THE WORLD’S LEADING


MYCOLOGICAL COMPOSER Lawrence Millman


is, they are all different,” he observed. Perhaps his most important


M


ycologists can be an eccentric


lot. Consider Bryce Kendrick, who keeps slime molds as pets, or consider the Icelander Helgi Hallgrimson, who studies lake monsters in addition to fungi. Now let’s consider Václav Hálek, who


was once a classical composer in the Czech Republic. Among other things, he composed an oratorio based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and incidental music to Shakespeare’sMacbeth. He supplemented his not necessarily sumptuous earnings as a composer by playing the organ at several churches. In 1981, at the age of 44, Václav Hálek


experienced what turned out to be a life- changing epiphany. He happened to be on a field trip with a mycologist named Baier, and upon looking through a camera’s viewfinder at the cup fungus Tarzetta cupularis, he heard music. Specifically, he heard harps, flutes, and a harpsichord that soon developed into the sound of a full orchestra. Baier and the other individuals on the walk thought he had gone completely mad. From then on, until his death in 2014, Hálek devoted himself to being a mycological composer. He would venture into a forest, and whenever he saw a mushroom, he would sit down beside it with his pen poised over a sheet of musical paper. Altogether he composed 2,500 pieces based on the music of fungi. Some of these pieces were for orchestra, some were songs. Also, some of the fungi seemed to be rather more creative than others. For example, he heard and recorded 60 songs from a highly creative Lepista saeva specimen. Hálek claimed not to have a favorite mushroom or melody. “Te great thing


composition was a 30-minute symphony entitledMycocosmos. He wrote this piece after he visited a forest where all of the mushrooms were singing


together in a veritable fungal chorus. If you end up listening to the piece, you might hear


Bela Bartok singing, too … Hálek’s musical compositions were featured in a book entitled


Hudebni Atlas Hub (Te Musical Atlas of Mushrooms). Published in 2003 by the Prague-based company Fontana Publishing, the book includes 42 types of mushrooms, each of which is accompanied by a color photograph and likewise by an example of that species’s musical creativity on sheet music. A CD of these compositions is included with the book, which can be procured by contacting Fontata at fontana-esotera@ceznam.cz. Hálek specialized in the music of fleshy


fungi probably because they were the most obvious ones he observed when he ventured into the field. He especially liked to write down the music of uncommon boletes and common Russulas. Tere are few if any polypores or crust fungi among his compositions. But he did record the music of toxic Amanitas, which you might guess would be atonal or at least dissonant, but they weren’t. Indeed, Hálek didn’t think Amanitas were a whole lot different in musical style or content from edible mushrooms. “Te most poisonous types mask their true nature with sweet music,” he wrote. “When I find a mushroom, I want to set


to music, I concentrate on it and pray [he happened to be a devout Catholic] because I want to understand the specific essence of that mushroom,” Hálek declared. “When I feel ready, I examine it by breathing in and smelling its body. Shortly, I can hear a motif … When I finish, I experience a feeling of joy, and I thank God for my being able to write the music.” Te above statement indicates his


proximity not simply to religion, but also to the natural world. Tat proximity is very much in the tradition of Czech classical music. For composers like Bedrich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček also focused on aspects of the natural world in many of their compositions. Yet the inspiration for those compositions differed from the inspiration of Hálek’s. After all, Janáček did not get down and dirty with an overgrown path when he wrote his celebrated piano piece “On an Overgrown Path.” Rather a number of individuals


thought (and still think) Hálek had gone completely off his rocker. After all, mushrooms would seem to have no more musical expertise than, for example, dandelions. Other individuals have suggested that his compositions are a typical example of Czech eccentricity. An example of that eccentricity: the writer Jaroslav Hašek, best known for his novel Te Good Soldier Schweik, reputedly set up a pet shop in Prague where he claimed to sell pedigree werewolves. Still other individuals such as ecologist


Andy Letcher (author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom) think Hálek might have suffered from the medical condition known as synesthesia. Composers such as Franz Liszt and George Gershwin were synesthetes, although their sensory pathways did not include mushrooms. But in a place like the Czech Republic, where people tend to be passionate about mushrooms, at least some of its inhabitants might, just might be capable of combining one or more of their senses with mushrooms. Recently, I bent down and listened


to a Lycoperdon puffball. Was it my imagination or did I hear the puffball singing Bob Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind?” Ten I saw a passerby with a phone whose music was playing the Dylan song a bit on the loud side. A short while later, I listened again to the puffball and heard nothing. Tis is not surprising, since I’m not Václav Hálek … Tanks to Harvard librarian Mary


Sears for helping me find information for this article.


Summer 2026 FUNGI Volume 19:2 21


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