Mediating elements. Narrative
Before the first research experiment, I was very careful not to give too much information to the participants. I wanted to avoid making any comments that might influence their perception of the experience. I did not give any clues as to how the match between food and music had been designed, and limited myself to sending a description of the three dishes that would be eaten and to explaining the procedure of the experiment just before it took place. Only after the experiment was finished, the feedback forms completed and collected, and the discussion finalised, did I share my ideas and the concept behind the performance with the audience. Nevertheless, while analysing the feedback collected from the participants, I was somewhat surprised to discover that several of them mentioned actively “trying to find a relationship between food and music”, as one of them put it, an endeavour that, so it appeared, had led to some degree of frustration and/or confusion in them. Even though I had tried to steer the audience’s expectations as little as possible, calling the experiment ‘Pairing food and music’ had obviously been enough to move at least some of the attendants to build certain expectations as to how exactly that pairing would be carried out. I began to realise that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not avoid having a certain narrative envelop whatever performance I would carry out.
This was further evidenced by the comments of one of the participants in the second experiment. This individual, triggered by the presence of beetroot and mushrooms in the dishes (which they defined as “earthy” foods), associated the music with “images of a […] forest floor, overgrown with moss and mushrooms”. The food and music alone had conjured a narrative rich in imagery in their mind, one that undoubtedly affected the participant's perception of the two elements, both separately and as a whole. Furthermore, they mentioned that the fact that it was sunny outside had to some extent disturbed their experience because it did not match the “dark, wet forest” that they had felt taken to. This points to the fact that narrative might play a very important role in linking the setting of a particular performance with the rest of its components.
One last example of the powerful effect of an individual’s narrative involving a certain experience would be that mentioned by another of the participants in the second experiment. This audience member claimed during the discussion that, for them, what they had experienced could not be called a “concert” (a word another attendant had used), but that they had come to be part of a “science experiment” and this had indeed been what they felt they had participated in. For this reason, they did not expect to (nor did they) find any “aesthetic enjoyment” in it. The fact that just a few words and instructions could affect someone’s perception of the event to such an extent brought me to the conclusion that I should accept, perhaps even embrace the idea that some sort of narrative would inevitably be created by the guest.
I then thought that, perhaps, the most productive artistic attitude towards this dilemma would be to consider narrative as an essential element of the performance, one that could maybe even help in bridging the gap between music and food. Perhaps, it could even be made to bring the audience and performers closer together, and to tie the performance space into the meaning of the event. I had already done something like this in the past, in A Year in Four Bites, the first performance I designed with a food and music pairing. On that occasion, the narrative that tied the event together was built up from stories about the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving a glimpse into each of the four seasons. These stories linked the food that was being eaten with imagery from the time of the year when it had been made and preserved, and with a personal story from each of the performers. While the experiments did not seem the place to try out such an elaborate narrative, as it would have dominated over whatever other parameter I was intending to test, the public performance Four Bites of Autumn did indeed seem like the perfect occasion to use narrative in a conscious way.
And so I did. I introduced each dish by telling a story about my connection to the windmill De Roos in Delft, where the performance took place, and to the different ingredients that were served. I then told a story about each of the 18th-century composers whose music we played, highlighting particular words linked to affect that I thought would also suit the music and food that would follow the story (a more elaborate explanation of this can be found in the section Mediating elements. Semantic matching). Probably the most successful connection that was achieved through narrative in this performance was that between the second dish and its music. The dish consisted of a piece of rye bread with apple syrup. The recipe for the bread was based on an 18th-century manuscript that had been found in the windmill itself. This recipe was for a bread that had been ordered by the mental institution in Delft, a “poor man’s bread” that would have been stamped with a particular mark so it would not be sold, because it was reserved for the most necessitous in the city. This bread was paired with a piece of music by Albertus Groneman, a German composer from the mid-18th century who had spent prolonged periods of his unfortunate life in the mental institution of The Hague (Wentz, 2022). Telling the story of Groneman’s life, and explaining to the audience why one of his pieces and the poor man’s bread would be paired, created a powerful association in at least some of the attendant’s minds, as is evidenced by their comments in the feedback form.
Another example which shows the relevance of narrative in a food and music matching context can be found in an article by Reinoso Carvalho et al., which describes an experiment in which different participants tasted an identical chocolate sample while listening to the same song. However, some of the participants listened and ate without being given any extra information. Others “were told that the song had actually been the chocolatier’s source of inspiration when creating the chocolate sample that they were about to taste” (2015, p. 5). Lastly, some “were told that the song had been chosen by a team of scientists because of its enhancing effect on the taste of the chocolate” (2015, p. 5). The experiment showed that “those participants who had been told that the song was used as the source of inspiration by the chef […] reported liking the chocolate the most after eating it, and were also the ones who were willing to pay the most for this experience” (2015, p. 6). This clearly indicates the impact a certain narrative may have on the perception of an experience.
Conclusions to the presence and use of narrative
The presence of narrative seems to be unavoidable in any live performance. This narrative may be instigated and influenced by the artistic elements of the performance itself (the music and the food, in this case), the performance space, any words used to describe the event, and so forth. The more explicitly and carefully this narrative is woven into the performance, the more likely it is to provoke a more or less consistent effect on the audience. If presented ambiguously or ignored, a narrative is very likely to be present anyway, but each audience member will create a unique and possibly very different one around the event (e.g. a walk through a shady forest vs. a science experiment not meant to evoke aesthetic enjoyment, as seen in the examples taken from the second experiment). This ambiguity might be very fruitful in itself and I do not suggest by any means that it should be discarded without consideration. Rather, I would like to invite performers to carefully think about what kind of role narrative should play in each of their creations, and to shape them accordingly.