Tis the Season for Morchella

The Arnold Schönberg Center is hosting a symposium today and tomorrow, “Musik und Zahl” (Music and Number), with lectures, panel discussions, and evening concerts. Tonight I had the pleasure of hearing the Ensemble Wiener Collage perform works by Cage, Frescobaldi, Berg, Ligeti, and Zimmermann. Intercommunicazione, for cello and piano, by Bernd Alois Zimmerman, was a tour-de-force of a piece with unrelenting intensity, even when the intensity wasn’t apparent. Roland Schueler, the cellist, played this dark and difficult work with ferocious precision, and the pianist, Johannes Marian, let the crashing chords fly with violent finesse. Zimmermann’s music was like a roomful of Rothko canvases unleashed into space.

So what do morels have to do with numbers and music? A serendipitous confluence: having attended a concert tonight starting off with John Cage’s work, Two, and having had exactly one conversation with Cage in my life that had nothing to do with anything except mushrooms, and having been seduced into buying (instead of finding, much more exciting than hunting for Easter Eggs), sautéing, and consuming a few exquisite Viennese morels, I assume that if you've gotten this far you probably know that John Cage was a mushroom expert and aficionado---and in fact, a founder of the New York Mycological Association. I'd like to share an irresistible anecdote, appearing in an article, "Sounds and Mushrooms," penned by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, November 22, 1981: "A woman once asked John Cage, ''Have you an explanation of the symbolism involved in the death of the Buddha by eating a mushroom?'' Mr. Cage thought: ''Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to the lady in Philadephia. I said, 'The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.' ''