It might be a scene from a dull Star Trek episode: a dutiful musician wanders the woodlands, chronicling exotic flora on 5-lined manuscript paper to the consternation of our Earthbound heroes. But the compositions of Václav Hálek are anything but dull. Full of character and pastoral charm, they explore something necessary in art music: the artist’s natural condition.
Václav Hálek began as a pianist in the Prague Conservatory sometime in the mid 1950’s. His early period, it seems, was dominated by stage music. Though English language information on the composer’s life is scarce (he lacks an Oxford Music entry, for example) we know that he wrote over two hundred works for theater.
In his later period beginning in the early 1980’s, Hálek combined his love for foraging with his ear for new music. The composer set hundreds of unique mushroom species to the staff, creating a library some twenty six hundred pieces deep. Many of these are brief snippets, but some, like his 1981 symphony mykocosmic, span vast movements.
His mushroom music is perhaps the most lauded aspect of his career, and also the most poignant: “first [I feel the] mushroom is pleased that I have noticed it and then it wants to show me what it is and why it is in this world.” Though fascinated by fungi, he is also known to have composed music based on flowers, trees, and the vocal peculiarities of people he met.
Hálek’s oeuvre was one saturated in sensuous life, his work typifying Marx’s view on human nature. Here we see an artist who in changing nature also changed himself. This is one reason why existing American coverage of Hálek disappoints. Content farm journalists only considered the spectacle of such a strange act rather than what that act says about the world Hálek reflects, missing the forest for the proverbial trees. Such a unique combination of cultural priorities and musical acumen—though so typically Bohemian—are a true reflection of the artist’s condition.
For Hálek, the artistic method was a way to explore the inorganic body, the natural world outside of himself. The composer in this case is not some romantic genius longing to express himself. He is an interpreter who fed the organic body by listening to the inorganic, and in doing so gave voice to the natural world.
You can hear a few of Václav Hálek’s short works from his 2003 Musical Atlas of Mushrooms on the Internet Archive.