental compost heap
American science fiction and fantasy writer George R. R. Martin distinguishes two types of writers, namely architects and gardeners (2022). The former type has everything clearly laid out from the beginning, the latter sows a seed, waters it, observes the plant that grows, and then supports its growth by fertilising it, pruning it, tying it to a trellis, or simply letting it be. The form in which this research was conceived and developed has taken a bit of both approaches. At its outset, I was an architect, and I created a very clear structure, with a central axis consisting of two experimental performances around which the whole of the research would orbit. However, I envisioned for this structure to act like the perimeter of a garden, within and on which there would be space for ideas to sprout, and then grow, blossom, and fruit (and, every now and then, perish before doing any of the previous).
Another science fiction and fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman, speaks about having a mental compost heap, a place in which observations from everyday life can come together and decompose, melt into each other and become, after a while, ideas (2020). I decided that this research-garden would need its very own compost heap, and on it I tossed all my knowledge about composing and performing music, cooking, and everything else that I thought might add to the fertility of my garden's soil. Bringing together concepts and techniques from different domains in this way allowed me to establish adjacency between these ideas, the first step to an intuitive leap (Sennett, 2008, 209-212). (Adjacency is discussed in more depth in the section Mediating elements during the creative process.)
Approach and relevance
This research addresses the issue of how to pair music and food from an artistic perspective. While I have used scientific knowledge to design some of the characteristics of the experimental performances I have carried out, my purpose was not to prove or disprove any particular hypothesis, but rather to see how that scientific knowledge could be applied in an artistic context. I consider this thesis relevant for precisely this reason. My hope is that it will provide artists with the tools and methods I would have wished to have when I began to investigate this issue.
How to read this thesis
The reader should feel free to read this thesis in a non-linear way, following the hyperlinks that will lead them through different chapters and sections when pursuing a particular line of thought. Nevertheless, a linear reading is also possible, and a link to the next chapter has been included at the end of each page.
A note on the reference style used in this thesis
While the APA 7th edition has been used as the basic reference style, the popover style of the Research Catalogue has been adopted for the reader’s convenience. When hovering above an in-text citation, a full bibliographic citation will appear, making it unnecessary to go to the final reference list every time one wants to check a source. This only applies to the first time a source is cited within the same chapter or section.