Food and Music: A Shared History Through Composers, Lyrics, and Instruments

Food and Music: A Shared History

The bond between food and music reaches across cultures, including the United States, where it has a long and diverse story. This relationship goes well beyond music’s familiar role as Tafelmusik (table music) or the practice of paying musicians with food and drink. Both food and music serve as authentic expressions of culture, often sharing rituals that encourage community, trance, meditation, or even intoxication.

Composers, Performers, and the Culinary Arts

Many celebrated composers and performers were passionate about food. Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, after moving to America with his companion Nancy Grahl—a cook—ran a grocery store in New York. Composer John Cage had a deep interest in mushrooms and macrobiotic cooking. Food and wine have shaped the creative work of writers, musicians, and performers in many ways. In lyrics and writings about music, food often serves as a metaphor for life, religion, sex, gender, social status, and group identity. For example, Robert Johnson’s “Travelling Riverside Blues” and Arthur McKay’s “She Squeezed My Lemon” use food imagery with double meanings. Cookbooks like A Musical Feast: Recipes from Over 100 of the World’s Most Famous Musical Artists (1995) feature recipes from American musicians ranging from Anita Baker and Frank Sinatra to Jessye Norman and Tammy Wynette.

Leopold Mozart, as a court violinist and teacher in Salzburg, received 54 florins annually for wine and bread. In 1759, he successfully petitioned Archbishop Siegmund Christoph von Schrattenbach for an exemption from the wine tax. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, wine was often used to pay for organ building; it was customary to fill the organ’s largest pipe with wine when the instrument was dedicated.

Food in Lyrics and Folklore

Music has long paid tribute to food. Drinking songs, kitchen songs, and opera scenes use eating and drinking to define social relationships, following what some call gastro-musicological rules. Instrumental music also takes food as its subject. In popular song lyrics, coffee, tea, fruit, and vegetables frequently appear. The song “Apples and Bananas” by Keith Urban, “Milk It” by Nirvana, “Starfish and Coffee” by Prince, and “Pound Cake” by Van Halen—which uses dessert as a double entendre for sex—are recent American examples.

Traditional music often involves food and its tools. People in many folk traditions bang kitchen tools during celebrations and protests. In native North American culture, music and performance were judged by how well they fulfilled spiritual and practical needs—such as providing food, water, and healing. The Lake Indians (Senijextee) of the Columbia River in Washington sang songs guiding the ceremonial gathering of native plants and herbs, from bitterroot to yellow bell. The Crow Indians of Montana sing to ensure food and other necessities. Appalachian folk songs, such as “Groundhog,” reflect a close relationship with the environment. These songs mention corn, grain, vegetables, and meat, and the trials of whiskey making. The folk song “Dreadful Memories” mourns the hunger of the Great Depression.

Songs as Social Critique

In Black music, food occasionally becomes a vehicle for social commentary. Songs like “We Raise the Wheat” and the coon song “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd” contain criticism. Dizzy Gillespie used food titles such as “Salt Peanuts” (1942) and “Manteca” (butter) to provoke audiences and protest popular culture.

Food as Performance and Sound Source

In twentieth-century American experimental music, food and kitchen utensils played a tangible role both as subject and as sound object. John Cage’s Theatre Piece (1960) was a happening with no symbolic intent. At the 1963 Rome performance, a pianist threw a dead fish onto open piano strings; another musician dragged a chair across the floor, while participants handed out soggy pizzas to the audience. Fluxus artist Alison Knowles treated cooking as a concert. Her pieces included Make a Salad (1962), beginning with a Mozart duo, followed by salad-making and communal eating, as well as Make a Soup and Identical Lunch. Raymond Sender’s Tropical Fish Opera (1962) used a fish in a tank whose movements were translated into musical parameters. Robert Leonard Moran’s Smell Piece for Mills College (1967) involved frying pans and food, intended, in his words, “to produce a conflagration sufficiently thermal to burn down the college.”

Paul Lansky applied principles of musique concrète in Table’s Clear (1990), using kitchen implements alongside voiced utterances. Likewise, the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, founded in 1998, makes its own instruments from carrots, pumpkins, and zucchini.

Food Metaphors Around the World

Hindustani musicians of North India use a culinary metaphor to explain the concept of raga. For the Quechua speakers of northern Potosí in Bolivia, the potato is central to musical expression; music draws inspiration from everyday objects and cultivation, not separate from them.

Specific Musical Works About Food

Gioachino Rossini composed Quatre meditants et quatre hors d’oeuvres for piano (1880–1885), inspired by almonds, raisins, and anchovies. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote March Past of the Kitchen Utensils (1909) for a Cambridge production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps. Leonard Bernstein’s La Bonne Cuisine: Four Recipes for Voice and Piano (1948) sets four nineteenth-century French recipes to music, including “Plum Pudding” and “Queus de Boeuf.” Jerré Tanner’s The Kona Coffee Cantata (1984–1985) responds to Bach’s coffee cantata, BWV 211, blending baroque forms with Hawaiian hula rhythms. Aaron Jay Kernis’s Le Quattro Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurismo (1991) sets Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook to music, referencing historical styles. Frederic Rzewski’s Eggs (1986) for piano lasts exactly the time it takes to soft-boil an egg. Phillip Bimstein’s Cats in the Kitchen (2007) uses sounds of cracking eggs and sizzling skillets.

Food as Musical Instruments

Food has long been used for making instruments: nut shells serve as whistles in Peru, coconut shells are ocarinas in Africa, and Zhu Caiyu (1536–1611) used bird eggs as molds for ocarinas. The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra (founded 1998) makes pumpkin drums, carrot flutes, and zucchini oboes. In instrument repair, trombonists historically used ham fat to grease their slides, and egg whites seal keyboard soundboards. Ela Lamblin’s experimental instruments included a carrot flute, potato panpipe, apple ocarina, and kelp bullhorn. Performers like David Tudor “prepared” pianos by pouring mustard seeds, garlic, and cinnamon inside. Sound-text poet Stuart Saunders Smith accompanied readings with kitchen utensils. Alvin Curran’s “Thoughts on Soup—A Recipe” (1968) served as a template for improvisation between musicians and audience. Philip Blackburn’s No Nutritional Value (2007) involved commercial junk food. By the later twentieth century, nutrition also became relevant to instrumental playing, singing, and music therapy. And beyond the concert hall, music serves as a powerful marketing tool for food and beverages, affecting perception both musical and extramusical.