Words and Music

A foraging trip is the scene of a failed marriage proposal in Anna Karenina, wild mushrooms form the key ingredient in a Meera Sodha meal, and inform the psychedelic experiments of Timothy Leary. Alice in Wonderland encountered the caterpillar, composer John Cage mused on the idea of playing Beethoven making a mushroom more edible. These are some of the readings in this edition exploring fungi, with music from a range of composers including Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, which Disney used for a scene with dancing mushrooms in Fantasia; Anna von Hausswolff's Theatre of Nature; a pygmy song for gathering mushrooms from the Bayaka people and Dvorak's evocation of a Bohemian forest. The readers are Youssef Kerkour and Verity Henry.