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May 17th, 2008
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Play that fungi music

When it comes to mushrooms, a Prague composer knows the score

Vaclav Halek hears music in something others just eat.
By Katka Krosnar
For The Prague Post
(December 18, 2003)


Deep in a forest on the outskirts of Prague, Vaclav Halek stands above a small cluster of mushrooms, pen poised above a sheet of music paper.

Within seconds he is rapidly scribbling notes, stopping only to chuckle delightedly, his hand waving in the air as if conducting an orchestra. Ten minutes later he has completed a score, "sung" to him by the Tubaria hiemalis (Krzatka zimni) below.

Half a mile along it's the same refrain, as Halek gently clears leaves and other debris from around his chosen specimen, stands back and calmly waits. This time, the single tiny Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca (Listicka pomerancova) inspires a more serious composition.

It's a process the mushroom-mad composer has repeated for two decades, insisting his special gift allows him to tune in to the fungi and pick up their musical signals.

"Each type of mushroom has a different melody; it's their way of expressing themselves," says Halek, 66. "At first the music starts gently but then it grows stronger."
"Each type of mushroom has a different melody ..."

Vaclav Halek,
composer

Swinging a large basket containing a German mushroom encyclopedia over one arm and clutching his pen and paper in the other, Halek looks utterly content as he makes his way through the forest. Pausing and standing stock-still above the mushrooms, lost in concentration, he may cut an odd figure and attract bemused stares from passers-by, but he is deadly serious about his passion.

A professional composer by trade until his retirement in 1997, Halek estimates that he has collected the melodies of 1,700 different types of wild mushrooms across the country, and says he will manage at least several hundred more of the remaining 1,300.

Halek says he has no particular favorite mushroom or melody. "The great thing is that they are all different," he says.

Back home in his fifth-floor Prague apartment, Halek sits down at his grand piano and bashes out the melodies he has just composed in the forest. The first tune he calls "a wonderful, completely jokey piece of music" suitable for the violin; the second is a melody for flute, "about enjoying freedom but knowing that it will end soon."

His focus on fungus began when he went mushroom-picking as a child with his parents and grandmother in Prague Suchdol and in Sobotka, central Bohemia. But it wasn't until 1980 that he stumbled on his gift.

"A microbiologist friend of mine took me on a field trip to photograph and document mushrooms. He asked me to look through the lens at a Tarzetta cupularis [Zvonecek sadni] to see if everything was properly set up, and as I did so, suddenly I heard music, as if a whole symphony orchestra were playing.

"At first I just couldn't understand what was happening but then I realized it was the mushroom making the noise." Halek rushed for musical paper, noted what he heard and hasn't looked back since.

Unlike most who share the national passion for combing the forest for mushrooms, Halek does not eat his samples (though he does eat mushrooms obtained elsewhere).


Rare finds

His efforts over the past two decades have culminated in the publication of more than 40 of the compositions in The Musical Atlas of Mushrooms, a glossy new book complete with color photographs, full scores, an introduction to each type of fungus featured and an accompanying CD.

One of the spotlighted mushrooms, Boletus junquilles (Hrib slamozluty), is so rare that Halek has seen it only once; another, Boletus spinari Hlav (Hrib spinaruv), was discovered so recently that it has not yet been registered internationally.

As well as recording the individual melodies, Halek has composed two symphonies combining music from different fungi.

"One musician plays some of my work during his concerts, but the audience doesn't realize it is listening to music that was inspired by mushrooms," he says.

That musician, violinist Jan Kvapil, does have his questions about the origin of Halek's music.

"I can understand that Halek is inspired to compose when he stands in the peaceful surroundings of the forest, but that's not the same as hearing music directly from the mushrooms themselves," says Kvapil, a member of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra who plays on Halek's CD and occasionally performs the mushroom pieces with the Mysterium Musicum chamber trio. "But I have to say that Vaclav's music is very powerful and I really like what he writes."


Finnish song

Mushrooms aren't Halek's only source of creative inspiration. He has also written compositions based on the harmonies he says he hears from trees, and from the qualities of people's voices.

"I once wrote a melody based on the harmonies I heard in former Finnish President Urho Kekonen's speech at the first Helsinki Conference [on Security and Cooperation in Europe, in 1975], which was shown on television. When I was invited to play it at the Finnish Embassy in Prague, the ambassador asked me if I had ever been to Finland. When I replied that I hadn't, he told me that the music sounded just like traditional folk songs from the region where the politician was born."

A freelance composer all his working life, Halek says he was shunned when it came to official jobs under the Communist regime because he was an openly practicing Catholic, attending and playing organ at church services.

He made his living on private commissions, including the scores for the movies Obrazy stareho sveta (Pictures of the Old World, 1988) and Sukromne Zivoty (Private Lives, 1990), by the award-winning Slovak director Dusan Hanak, and the 1989 Czech film Poutnici (Pilgrim).

A widower with a 25-year-old daughter, Halek admits that his family and friends don't quite know what to make of his hobby.

"They know it's real because they see me write more and more new compositions but they don't really understand it," he says.

"It's almost a miracle. I believe all of us have a special gift; it's just a matter of finding out what it is."

Hudebni Atlas Hub (The Musical Atlas of Mushrooms) is available from Knihkupectvi Abraxas, Korunni 1, Prague 2-Vinohrady, for 298 Kc. It is written in Czech, with an English introduction.

Katka Krosnar can be reached at news@praguepost.com


Reader's Comments:
[01/01/2004] : Thats cool - I would love to hear some of this music. Makes me want to come to Czech (again) and walk in the forests!
peat@ihug.co.nz
peat
Auckland, New Zealand
[22/12/2003] : Only in the Czech Republic. In the US he would be sent to a shrink. God bless the Czech Republic!!!
Dusan Lipensky
Wheaton IL. USA
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