Mediating elements. Ritual
Rituals are an undeniably present element both in our daily eating routines and in our relationship with music. They become especially important in social situations: we set the table (or it is set for us at a restaurant); the dishes follow a certain order which we tend to respect; we tend to wait for everyone to finish their course before passing on to the next; and so forth. Or, in music-related contexts, for instance a classical music concert: we arrive at the concert venue, sit in our assigned seat, clap when the performer comes on stage, they bow, we listen in silence, etc. As Richard Sennett argues, rituals become stale if they do not self-renew (2013, pp. 90-91), which one might contend is what is happening at the moment in much of the performing arts worldwide, but that is a discussion for another time. The point is that there is ritual, it helps us channel our expectations, and it gives symbolic meaning to the actions that are carried out (e.g. waiting for everyone to finish their food is a sign of respect and of togetherness, and clapping at the concert symbolises the recognition of the craft and work of the performer on stage).
While designing A Year in Four Bites, the first performance in which I combined food and live music, I decided to create a very ritualised pattern, in the form of what Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus calls a “scripted meal” (2020, p. 340), during which there would be specific texts being read to introduce each dish, and specific music composed to accompany it.
Since this first performance, I was confronted with the question of how to cue the moment when the audience should start eating, in order for the music to be synchronised with the food so that every guest would be tasting the same while listening to (more or less) the same music. During that particular performance, we were three musicians, one of whom would be reading a text to the audience and would then join the other two to play a prelude to the piece of music that I had chosen to match the food. I asked the audience to start eating after they heard the three musicians play the prelude together. This proved to not work entirely well, as some people would start eating during the prelude, some after it, some not at all until I looked at them intently and gestured that they could indeed begin. I decided thereafter to include a musical cue which would be embedded in the music I would compose for the two experiments, and for the public performance Four Bites of Autumn.
Sennett defines three building blocks of ritual: repetition, which lends intensity; the transformation of objects, gestures, or words into symbols; and finally, dramatic expression (2013, pp. 89-93). It was clear that these building blocks became increasingly established during each of the performances carried out in relation to this research. The musical cue was presented and explained to the audience in the beginning of each performance. The first time they would hear it when it was played during the explanation of the performance, and the first bite they would take after hearing it again during the performance itself, would invariably carry a sense of unfamiliarity and strangeness to them. The cue had not yet been established as a symbol of anything, and it carried very little dramatic expression. For us as performers, it was fascinating to see how this changed as the performance progressed. At each of the six performances we did of Four Bites of Autumn, there would always be smiles of recognition when the cue sounded for the last time, and the sense of security with which people would eat the last dish of each performance was noticeably different from the insecurity that could be sensed during the first. Our feeling as performers would also change every time we would play the cue, as it acquired meaning, gravity, and dramatic expression. It always had, by the last repetition, become a true symbol, not only of the ‘permission’ given to the audience to start eating, but also of a certain connection between them and us as performers, and of the links between the music and the food. Participants in the experiments mentioned that the cue also contributed to their feeling of the performance being “well organised and guided”, and “nicely structured”.
During the second experiment, I tried to reduce the sense of insecurity that accompanied the first bite by making an attempt to flatten the learning curve, reducing the amount of information that each musical and culinary bite carried to a minimum, and then bringing all the elements together in the final dish. While this type of teleological approach was interesting in itself, it somehow reduced the impact of each bite, because people where eating fragments of a dish, instead of a balanced recipe composed of different elements. (More information on how the second experiment was organised to create this increase in complexity can be found in the section Mediating elements. Structure. More information on the musical cues and how they were integrated in the music of the different performances can be found in the chapter The music.) Perhaps, the sense of insecurity experienced by at least a part of the audience at the beginning of each performance was not even necessarily a bad thing. The security and sense of ownership of the experience that were acquired during the performance might have been greater precisely thanks to the fact that the experience seemed rather unfamiliar in the beginning. It has been shown that “the end of an experience […] plays a disproportionate role in the affective memory of [that] experience” (Rozin & Rozin, 2018, p. 7). This being so, if the audience did indeed feel a greater satisfaction at the end of the performance than they would have if there had been no sense of insecurity in the beginning, then the learning curve that was travelled might actually have been an essential ingredient of their positive memory of the experience.