The Big Black Bechstein in the Middle of the Room

Perfume as Music

For years I have been trying to persuade myself to believe that perfumes are closer to poems than to other art forms. I have gone so far as to devise lists of identity claims which presumably demonstrate the truth of this apparently preposterous theory (see: Perfumes, Persons, and Poems). In all of this frenzy of activity, I have somehow failed to see the Big Black Bechstein in the middle of the room: that, in fact, perfume is much closer to music than it is to poetry.

Several lines of reasoning have fortuitously converged more or less simultaneously upon this same conclusion. Some of the first interlocutors to help to jolt me from my dogmatic slumber were Bob Johnson and one T.S. Brock (in comments at another site), who pointed out problems with my “perfumes as poetry” theory. More recently, in a response to the salon discussion of Duchamp's Fontaine and  ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, salonista Njeb offered this excellent explanation of the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art:

One reason I love abstract art is that it can go right to the primitive part of your brain and evoke feelings in a way that you aren't even really sure where they come from. What you are viewing is not really "something" and yet it makes you feel a certain way.

                             --Njeb, January 20, 2012, comment on Tower of Babel 2

In recent weeks, having set my “perfumes are poems” theory temporarily to one side while mulling over possible disparities between the two cases, I have also been trying to understand what I have been referring to as the Tower of Babel problem of radically disparate receptions to perfumes (including Sécrétions Magnifiques) in terms of selective physiological differences among various persons. It appears that people do not smell the same perfume when they praise as a masterpiece what others decry as a disaster. Or do they?

I do in fact still believe that variable sensitivities and distributions of hyposmias, anosmias, and hyperosmias may help to explain why and how a perfume such as L'Artisan Parfumeur Dzing! smells to some people like Bandaids and dung while it is heralded by others for its faithful reproduction of the scent of the kind of paper found in certain books. If we all know what Bandaids, dung, and paper smell like, then such radical distinctions in interpretation would seem to be grounded in the fact that some sniffers are not picking up on the specifically “dung-like” or “Bandaid”-like quality of that composition.

The same theory of physiological difference also explains why some reviewers appear to experience Sécrétions Magnifiques as a banal floral aquatic fragrance, not the serial killer crime scene facsimile experienced by others, myself included. All of these problems would seem to be exacerbated by the fact that different perfumes appear to express themselves differently on different wearers. Gypsy Parfumista reports, for example, that his mother dislikes Sécrétions Magnifiques on herself but finds it not unlikeable on her son, providing yet more welcome evidence for the Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth.

Still, there appears to be something else going on as well, as was illustrated by a couple of our commentators on the Tower of Babel 2. Gypsy Parfumista and kastehelmi seemed to interpret the same perfume very differently. Does Sécrétions Magnifiques convey an interpretation of the scent of sex? Or is it rape? Attitudes toward the perfume may well have something to do with one's answer to that question.

But what is it that leads some wearers to interpret such a composition in one way rather than the other in the first place? And why is it that disagreement in perfume criticism seems to have more to do with seemingly incommensurable interpretations than with facts about (the properties of) the objects of critique, the perfumes themselves?

Conceptual Similarities

The key to all of these conundra, I am finally beginning to appreciate, may lie in the marked similarity of perfume not to poetry but to music. First of all, perfume, like music, is non-representational and nonverbal. Neither is expressed in a human language readily translatable to other human languages. Yes, some music is choral, and has text associated with it, but the music itself remains entirely distinct. Opera and related genres would seem to be hybrid art forms involving both poetry and pure music.

Many of the same qualities which mark music off as distinct from the other arts hold true for perfume as well. The contents of a bottle of perfume are not directly translatable to other human languages, though we may try our best to describe what it is that we smell. Perfume, like music, is nonrepresentational in that it does not literally represent or refer to any objects in the world.

Perfume may and certainly does evoke memories of objects, but no object is implied by any particular perfume. This is perhaps one of the reasons why people may differ so radically over the “meaning” of a perfume such as ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, as we have been discussing here in recent weeks.

Perfume, like music, calls forth strong emotions and memories in some but not all people, and the elicited memories may be visual images, but, in the end, whatever they are, they are much more dependent upon the wearer's or sniffer's unique history than upon the nature of the perfume itself.

Perfume, like music, may be more or less lyrical, with a development trajectory which flows and undulates, or, in the case of a linear composition, which stays the same from start to finish. This may be why those who love classic perfumes with complex development trajectories find modern linear compositions sometimes boring and banal.

Perhaps linear perfumes can be usefully compared to simpler musical forms, such as the four-chord pop score, or the familiar twang of a country music riff. Perfumes which develop differently even on the same person during different wearings may be closer to extemporaneous jazz compositions. One might want to compare simple aromachemical perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 to some of the minimalist music of a composer such as Philip Glass.

Classic and vintage perfumes with well-defined, and complex yet repeatable development trajectories, such that they can be meaningfully discussed by multiple wearers—who experience similar series of unfurling notes—may be closer to classical music compositions, which have stood the test of time because they appeal to so many listeners and musicians, all of whom are able to agree on the score's transcendent beauty, though they may differ in their precise understanding or, in the case of musicians, about how best to interpret the score in a performance.

Extraneous similarities

Music and perfume are also similar in the sense that particular instances of the perfume or the work of music do not exhaust the work itself. In order to preserve a work of music, it is transcribed onto a score, which provides instructions on how to bring the piece back to life through a performance. Perfumers similarly preserve their formulae so that the perfume which they initially created can be re-created, reproduced, over and over again. Some performances are bad, just as some bottles of perfume are bad, having been poorly executed by those who took themselves to be following the composer's (perfumer's) instructions.

Both music and perfume can be perverted later on down the line. A beautiful classical composition can be watered down and rendered insipid, stripped of passion and directed toward the functional purpose of providing a background noise “Muzak” in public places. Perfumes which are reformulated often suffer a similar fate: they are perverted and eviscerated through tweaking the formula in ways which may be intended to improve the original but more often are probably intended to have cost-cutting effects.

Yes, reformulation is often claimed to be necessitated by the IFRA bans, but, in reality, many more perfumes appear to have been reformulated for crassly economic reasons. Clearly, if a perfume never contained evernia prunastri or any of the other “forbidden” components, then its reformulation was not motivated by concerns with complying with the IFRA (see Reflections on Reformulation, for more on this).

Perfume can also be misused, in the way that music can be poorly performed. A composer may cringe upon hearing a grotesque interpretation of his work, and a perfumer may cringe at discovering that his masterpiece is being overapplied by some wearers to the point where the beauty of the composition becomes impossible to perceive by those who come in contact with the over-perfumed person. Those who love perfumes such as Thierry Mugler Angel and Christian Dior Poison are the first to offer advice on how properly to apply the objects of their esteem. A spritz at the hip level or into the air through which one walks are a couple of the suggestions I've seen offered by reviewers of such über-potent perfumes.

But wait, there's more: the very production of entire genres of perfumes, as of music, appears to be driven more by market forces than by the creative élan of the artists involved. In this way, both music and perfume may be produced specifically to feed into a demonstrated market, which can be exploited over and over again by producing the same old thing: repetitive pop music, on the one hand; generic aquatic and sport colognes and fruity-floral fragrances, on the other—both of which cater to a certain stratum of society which seeks the comfort of the familiar in deciding where to spend their money on new music and new perfume.

Experiential Similarities

On a deeper level, transcending the conceptual and the extraneous similarities between music and perfume, it seems that the way we process both of these art forms is deeply personal, informed even more by our personal history and experience than by the object itself. This explains, among other things, why “one perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash,” and why some people love while others loathe classical music. Is it wrong or misguided to hate the music of J.S. Bach? I would be surprised if many people did. What does seem to be the case is that many people have no interest in such music, because it does not speak to them.

Similarly, a classic “old lady” floral aldehyde or chypre perfume may be less than meaningless to a young person looking to smell like the typically fruity-floral fragrance which has taken the industry by storm. Consider the “sweet laundry” and the vanilla patchouli fads in current perfumery. These sorts of scents have been made to seem familiar to large swaths of the market by their near ubiquity. They have become accessible by their sheer availability.

How can an average consumer possibly develop a taste for a genre of perfume which is not currently holding sway in the corridors of Sephora? If through exposure to perfumes massively marketed through multi-million-dollar campaigns featuring celebrities who pose in glittering attire—the suggestion being that one will presumably become similar to such celebrities by donning their perfume—one comes to dispense one's perfume wallet share on those products, then it will have been already been spent. Only perfumistas, who approach their hobby and passion as a quest for truth, knowledge, and beauty, are sufficiently motivated to invest the time and energy needed to learn about currently less popular genres of perfume, including those produced by niche houses (for more on this, see The Question of Niche).

The same holds true for music. Everyone is exposed to popular music: on the radio, through mass media, etc., in fact, through many of the same avenues by which one learns of popular perfumes. Only some people are exposed to what snobs would term art music, by virtue of having parents who value formal music education or simply want to provide as many opportunities to their children as possible.

I wonder whether with the advent of the internet fewer children are taking piano and guitar lessons, but I strongly suspect that is true. Children, like adults, are now busy surfing the web. It's no longer even possible, it seems to me, for someone to be bored, provided only that they have access to the internet. But music lessons, in the past, were an important source of diversion to children, and some among them developed a serious interest in classical music as a result.

In the world of perfume, as in the world of music, market success appears to be taken more often than not as the measure of quality. There are “perfume critics” just as there are “music critics”, but their opinions appear to hold little sway against market-driven trends. Most people who consume perfume and music decide what to buy based not on what the self-proclaimed experts say, but on what they happen to like, though the range of their choices appear to be narrowed considerably by exposure to marketing and by whatever happens to be available at the time when the person is looking to acquire a new perfume.

People have finite time and so tend to become attached to certain forms of music, which necessitates a neglect of others. So, too, do people have only a finite amount of body upon which to apply perfume, and a limited number of occasions during their short lives in which to wear the perfumes which they happen to have arrived at, often purely by chance.

The more I think about these overlaps between perfume and music, the more I become convinced that perfume really is the music of the nose. Although the similarities proliferate the more I reflect upon these matters, I am specifically interested in the implications for our experience of perfume. Just as listening to a piece of music is very different from performing it, and performance is very different from composition, I continue to wonder whether part of the Tower of Babel problem inheres precisely in people's confusion about what perfume actually is.

Perfume sometimes is the focus of our attention, similar to how one focuses at a concert on the music being played. There are always distractions, but some occasions of perfume wearing seem a lot like going to a concert. I think in this connection of the perfumes of the house of Serge Lutens, which are sometimes so intense that I feel that they command my full attention.

Often, however, perfumes are worn analogously to background music. That would explain the preponderance of doggerel-like perfumes in existence. They are not worn by and large for the sake of wearing great perfume. They are worn as a form of embellishment to one's appearance, like an accessory.

Depending upon how one is regarding perfume, there will be different attitudes about whether it is living up to its perceived promise. If the promise is to be inoffensive and pleasant, then many of the mass-marketed fragrances will meet that criterion, while powerhouse fragrances and even classic perfumes may not. All of this leads directly to the question of what precisely we are doing when we write perfume reviews.

Thinking about perfume on analogy to music, some reviewers approach perfumes from the perspective of a composer: they dissect it into parts, talk about the structure, the notes, and the trajectory. Other people simply report their personal experience of pleasure or displeasure with a perfume, in the manner in which one might critique a meal, explaining what works and what does not. Still other people tell stories about the memories which the wearing of a perfume have elicited. If perfume were music, or relevantly analogous to music, what would an appropriate perfume review by a wearer be?

Having shared some of my musings on these matters, I now turn to you, my fellow fragrant travelers:

Have you ever thought of perfume in musical terms?