Perfumes and Music

The artistic sphere that is without doubt most similar to the activity of searching for and creating perfumes is that of music. The first affinity consists in the terminological identity existing between the single components of a perfume and those of a chord or harmony: both are so-called “notes”. Indeed, just as a group of essences or aromatic substances can create a part and then the perfume as a whole, in the same way a chord is formed with a wide range of notes and a “harmony” with several chords and notes.

The traditional shelf on which the perfumer lines up the bottles with the essences is called an “organ”. The parts of a perfume and those of a piece of music must be in harmony and the components must be “tuned”, each in its own measure, and in syntony, so that no single element, at any “moment” of the musical score, or at any stage of the evaporation of the fragrance, becomes preponderant in an undesirable and therefore unpleasant manner.

In both cases we have a composition in which the individual characteristics of the aromatic notes (or of the musical chords) gives way to the importance of the totality, without losing their specificity. If I think of an instrument with which to ”play” both musical and aromatic notes, what comes to mind, is not so much a pianoforte, but a violin, with which in practice an infinity of possible semitones are possible. If I imagine the harmony of a perfume, I conceive it as a chord composed of a thousand notes or as an orchestra.

As for the individual scents, the best comparison is perhaps that with colour: infinite gradations of an aroma, as of a colour, can be created. “Chords”, in music and in a perfume, are compositions of various single scents, that are mixed to produce new musical and aromatic effects. Chords, in perfumes, can be composed both of a limited number of notes, as in music, and of a broad range of hundreds of different notes. In a musical or aromatic composition the nuances are important and while they do not perform a central role within the totality, they do serve as a support for rounding off and harmonizing the structural elements, for translating musical or aromatic effects that contribute to the equilibrium, completeness and originality of the whole.

Nothing is more impalpable, for our perception, than sound and smell. Light, although constantly mutable, has a long life, allowing the eye sufficient adjustment making it sensitive to any visual effect, even if indefinable. This is not the case with hearing and smell, which rely on memory, on the deciphering — like a revelation — of the awakening of assonances, concordances, subtle contrasts, resistant to being fixed, escaping definition. Extreme decadent ambition, the desire to evoke the one with the other: enveloping melody of an aroma and fragrance effused by harmonies. Sensuality that is able to be — for those who possess it and know it — art of communication.

Also the word, when it is sound, understands it. It is on the word, therefore, that the composer most often relies in order to mediate that sensation. Like Baudelaire for Debussy, Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir from the Préludes for pianoforte; so D’Annunzio for Pizzetti with La danse de l’amour et de la mort parfumée in the Pisanella of 1913. Soon the sound detaches itself from the poetry to become pure sensation, allusion, evocation. Debussy does the same in Parfumes de la nuit, in the orchestral suite Iberia. Until the musician, not content with evocation, decides to compose together sounds, scents and lights. It is thus that, after the Prometheus — where to each sound corresponded to a different gradation of colour — Scriabjn dreamt a Mysterium, never accomplished. A liturgical symphony of sensual love, perfect form and reproduction of nature, fusion of music and scents, of lights and of that which is most tangible and yet most mysterious in nature.

L. Villoresi, “Il Profumo”, Ponte alle Grazie, Florence 1995