In the mid-’50s, shortly after moving to rural Stony Point in New York state, the avant-garde American composer John Cage started to develop his fascination for mushrooms. As his biographer Rob Haskins explained, “He made much of the fact that the dictionary entries for ‘mushroom’ and ‘music’ are so close together.”

And he was right: they’re virtually alphabetically joined at the hip. Separated only by mushy (if you ignore the dodgy mushrump, which is actually a variation on the shroom as we commonly know and name it), mushroom and music make magic together, in many an artful mind …