Of music and perfume

BEHIND FORMULATING

An essay on music & perfume

In a recent interview, Karen Marin asked us some questions about our creative process. We briefly explained that it was inspired by the work of two artists who have greatly influenced our understanding of the arts: Bruckner and Celibidache, two musicians, one a composer, the other a conductor, whose singular vision of their art went beyond music to become universal.

In an era marked by an awareness of synesthetic realities, it is appropriate to ask ourselves whether the relationship between music and perfume exists as such, and whether it is really possible to compose a fragrance as one would a piece of music.

This observation, of a synaesthesia frustrated by a want for words to express the totality of its experience, did not fail to strike Septimus Piesse, the famous English perfumer of the 19th century, who, in his attempt to make up for this lack, gave birth to a scale, neither Ionian nor Dorian, but diatonic... and above all olfactory. This work, which is commonly referred to as the octophone or odophone, was the first concrete attempt to reconcile two fields that the senses brought together but that reason had until then opposed.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the sense of smell was perceived as a lowly animal one. Fénelon, in his "Voyage supposé ...", was the first to combine the sense of smell with the sense of hearing so that, by linking them, the former could benefit from the supposed nobility of the latter. After having drawn a long parallel between taste and smell, his hero being fed only with "tuberoses" and "Spanish hides", Fénelon went on to describe natives who "assemble smells as we assemble sounds".

It remained however a marginal attempt as it was not until the 19th century that the sense of smell found a place alongside its more noble comrades, in the era when perfume was being constructed as an art form in its own right. It must be considered for what it was then - a breath of fresh air at a time when art was reinventing itself. Poetic forms were exploding, rhyme and prose; surrealism and symbolism were emerging in response to naturalism and realism, yet perfume, in that it is indescribable, escaped the codes of sculpture, painting, poetry, literature and even music.

Subtle and intangible, it still remained the uncharted territory of theorists.

At the beginning of the century, Sénancourt discreetly brought the sense of smell into the pantheon of the noble senses by theorising a total synaesthesia that linked music to odours. Melody," he said, "can also result from a series of odours. A century of more or less successful attempts followed, including Piesse’s odophone.

Although anecdotal and without any critical foundation, Piesse’s music-olfactive scale would be emulated, mainly in the literary world. If Huysmans immediately comes to mind – his A Rebours being full of symphonies, chords and olfactory intervals that have laid the foundations of the current olfactory language – none was a more obvious disciple of Piesse than Kurd Lasswitz who, in Images of the Future, mentioned an Ododion, a real olfactory instrument, a sort of organ - another of those words that perfumery borrows from music - whose keys, instead of releasing sounds, did so with scents. A few years later, Lundin would describe its mechanics in Oxygen & Aromasia.

Surpassing the theoretical world, these experiments wound up on stage. In 1891, Paul Roinard staged the Song of Songs and created a purely synaesthetic dramaturgy for the occasion - the critics were somewhat perplexed. Later, in 1915, Scriabin tried his way at accompanying Prometheus with perfumes – it was not a resounding success.Then, in 1926, a perfumed organ was created for Poiret, playing music as well as perfumes and Debussy mentioned the "lemon of the oboe" in Grieg's music, not specifying whether he was referring to their taste or their perfume. Melody was a more profound source of inspiration than colours, and it seemed to them easier to transcribe, or at least try so, a major third a chord into a scent than a cameo of reds or greens or blues.

"To Bruckner, time is what comes after the end.”

This cryptic quote, like many of those left by Celibidache, emphasises the eschatological gesture of Bruckner's work. God's minstrel, as he was known, the man with the unfinished Ninth did not hesitate to dedicate it to the Creator himself. Although there are many possible ways to interpret what Celibidache said, it has always resonated with us in a special way. It is important to understand that the time in question is not human but divine, the very eternity that unfolds not when musical note is played but after it has faded away. This realisation is fundamental to understanding Celibidache's and Bruckner’s works, and we can take as proof the numerous apotheoses with which he had punctuated his symphonies and which find their resolution in the last measures of their codas, or in the unsung measures they suggest.

We can therefore wonder about the relevance of this statement in relation to perfume. Although numerous, the attempts to link perfume and music have always been fragmentary, yet both are linked and conditioned by a temporality that is yet to be defined, and this is the object of our reflection. Considering fragrances as one would a symphony implies appreciating them outside a solely melodic framework. Today, our reading of fragrances is confined to this register and to the temporality of a melody that unfolds its motifs in a linear fashion, from its opening to its coda, without thinking of it from a harmonic point of view, in which each note is a musical world of itself. Yet the point of contact between Bruckner and perfume is precisely this reversed temporality, the opening bars of his symphonies prefiguring motifs that will only be revealed in the coda. Although this dynamic is not particular to Bruckner, he was arguably its most industrious exponent, the Third sketching out motifs that only find their resolution in the finale of the Ninth &c.

The same is true of perfume. It is only truly complete in its first few minutes, as time strips it of its molecules, essences and notes until naught but an olfactory silence remains – that of our own skin. Olfactory pyramids, as they are represented, are therefore imperfect since they suggest that a perfume grows from its top notes to its base while it, in fact, proceeds from the opposite dynamic. The image of a perfume is only perfectly full before it evaporates. Our creative approach has always been to try to translate this Brucknerian motion into scent, to articulate a fragrance from its base rather than its head, so that it prefigures themes that will recur throughout its evolution until its final evaporation.

Two issues emerge from this observation: firstly, to succeed in appreciating a perfume in a cyclical "Brucknerian" time – that is to say, starting from its base note to return to it – as opposed to the linear time that is still the reference in olfaction; and secondly, to formulate a perfume that, obeying this temporality, succeeds in prefiguring, repeating and apotheosising its own motifs.

Can we, however, free ourselves from the chemical limit of evaporation, which is uncontrollable, as each essence obeys the properties of the molecules it is made of?

It is here that orchestration and direction must follow a work of composition. Far from simply being the writer of his formula, it belongs to the perfumer to become its conductor, to be able to control its rhythm and tempo so that its initial motifs can be enriched instead of disappearing as time flies.

Harmonic epiphenomena

As far as possible, we try in our creative work to come closer to that of Celibidache who laid the foundations of a phenomenology of music.

Above all, it must be understood that a symphony is not just a series of disordered noises but rather a collection of sounds, of artificial notes arranged by human hands and whose role is to break the silence of which the Universe is made and which is precisely "Bruckner’s time". Isolated, notes are only accidents of nature, but their arrangement allows us to descry a tension whose resolution will always be, fatally, this primordial silence from which they extract, or are extracted, themselves.

The same applies to perfume. As Giono said, "gods create scents, men make essences". Despite all that is said about the virtue of natural essences, these will always be the result of a human, mechanical interference and perfumes are its result, assemblages of oils and absolutes pressed together to create a symphony doomed to evaporate and leave a sidereal void in its wake. The role of the perfumer is precisely to weave a fabric of scents, to sketch olfactory worlds and make them last as long as possible before nothingness takes back its place. It is also the role of the composer - and a fortiori of the conductor - to stretch, as much as possible, the music happening between silences before the inevitable return of the great Silence.

But just as sounds are never pure, neither are essences. Each sound is composed of a fundamental frequency and a series of harmonics that appear and disappear independently of the frequency they adorn. The same is true of an essence, say of a rose, whose olfactory core is woven from a hundred molecules that evaporate, each according to its own rhythm.

That is the purpose of our journey - to be able to compose perfumes in the same way that Celibidache conducted a Bruckner symphony and Bruckner wrote them.

The fact that these "olfactory harmonics" appear and evaporate according to their nature implies that a perfume must leave enough space for each essence to unwind its "epiphenomena", those numerous molecules which are apparently inaudible but have nevertheless an undeniable effect on the final composition.

Faced with two dissonant harmonic sequences - or essences - the perfumer must be able to invent a void so that the consumer may appreciate each dissonance at its true value and perceive, on his own, the underlying tension that links both and gives them meaning. This is also true of "assonant" essences since two sounds, however harmonious, are never the same. Just as two C’s that follow one another will never be equal, two roses that follow one another will never be equal, so that perfume is, in the end, but a chaplet of unified oppositions.

We therefore deduce that essences and their epiphenomena condition the formulation of a perfume and that the role of the perfumer consists in making visible the motion that unites them by mastering the tempo of the fragrance.

Rhythm, hyperdose and hypodose

 

How, however, can we control the tempo of an object which, by its very nature, is beyond our control? How can we accelerate or delay the essential epiphenomena that determine a perfume?

The contemporary perfumer will be pleased to have access to many artificial materials - Hedione, Iso E Super, White Musks, Lilial and co. &c. - which do just that. By reducing the sum of naturals, and therefore of harmonics, in a formula and by adding the materials forementioned, the creator will be able to control the tempo of their work either by delaying the evaporation of certain essences or by adding "air", i.e. a silence between accords.

The question is more difficult when it comes to natural compositions. Without such materials, the perfumer can only rely on an olfactory register already rich in harmonics, having to create silence with sounds and regulate a tempo without rests. PERSONNE (which we created for Attache-Moi) is a good example.

At the request of Olivia Bransbourg, we tasked with creating a perfume based on the essences mentioned in Homer's Odyssey. On discovering them, it became clear that the formula would be full of dissonances.

Following the principles here outlined, our approach was to stretch the tempo of the fragrance by creating harmonious accords and amplifying them to the extreme, reducing the spaces left to dissonances yet leaving them wide enough for each to express its range of epiphenomena without risking clashing with the others. A brief glance at PERSONNE's formula would give the impression of a multitude of superfluous essences, yet they all contribute to creating this "olfactory landscape" which takes the core formula from an enharmonic to a chromatic register.

This brings us back to Bruckner and his masterful art of orchestration. Many are the passages in which he does not hesitate to sacrifice entire sections of his orchestra so that others may be heard to the fullest, as in the coda of the Fifth or in the finale of the Eighth, where the woodwinds are deployed at full power only to support the brass, which largely overshadows them in return.

Following Bruckner, and since each essence is a harmonic work in itself, the natural perfumer must be able to make use of hyperdoses and hypodoses in order to skilfully orchestrate their composition, being earnest to sacrifice entire sections of his formula so that others may not seem overpowering. In PERSONNE, the hyperdose of balsams counterbalances the Hemp, Parsley and Laurel; the carnal hyperdose of Fenugreek, Oakwood and Immortelle delays, by the space it occupies, the dissonances of Fig, Seaweed and Cognac; and certain hypodoses, of Saffron, Buchu and Celery, merely support motifs played by other essences.

Behind PERSONNE

PERSONNE therefore holds a special place in our lilliputian career in that it is our first attempt to integrate these very theoretical aspects into a very material creation.

As we approached this considerable list of materials - forty-one - it became clear to us that we should interfere with them as little as possible so that Homer's vegetal tale may speak for itself.

We therefore decided to select only the essences available in the perfumer's palette in their natural form and to assemble them in equal parts in order to ignore our own aesthetic prism, which would inevitably have placed PERSONNE int a gesture too contemporary to echo a work as timeless as The Odyssey. The choice of naturalness for this creation stems from this same consideration; by reducing the composition to the materials mentioned we would avoid the pitfall of modernity but it seemed essential that we should carry out this work of "reconstitution" as conservatively as possible before any subjective attempt.

Unsurprisingly, this first perfume was strongly determined by its materials, each occupying its innate place in the olfactory pyramid regardless of the proportions we chose. Aromatics such as Cypress, Hemp, Rosemary or Juniper acted as the head, undergrowth notes such as Moss, Violet Leaf or Papyrus acted as the base, while floral and food notes - Barley, Rose, Carob - acted as the heart.

However, we were faced with a major dilemma: some of the materials did not exist as such in the perfumer’s palette yet could be recreated from natural isolates - such as the Fig, the Pear, the Apple or the Pomegranate. Did fidelity to the work consist in omitting them, so as not to pollute Homer's vegetal narrative with our own perception, or did it require the, feasible, inclusion of these materials, which would inevitably bear our mark?

Our decision was to include them although respecting the most conservative accord patterns, sketching but the ideas of the fruits mentioned to avoid falling into an expressionism that would have been inappropriate. The Pear, the Pomegranate, the Date, the Apple and the Fig are simply evoked, so that the emphasis remains on those essences that correspond to the materials mentioned by Homer and identified by Laurent Dubreuil. The rest of our work consisted in rearranging the formula, in order to give each essence the space we wrote about earlier.

The result of this initial formulation phase was a surprisingly dark, coarse, woody and medicinal fragrances not unlike a Chartreuse Elixir which, while not unpleasant, was an incomplete account of The Odyssey. What is the Odyssey, after all? Although plants punctuate its narrative, it appears that olfaction is, there, lacking. Indeed, there is little mention of perfumes and many of the ingredients in this list appeared in a gustatory rather than olfactory context.

Which brings us to our second dilemma: how could we reconstruct something that never existed as such?

Scenting the unscented

We have been greatly inspired here by the work of Sébastien Letocart on completing the unfinished finale of Bruckner's Ninth. While following a historical and methodical approach, he has emancipated itself from the score to proffer an intuitive and poetic reading of the missing coda.

Throughout our career, whether in the theatre or in publishing, our desire has always been to step back behind the text to bring out its innate meaning, since every written text naturally should be understood without the need for external intervention. This has also been the case in our reconstitutions of historical perfumes, our aim always being to transcript their original intention without tainting them with our modern interpretation. However, in the same way that blue is absent from The Odyssey though at sea, we had to face the fact that olfaction was so. Was it that the sense of smell was not sufficiently considered in Homer's time or wasn't it rather that certain scents were part of a "microwave olfactory background", a sort of shapeless fog containing the fragrances of our daily lives to which we have grown to be insensitive? It is enough to lose one's sense of smell for a few weeks to realise the existence of these anodyne scents: that of our atmosphere of our sheets of our hair and of our skin.

This is what was missing from this creation for it to really attest to the scents of The Odyssey: iodine and seafoam, the sweat and skin of sailors, the warmth of sharing and the ordinary bundle of plants that a Greek, by force of habit, no longer considers, the Immortelle that lines up the cliffs of the Cyclades, the Sage that suffocates in the extreme of summer, the Lentisque that greens up at all hours. That lead us to create an accord we called "Nausicaa's Share", in reference to one of the most crucial episodes of The Odyssey.

The meeting of Ulysses and Nausicaa is indeed central to the story in that it marks the moment when the hero, dispossessed of his person, finds in the princess’ eyes the dignity that he is striving to recover. With this Share, we wanted to give an account of the inner fire that never ceased to burn in the heart of Ulysses, father of Telemachus, husband of Penelope and master of Ithaca, the same flame that motivated his sailors to continue an adventure that was doomed to ruin since it was cursed by the god of the very sea under their feet.

This epiphany opened up a field of possibilities that allowed us to recreate as best we could what the protagonists of this mythical might have smelt. In the same way that Sébastien Letocart drew on his poetic resources and his fine understanding of the architecture of Bruckner's movements and harmonic work, we drew on our reading of The Odyssey to create this fragrance.

The result is that, as much as possible, all the Homeric essences have been integrated into this perfume, anchored in a harmonic base that sublimates them without distorting them, Nausicaa's share being its missing coda, the few measures recapitulating a symphony and opening it up to wider horizons and understandings.

Notes on notes

In response to Karen Marin's question about our creative process, we can say that our process, far from being only musical, is Brucknerian in form and from this permanent reflection stems another on perfumery formulation. Swaying between art and craft, this practice is now reaching a limit. Born at the end of the 19th century, perfumery as we know it has evolved but little compared to the visual, plastic, musical and literary arts, which took advantage of the last century to reinvent themselves.

This raises the question: how can it evolve?

The American, indie new wave may hold some answers but not all for its existence is mostly thanks to the absence of cosmetic regulations that are enforced in the rest of the world and tend to be more restrictive over the years.

To question of the evolution of perfumery is to question its very nature: is it an art or a craft? Art implies utter freedom whereas craft implies a form of determination, that of creating an object that has a definite function, in our case that of smelling good and more or less expensive, depending on the targeted market.

For us, we try to stick to the former, that of an art form which, like all others, is destined to be explored, shattered and reinvented in the image of learned music, of which Bruckner delivered one of the acmes and was nonetheless surpassed in form by Schoenberg and his disciples.

We firmly believe – of this time will be the only judge - that the future of perfumery lies in this transdisciplinary exploration, in this attempt, real and anchored, to apply to perfume the evolutions experienced by the other arts, while waiting to find, or to find in it, a mutation of its own.