Food and music help to elucidate our world. Taken individually, each serves a number of emotional purposes that other human necessities and artistic disciplines cannot. iPod playlists, for example, are what we create when we want to channel a particular mood or feeling; I don't think I've ever listened to Janis Joplin at the gym, or Bananarama in the bath.

Both music and food have a time and place in our lives. We make mix tapes for lovers and eat soup when we are sick. We lie in the grass and listen to Leonard Cohen. We get drunk and shake it to Britney, and maybe—just maybe—we stop off at a burger joint on the way home to eat the only thing you want to eat when you're drunk and trying to recall the lines of ”Womanizer.”

The formidably brilliant food critic AA Gill recently wrote about the role food plays in times of grief: “Food is as intricately woven into death as it is any of the great turning points in life. It is, by its nature, symbolic and metaphysical. The dead are beyond succour and hospitality. We eat in remembrance.” Gill's take on food in a time of mourning led me to consider the Irish wake and how food and music form an intense correlative bond during the ritual. In Ireland, a wake allows friends and relatives of the deceased to lose the sort of emotional repression that the Irish are often—quite correctly—accused of having. Wake houses are, for the most part, animated gatherings: stories, songs and sandwiches, porter cake and Jameson, handshakes and a hand on a shoulder. A wake is the celebration of a life lived, not the commemoration of a life lost; food and song unite and console. These are tangible entities in a time of suffering and they help give us the will to go on.

Taken together, food and music are powerful emotional cohorts. They can be catalysts that allow us to gain a deeper insight into history and into the world around us. In Puccini's La Bohème, the libretto is replete with references to food, drink, and eating. How fascinating to decipher the cultural meanings behind Parisian street foods of the 1890s, and to listen to the hawkers sing their names: Oranges, dates, coconut milk and toffees! The libretto for the opera was written at the end of the 19th century, during the height of French imperialism. Foods like sugar and citrus fruit were plentiful and would have certainly come from the colonies. However in La Bohème the revelry surrounding the consumption of these foods is short-lived, and the pathos that pervades the final act is like a prophetic nod towards the eventual collapse of the French empire some 40 years later. With the loss of her colonies, France also lost a direct link to the exotic foods that had been ubiquitous in 19th-century Paris.

Another exciting amalgam of food and music is food preparation, which has its own inherent notes and scales—chopping, slicing, boiling, mashing, whisking, whizzing, pounding, cracking. The music of preparation has a very specific arrangement. Every step needs to be carefully orchestrated so as not to upset the harmony of the final piece, or dish. The musical analogy also extends to degustation. Brillat-Savarin wrote that the perception of flavors and aromas “at the back of the mouth” was the enharmonic equivalent to the true taste of food. In other words, taste and aftertaste are so intrinsically linked that they cannot be considered in isolation.

— Katie Phelan