Search Results for: perfume

Making Sense of the Perfume of Hearing

Posted on July 28, 2009 by - Columns

My summer reading list of books about olfactory sensations finds me now voraciously devouring Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a national bestseller when it first came out in 1990 which devotes roughly equal amounts of time to smell, touch, taste, hearing, and vision. Admittedly some of the theories it promulgates are now outdated, e.g. she states there are only four different tastes (five are now acknowledged) and they are each triggered in specific places in the tongue (refuted), etc. But such informational shifts are inevitable given that our understanding of most things—especially science and history—continues to evolve over time, pace Dmitry Medvedev. Also inevitable is that my newfound interest in how people perceive aromas, which was initially triggered by music, has ultimately taken me back to music, as I knew it would. For starters, Ackerman suggests a definition of music that’s been making my head spin: “Music is the perfume of hearing.”

Though the book was written with a general readership in mind, Ackerman then goes on to get into some music theory nitty-gritty, albeit largely citing Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music: “Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with ‘mournfulness’ and to a major seventh with ‘violent longing’ and to a minor second with ‘spiritless anguish’ because we’ve formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or it something more intrinsic in our makeup?” And earlier, after ranting a bit about all the young people who are destroying their hearing by blasting loud rock and roll (I can only guess what her reaction would be to today’s seemingly ubiquitous iPod people) she attempts to make a distinction between noise and music.

[T]he noises that irritate us are sounds loud or spiky enough to be potentially damaging to the ear. Because a sound grates on our psyche, or actually hurts, we want to get away from it. But there are also non-threatening sounds we just don’t like. […] Musical dissonance, for instance. In 1899, when audiences first heard Arnold Schönberg’s revolutionary “Transfigured Night,” they thought it was closer to organized noise than to music.

Although some readers of these pages might immediately be thinking: Transfigured Night? What about Schoenberg’s subsequent musical development, the rise of integral serialism, Cage’s indeterminacy, free jazz, Merzbow and noise music. On all of this Ackerman, sadly, is silent. Given her perfume analogy for music, though, it would have made for fascinating reading to find out what her thoughts were on all of these sonic experiences. Perhaps trace the parallels between Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-tone works like the Suite for Piano or the Wind Quintet, which in terms of their formal abstraction are analogous to the roughly contemporaneous 1921 release of Ernest Beaux’s landmark, synthetically derived perfume Chanel No. 5, a scent whose name alone hints at its own abstraction. Granted No. 5 is way more popular than anything penned by Schoenberg to this day, but it seems like there was definitely something in the air at that time, so to speak.

However, Ackerman’s agreement with the claim that most people can draw meaningful distinctions between minor sevenths, major sevenths, and minor seconds, poses something of a challenge to our currently relativist anything-goes approach to the materials of musical compositions. So often nowadays we like to say that musical perceptions are acculturated and that there are no absolutes. But there are flavors, odors, and tactile sensations that appeal to few people, and Ackerman also describes color consultants who claim that specific colors give off specific mood-affecting chakras which can be beneficial or harmful. Might there be some hard-wired biology standing in the way of most of us loving relentlessly pounding chains of minor seconds and sounds even more dissonant? Might such sounds ultimately be bad for us to listen to?

Many musical oddballs (me included) revel in such sonorities, but perhaps we fool ourselves if we think they will ever be meaningful to a significant audience. Then again, Chanel No. 5 is one of the few perfumes from the 1920s that is still on the market. Perhaps Schoenberg just needed a better marketing department.

The Realm of the Senses

Posted on June 30, 2009 by - Columns

“We search for visual beauty in art and in nature, and take care to arrange our homes in a way that pleases the eye. We seek out new music and musicians to add to our CD collections; perhaps we have learned to play an instrument ourselves. We spend time and money on sampling new and exotic cuisines, even learn to cook them. We pamper our sense of touch with cashmere sweaters, silk pajamas, and crisp linen shirts—we can hardly help refining it through our constant interaction with an infinitely varied tactile world. Yet most of us take our sense of smell for granted, leaving it to its own devices in a monotonous and oversaturated olfactory environment. We never think about its cultivation or enrichment, even though some of life’s most exquisite pleasures consequently elude us.”

—Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume (North Point Press, 2001; re-issued in paperback by Gibbs Smith, 2004)

“Some say Fougère Royale [first issued in 1881] is to fragrance what Kandinsky’s first abstract gouache of 1910 is to painting: a turning point. Even the tongue-in-cheek name (‘royal fern’) announces that the game has changed: ferns, of course, have no smell and there is nothing royal about them. […] Fougère Royale starts the way some Bruckner symphonies do, with a muted pianissimo of strings, giving an impression of tremendous ease and quiet power. It does smell of coumarin, to be sure, but it is also fresh, clean, austere, almost bitter. […] But wait! There’s a funny thing in there, something not altogether pleasant. It’s touch of natural civet…”

—Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent (Harper, 2006)

“Dune [by Dior] is a strong contender for Bleakest Beauty in all perfumery […] dissonant but interesting […] [I]t’s as if every perfumery accord had become a Ligeti cluster chord…”

—Luca Turin in Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (Viking, 2008)

Despite all of the marvelous experiences in other cities I had over the past two months, the event that still remains most vivid to me is Green Aria—a Scent Opera, which I caught during my two day return to New York City in between flights. My encounter with that completely unique artistic creation triggered a ton of thoughts at the time which have only gotten more elaborate as time has gone by, and have been even further fueled by the writings of perfume guru Luca Turin. In one of life’s inexplicable yet fortuitous coincidences, in the guest room I stayed in several days later in Toronto there were copies of both of Turin’s books as well as Chandler Burr’s biography of the man. Sneaking fleeting glances at these books during the few hours I was actually in the room hooked me into wanting to learn about olfactory concoctions and to see if my experience of them could in any way be analogous to the way I perceive visual art, literature, film, or any of the performing arts—obviously, most of all, music.

So still immersed in Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent (which I ordered along with several other nasally-oriented volumes upon my return) and armed with notes culled Perfumes: The Guide (which Turin co-wrote with Tania Sanchez) plus a list of perfume retailers in New York City, I embarked on a completely new (at least for me) experiential adventure—a jaunt through various perfume counters in an effort to figure out how much I could distinguish about the various offerings on hand.

Sephora

A few of the many scents available for sampling at one of the many NYC branches of Sephora. But it is extremely difficult to process a large amount of olfactory information.

I started my quest at one of the many local branches of Sephora which allows visitors to sample a great many of the perfumes on sale without terribly forceful sales personnel hovering over you to guilt you into buying something. Conveniently placed smelling strips placed near the “tester” bottles allow store visitors to get a sense of what different perfumes smell like in the same way that headphone kiosks allow curious listeners to check out the latest recordings. So far so good. Perfumes in Sephora are divided by male and female fragrances—there’s definitely nothing analogous to that in a record store—and within those divisions arranged by company name. To me it seemed the equivalent of alphabetizing CDs by record label or music publisher. But since perfume composers (they actually use the same word!) are even less known to the general public than the composers that usually get talked about on these pages, it must be conceded that sorting fragrances by their creators would make little sense to potential consumers.

I wound up visiting three different branches of Sephora since the stock is not consistent from store to store, but eventually found my way to the first floor of Macy’s which I suppose is analogous to a Metropolitan Museum of Art or Lincoln Center for perfume. At Macy’s, specific areas are consigned to specific manufacturers whose representatives hawk their wares quite aggressively. I’d argue that the scene there is way more intimidating for a novice potential perfume audience member than attending an exhibition or an orchestra performance would be for a neophyte museum visitor or concertgoer. At the same time, you might be more likely to find a remarkable aroma in Macy’s than at Sephora. Of course, there are even higher end places to seek out the perfect scent such as Bergdorf-Goodman or specialty shops for various manufacturers which I suppose are analogous to blue chip art galleries or historic music shrines like Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, or La Scala.

But after nearly two hours of sniffing, my nose was completely overwhelmed. Admittedly I’m a complete amateur at this sort of thing, but I would contend that is more difficult to stay focused nasally for long periods of time than it is to read for hours on end, look at floors of museum walls, or listen to music for hours uninterruptedly. And there’s a real bodily limitation in addition to the perceptual one. Despite my overhearing someone in the music business claim that being exposed to minimalist music made her physically ill, it seems physically impossible (though probably not psychologically so) to have an allergic reaction to music, whereas I imagine the same is not true for perfumes.

Complicity and the Chemical Senses

Posted on November 23, 2015 by - Columns

Blindfolded patrons sit around a table and eat various food items, smell perfume, and listen to music.

Jozef Youssef presents a multisensory meal for the launch of a new Hugo Boss fragrance. (Photo courtesy Kitchen Theory)

I spent the weekend composing two new pieces of music for another collaboration with chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory. This time around I was tasked with bringing out the sweet and sour elements of a lavender and pomegranate-based tapioca dessert, part of a multisensory meal that Youssef was organizing for the launch of a new Hugo Boss fragrance. (Previously, I composed music to bring out the sweet and bitter notes in Chivas Regal 18 Ultimate Cask Collection blended Scotch whisky for a similar event.)

My sweet texture is pretty similar to the sweet texture I wrote for the whisky pairing: consonant intervals and mellow timbres in a relatively high register, organized in short, ascending phrases, with a sprinkling of wind chimes.

The sour texture, while similarly drawing on the psychological literature of Charles Spence’s Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University, is a bit looser in its interpretation of the research. I used bright, buzzy timbres and descending phrases for contrast, and I picked up on an idea from the music I wrote for a 2012 Azul y Garanza Garciano to depict tartness with dissonance, not only in the musical intervals, but also in the slight detuning of my subtly shifting delay effect. To give me a wider continuum of intervals from which to choose, I composed my music in Harry Partch’s 43-note per octave scale, which allowed me to incorporate his notions of comparative consonance (the simpler the ratio, the more consonant the interval, which is the best explanation of consonance vs. dissonance I’ve encountered and serves as a finely graduated yardstick for crossmodal inquiry). I interpreted the faster tempi that have been linked to sourness in psychological studies more generally as high rhythmic density, reflected in my texture’s pulsating elements. Sourness feels higher than sweetness to me, so this piece is in a slightly higher register as well.

While I wasn’t specifically composing music to accompany a scent, scent plays a vital role in dining, and I think the challenges to accompanying scent with music are similar to taste.

Taste and smell are our chemical senses. They are what allow us to interrogate the makeup of our environment, providing information that perhaps might lead us in the direction of dinner or cause us to spit out something poisonous. The visual arts and the sonic arts arrive to us from a distance, via electromagnetic radiation or fluctuations in air pressure, but taste and smell require direct contact.

Philosophers have long debated whether the fundamentally different nature of these chemical senses precludes the elaboration of an art of ideas based on them, something that goes beyond the ancient and sophisticated traditions of perfumery or cuisine. Taste, which requires a visible delivery mechanism, perhaps has a leg up on smell, which is invisible (like music).

A few years ago, Chandler Burr lobbied New York’s Museum of Arts and Design to establish a new Department of Olfactory Art and was subsequently brought on as its head. His brief tenure culminated in the 2012 exhibition The Art of Scent 1889-2012. A man of passionate pronouncements, he comes right out and says of perfume, “It’s art.”

I’m happy to accept, along with Marcel Duchamp, that if someone proclaims his or her work as art, it’s art. However I’m not sure whether, during the long history of perfume-making, most perfumers have actually been making that claim. We’re not talking about the gradual acceptance of a new technology; unlike photography or video games (my primary arena of activity for the past twenty years, which only recently emerged from its own “is it art?” debate), perfume has been around for a very long time. It might take a little more work than the wholesale rebranding of an existing discipline to bring perfume and art into the same conversation. Perhaps we can repurpose Wittgenstein’s dictum that not every building is architecture to suggest that not every perfume is a work of olfactory art.

(Incidentally, while I’ve seen a couple of announcements in recent years about companies bringing the sense of smell into gaming, my very first game, the maybe not so great Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail!, may well be the first, way back in 1996. The game shipped with a scratch and sniff card, and at key junctures in the game, the “Cybersniff 2000” logo would flash and a sound would play (my processed voice), informing the player which of the nine squares to scratch, neatly addressing the question of synchronization. The soundtrack also featured a 12-tone faux-jazz composition, the sure mark of a young composer fresh out of music school.)

One of the considerations is practicality. In an interview with The New York Times, Holly Hotchner, the former director of the Museum of Art and Design in New York City who brought Chandler Burr on board, conceded that “perfume by its nature has to be wearable, which is not true of other art forms.” Paul A. Young, a London-based chocolatier who devised a charcoal-flavored chocolate to accompany a Francis Bacon painting at the Tate Sensorium exhibition acknowledges the assumption that food should be pleasurable when he says, “Some people will find it repulsive and not want to eat it, some will find it engaging and some people will love it.”

Music has always been considered an art form, but in the last few decades, sound art has emerged and evolved as a parallel practice distinct from music (although I think sound artists ignore the history of music at their peril). There’s no quantifiable difference between sound art and music. The materials are exactly the same; it’s a question of focus. With all of the current interest surrounding food and multisensory perception, I’ve been thinking for a while that taste and smell may be next in line to be appropriated by the art world. But this question of focus highlights the challenges that can arise when people from different creative disciplines come together (as I described in an earlier essay).

As an example, when I attended “The Architecture of Taste,” Pierre Hermé’s presentation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design a few years ago, it was fascinating to get a glimpse into a great chef’s creative process, and the pastry samples were amazing, but it was clear, especially during the Q&A afterwards, that he was thinking of his work in very different terms from the concerns of art and design grad students. Another leading pastry chef, Jordi Roca of El Celler de Can Roca, discussed his relationship to art in the film that documents the multimedia meal El Somni, devised alongside the other two Roca brothers, concluding simply, “I’m just a pastry chef.”

An assortment of desserts on a tray.

Desserts served at Pierre Hermé’s Harvard lecture included an “infringement citron” and other desserts made from unconventional ingredients such as wasabi. (Photo by Ben Houge.)

Dean Dutton provides a good overview of the issues surrounding the notion of olfactory art in his book The Art Instinct, and as I’ve been doing projects that combine food and music, it’s been useful for me to consider these arguments from a musical perspective.

One issue that he dismisses a bit too quickly, I think, is the idea of “internal relations.” He borrows this term from philosopher Monroe Beardsley, pointing out that, while we may recognize corresponding proportional relationships in the spatial layouts of a painting or the intervals of a musical chord, chemical compounds don’t lend themselves to this kind of perceptual organization that can serve as the basis for large, sophisticated structures. There’s no equivalent to an octave or a major 7 sharp 11 chord or a retrograde inversion that would allow a composer like Bach to spin out a ten-minute fugue from a subject of just a few notes. The wine aroma wheel is nowhere near as precise as a color wheel (can you rotate a raspberry note 180 degrees to obtain its opposite?) or the circle of fifths (what’s the secondary dominant of leather?).

A second obstacle is a question of the delivery mechanism, and here I’m thinking about a time-based sequencing or counterpoint of multiple scents that goes beyond the natural diffusion of a scent in the air once it is sprayed or applied. (This is more of an issue for scent than taste.) To think of scent in musical, time-based terms, it’s a challenge to consistently deliver a scent and take it away, allowing for temporal contrast. This issue thwarted some of the historical efforts to bring scent into cinema, such as Smell-O-Vision from 1959.

Many approaches to scent diffusion have been developed with varying levels of technological overhead. The Museum of Art and Design’s Art of Scent exhibition took place in a spare, white room, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, laudably devoid of packaging and other marketing detritus. As visitors inclined their heads over small indentations in the wall, a puff of scent emerged from a sophisticated mechanism designed by Scent Communication in Germany. At Green Aria: A Scentopera, a collaboration between entrepreneur/writer/director Stewart Matthew, perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, and composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson which premiered at the Guggenheim in New York City in 2009 (about which NewMusicBox’s Frank J. Oteri has written extensively), scent was delivered to each spectator via a “scent microphone” (functionally more like a “scent speaker”) at each seat, which could be positioned as close to the nose as desired. The inaugural installation of the recently opened Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn, masterminded by cocktail impresario Dave Arnold, features a “Smell Synth” that allows visitors to experiment with different odor compound combinations at the push of a button. This echoes the “Olfactiano,” a “scent piano” developed by Peter De Cupere, which he has used for time-based scent-oriented performances such as his Scentsonata for Brussels presented at the Cordoba festival in 2004. At the Crossmodalist rehearsal I attended in London last April, the technique was low-tech but effective; I was blindfolded, and different perfumes (designed by Nadjib Achaibou to evoke concepts such as “lust” and “sorrow”) were manually wafted in my direction, sometimes simultaneously, by unseen hands at different moments of Chris Lloyd’s live performance of Liszt’s piano transcription of Wagner’s “Liebestod.”

A third consideration is representation. I’ve written in the past about what I called the “abstract” quality that food and sound share. By this I meant that, while music can be linked to an external narrative via text or theatrical context, coherence is essentially the result of internal relations, to return to Monroe Beardsley’s term, i.e., a note has meaning in the context of a chord or scale or harmonic structure and how these structures evolve in time. Even without recourse to the same kinds of internal relations as music, tastes and scents are constructed and developed by combining chemical compounds. This is in contrast to the visual and literary arts like painting, sculpture, choreography, cinema, literature, poetry, and video games, in which meaning-making via external representation is the norm. I think it’s important to consider that an extracted chemical essence of an object is still a form or an attribute of the object; the scent of a rose derived from a rose cannot be said to represent a rose in the way that a painting represents a rose, because in a real sense that essence actually is the rose. Representation is the use of one thing to depict another thing; as Magritte put it, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” and no pipe extracts are required to produce a painting of a pipe.

My usage is different from the way the term is used, for example, in Annick Le Guérer’s article “Olfaction and Cognition: a Philosophical and Psychoanalytic View” in the weighty 2002 compendium Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition. Here, the historical assertion (shared by numerous philosophers) is that scent is not “capable of abstraction,” by which she means that a common attribute cannot be extracted from multiple scents in the way that we might refer to an abstract color. This is reflected in the lack of vocabulary for describing scents (at least in English); we generally simply describe scents according to their sources or, in the case of synthetic compounds, by analogy.

So perhaps my earlier usage of the term is nonstandard, but I think the ideas are related: just as mimetic music was by far the exception prior to the advent of recording technology (with timpani evoking thunder in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique serving as an example of a rare exception), it’s difficult for a taste or a smell to be “about” anything other than itself.

I’ve heard people assert that what music represents is emotion, and I could imagine this argument being applied to smell or taste, but evoking and representing are not the same thing. As Frank J. Oteri pointed out in our recent correspondence on the subject, “Associations (e.g. major = happy, minor = sad) are the result of acculturation and not universal. The same, though, could be said for scent.” He notes the curious coincidence that, as I mentioned above, music and scent are completely invisible.

I’ve also heard some people conflate tonality with representation, and there certainly are clear parallels between figurative painting in the visual arts and tonal structures in music, but tonality strictly speaking still does not represent anything outside of music’s “internal relations,” and in fact it is these relations that give tonality meaning. Nonetheless it is certainly worth observing that abstraction in painting and tonality in music experienced parallel ruptures in the tumultuous early 20th century, and it is surely a result of the same cultural forces that Chanel No. 5 was introduced in 1921, unprecedented in its lack of reference to natural scents, “a perfume like nothing else,” in the words of Coco Chanel.

At a certain point, while pondering these questions, I realized that music has been here before. Like many undergraduate music students, I read about the absolute vs. program music debate in my music history classes, and (like a lot of students, I suspect) I was left wondering what the big deal was. On one side of this virulent debate you had Richard Wagner espousing opera as a total art form driven by narrative and deriving power from the coupling of art forms, while on the other side Eduard Hanslick argued for purely instrumental music as the art form’s pinnacle of expression. I recently picked up Mark Evan Bonds’s excellent new book on the subject and realized just how far back this question goes. He organizes his argument around the ideas of essence (what music is) and effect (what it does). This historical perspective has the potential to serve as a useful framing device for discussions of an art based on the chemical senses.

There is a category of “olfactory artists” that has emerged as a distinct practice from that of perfumers, and it seems to be expanding rapidly. Many of the artists working with scent are not working only with scent, and often they’re not working alone. Some of these artists are crafting the scents themselves, but oftentimes the chemical component is outsourced. Pamela Rosenkranz worked with perfumers Dominique Ropion and Frédéric Malle and sound designer Emar Vegt on Our Product, an installation at this year’s Venice Biennale that presented a huge pool of liquid the color of an averaged European.skin tone. Belgian artist Peter De Cupere, perhaps the best known artist in this arena, has been working with scent since the 90s, often incorporating smells into large-scale mixed media sculptures, as in The Smell of a Stranger, presented at the Havana Biennial, which engineers indigenous Cuban plants to give off scents redolent of Western culture. Brian Goeltzenleuchter has been working on a project to capture the smell of each neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Arnica Yi’s 6,070,430k of Digital Spit, presented last summer at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, bridged the worlds of scent and taste by building an immersive installation inspired by the “Mint Pond” dish at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli restaurant. She notes, “I think the most radical artistic statements are being made in the world of cuisine. That interest translates and seeps into my approach to smell. Even though I don’t work with food, I feel the sensibilities are shared.”


Soundscape for Pamela Rosenkranz – Our Product. Swiss Pavilion at Biennale Venice 2015 from Emar Vegt on Vimeo.
The high degree of collaboration that many artists are already exploring points one way forward for an art of the chemical senses. Maybe the lack of “internal relations” and problems of diffusion preclude certain types of standalone olfactory expressions, but by linking art forms, sophisticated new kinds of experiences are possible. Let music aid with the time-based elements. It’s not unlike setting a text or scoring a film; another art form defines the structure. Ramón Perisé of Mugaritz writes that, “how cooking can participate in a multisensory spectacle is something that, in my opinion, is in the first phases of exploration.” The idea of putting different art forms together into a multimedia event is the reason I chose the term “food opera” for my project in the first place.

Listening to music is something we do together. So is dining. As I’ve been working on my food opera project, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the overlap between these two spaces: the restaurant and the concert hall. Food represents community, maybe literally, in the same sense of the word I used when writing about “representation” earlier. When we think of fellowship, we often speak of breaking bread together. Dining is one mode of being in the world together.

To orchestrate a communal dining experience as an artwork is the kind of tactic associated with the relational aesthetics movement of the 90’s. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1992 piece Untitled (Free), now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, involved distributing free curry and rice to visitors in a gallery space, and since then, Tiravanija has presented a number of other pieces that involve people coming together to eat. Together with his longtime gallerist, Gavin Brown (a collaborator on the original exhibition of Untitled [Free]), he has been developing a commercial kitchen in Hancock, NY, called Unclebrother. In a recent interview, he highlighted some of the same community-oriented values I emphasize in my work, “It’s about eating from your surroundings.”

This is a big part of what my food opera project is about. I have observed that these events promote community in a unique way. Because each seat in a restaurant has its own speaker and functions as a source of music, diners become more aware of the people around them and in fact depend on the presence of other diners to complete their experience. The music foregrounded at each diner’s table becomes the accompaniment for the person at the adjacent table, such that everyone in the restaurant is involved, through their choice of dish and the rhythms of their meal, in facilitating the overall musical experience. There’s a lateral exchange of information that is unlike a typical concert; sound passes not just from performer to audience, but from diner to diner. This strikes me as a rich yet underexplored model for musical communication (something I’ve also explored in my piece The Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias, a setting of a Greek poem by Constantine P. Cavafy for unamplified voice and audience mobile devices).

At several events, we’ve gone so far as to incorporate field recordings from the farms that provide the ingredients and interviews with farmers into the soundscape, since Jason Bond, the chef with whom I’ve collaborated on these projects, is a passionate supporter of local, sustainable agriculture. We used sound to literally bring farm to table. My hope is that diners leave the restaurant with an increased sense of their interdependent roles in a larger ecosystem, which may encourage more responsible food consumption choices.

When I was attempting, in my poor Spanish, to describe this aspect of my work to chef Dani Lasa at Mugaritz, he understood immediately and responded with the perfect word: “complicidad.” Complicity. I asked if Mugaritz had ever done a dish involving sound, not in their various multimedia collaborations, but actually in the dining room. Dani told me about a dish called Mortar Soup with Spices, Seeds, Fish Broth, and Fresh Herbs. No matter at what stage people were in their meals, the entire restaurant was served the dish at the same time, and as each diner applied the pestle to the mortar, the whole room rang with a sound like Tibetan singing bowls. This experience was enabled by the restaurant, but enacted by each individual diner; everyone was complicit in the resulting sound.

A mortar, a pestle, and food.

Sopa de mortero con especias, semillas, caldo de pescados y hierbas frescas. (Photo courtesy Mugaritz.)

This is the goal of my food operas: to bring things together, connecting creative disciplines, connecting farms to restaurants, connecting people to their environments and to each other.

I hesitate to add this coda, but I feel this is an important point. I’ve been writing this essay in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, and in Beirut before that, and of course you can keep going as far back as you like. In these factious times, more than ever we need to find ways to understand those whom we perceive as being different from ourselves as part of the same ecosystem, complicit in the well being of the world. As someone who’s lived a third of his life outside of his home country, I believe that cultivating empathy for others via direct interaction is the best hope for peace. One of the best ways to do this is to come together over a meal. Just as our chemical senses—Le Guérer uses the term “proximity senses”—require contact to perceive our surroundings, we need situations that allow us to come together and better understand our neighbors on this planet. When we break bread together, a meal can do that.

Advocacy and Communication

Posted on March 4, 2013 by - Columns

I had something of an epiphany about how the various parts of my life relate to each other last week when I gave a presentation both about my own music and my writings and talks concerning the music of others for the composition seminar at Yale University. The more I’ve thought about that epiphany, the more I’ve wondered if it has larger implications for how artistic experiences are created and communicated to others.

As a writer and speaker about music, I have pretty firmly established my working methods as being advocatorial rather than critical. I’ve long believed that my own opinion about a piece of music (or anyone else’s opinion for that matter) is far less important than the piece of music itself and the person/people who created it. I tend to distrust the received wisdom culled from arbiters of taste (self-appointed or otherwise) only slightly less than my own personal taste which can all too often get in the way of experiencing the ideas of another creator on his or her own terms. So I’ve endeavored whenever I write or talk about something, or whenever I talk to someone about his or her work, to try to describe the work rather than to evaluate it and, in conversations, give the creator the opportunity to speak on the work’s behalf.

This kind of openness might perhaps seem antithetical to the process of composing music which is, after all, a sharing of one’s own personal musical aesthetics with the world. Undeniably there are specific musical ingredients that I feel pretty passionate about and which I therefore explore quite a bit in my own music—microtonal intervals, repetition (whether actual or perceived), vocal melodies that are based specifically on the pronunciation and meanings of the words sung, permutational patterning (whether based on themes, scales, or tone rows), oddball rhythms (particularly quintuple and septimal time), metric modulation, and even occasional indeterminacy. At the same time, though there’s a lot of theory behind much of what I compose, I try my best to always make whatever technique or process I explore clearly audible.
At Yale last week, a student asked why it was so important to me that my music communicate so directly even though it sometimes incorporates somewhat esoteric techniques and processes. And then it dawned on me: when I write about other people’s music, my goal is to advocate for their music; when I write my own music, my goal is to advocate for whatever techniques I’m exploring. When I set texts, my goal is to advocate for those words. For me, it’s actually all the same thing. The more music I hear by others, the more ideas I’m inspired to pursue on my own and the more I pursue certain of those ideas the more I want to ask others about them. Isn’t this what we all do, either as creators of or respondents to artistic experiences? Everything emanates from listening.

Then on the train ride back from New Haven, I started reading New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small’s seminal 1998 book Musicking, which is a scathing attack on how orchestral music is performed and listened to. Though Musicking had been on my reading list long before Small’s death in September 2011, I was not quite prepared for the book’s intensity, especially after a wonderful day at Yale that helped me clarify my approach to music. Here’s a sample of Small’s argument:

“What for members of the audience may at its best be a transcendental experience of communication with a great musical mind, for the orchestra members may be just another evening’s work and even, for some, a time of boredom and frustration. Whatever the event may be celebrating, it does not seem to be unity, unanimity or intimacy but rather the separation of those who produce from those who consume…”

Earlier in the book he decries concert hall construction that ensures a separation between performers and audience and a seating arrangement that makes it difficult for attendees to do anything else besides merely listen to the music. Though I was somewhat baffled by the first concerts I attended back in my early teens, I very soon grew to love how the format allowed for a really deep absorption of sonic information that was not constantly interrupted—either by someone asking you to buy a drink or other attendees loudly having a conversation which makes it extraordinarily difficult and at times impossible to fully process the music being performed.

I have not yet finished Musicking and will probably have more to say about it. I’m now up to the chapter titled “Summoning Up the Dead Composer” which I’m sure will be a doozy. As a composer and an advocate for the music of other composers, primarily those who are still alive, I have quite a few issues with the culture of orchestral music concerts which are all too rarely concern themselves with the music of the here and now. That said, I wouldn’t want orchestras and large concert halls to go away—quite the opposite. I want them to let more of us in!

Small was hardly the first writer to make this analogy, yet I find it particularly troubling that someone so attuned to the importance of music in human society (as he proved himself to be in his first chapter) would come to the conclusion that unimpeded listening is a form of submission that is ultimately bad for people. A similar argument could be made for us not looking at paintings or reading books (including his). Ultimately, taken to its logical conclusion, such an argument would have us never pay full attention to anyone else. I fear all too many people are encouraged not to pay sufficient attention to others these days which has resulted in a world where political discourse is often reduced to binary echo chambers.

On Saturday afternoon, however, I found a pleasant refutation of experiential immersion as subjugation during an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Art and Design (MAD), a place I had never before visited. What got me to finally attend was an exhibit devoted to perfume. (Readers might recall how my attending a performance of the Scent-Opera—a collaboration between composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson, “librettist” Stewart Matthew, and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel—triggered a summer-long exploration of perfume that led me to think about music somewhat differently.) MAD’s presentation, which unfortunately closed on Sunday, might offer the next step toward refining that line of thinking.

MAD Perfume Exhibition

Is sticking your head inside one of these indentations to experience a perfume an act of discovery or submission?

The exhibition consisted primarily of an empty wall with twelve indentations for visitors to stick their heads in to smell twelve specific perfumes created between the years 1889 and 2010. A brief text about each of the perfumes was projected onto the empty wall but only for short periods of time. I found it impossible to read each of the blurbs in only one go and had to wait for them to re-appear. Similarly, an introductory text appeared and then disappeared on the floor. (A side room offered a monitor displaying video interviews with the perfumers, as well as vats of each of the twelve perfumes on display in the main exhibition; visitors were allowed to dunk paper into the vats in order to smell the perfumes for a more extended duration, though even when smeared on paper the perfume will fade.) By turning the process of reading the texts about the perfumes into an experience as fleeting as smelling them, MAD created a remarkably apt way of describing the ephemerality and elusiveness of olfactory perception. Of course, music is as ephemeral and elusive, perhaps even more so in a live performance which you can’t even stick your head into again to rehear.

MAD Perfume Exhibition 2

Even if you save the paper on which you were allowed to blot drops of perfume, they will eventually lose their scent.

During the hour I was at the exhibition, I witnessed people of all ages willingly sticking their heads into those indentations with curiosity and delight, though it was an even more submissive act than sitting in a concert hall. Then again, it was very instructive to watch and listen to the videos and hear perfumer Ralf Schweiger enthuse about the aroma of sloths, reveling in how they smell like hair and dirt, only then to confess that much as he likes their fragrance, including it in a perfume is problematic. As he opined, “You can’t push the envelope too much because people won’t like it.”

Again I was reminded of all the sounds we love as composers and how we attempt to include them in our music either fully conscious of or completely oblivious to how they will be perceived by others, depending on our aesthetic inclinations.

Engaging All the Senses

Posted on May 14, 2012 by - Columns

Last year I spent most of my birthday wandering through various New York City galleries to see tons of recent visual art. This year, visual art also played a role in the day’s activities (I finally made it to the 2012 Whitney Biennial) but I devoted a significant amount of energy to sating my other senses as well, all of which presented different curation models.

My kind of traffic jam

My kind of traffic jam: the dim sum carts at Golden Unicorn.

The day began with tasting a nice range of the dim sum at Golden Unicorn on East Broadway in Chinatown, my favorite place to eat dim sum in New York City. (I didn’t eat enough Cantonese food in Hong Kong!) As in most classic dim sum places, although there is a menu, the way the food is normally ordered is directly from waitresses who roam around the restaurants with carts hawking the most recently cooked up varietals. So, instead of making a decision about what you are going to eat from a verbal description on a menu, customers have an opportunity to see and smell the aromas beforehand, which is extremely effective incentive to ordering a lot of things you might otherwise not have ordered, as well as a lot more food than you probably need!

A short subway ride uptown took me up to the Whitney Museum of American Art which every two years offers a retrospective exhibition of what is new and exciting in the world of visual art. Originally these retrospectives were devoted exclusively to art produced in the United States, but recent biennials have included international work as well. While it would be great to get a sense of the latest developments in visual art from all over the world, such an undertaking is probably too ambitious for any one institution, let alone one whose presentation is contained within one Manhattan building. And this year the Biennial attempted to embrace more than just visual art by including a series of musical performances as well (including avant-garde rock pioneers The Red Crayola and, on the day I was there, jazz pianist Jason Moran and mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran). The range of work presented at the Whitney this year is so broad that its being brought together under one roof seems somewhat random. In fact, that seeming randomness was further compounded by significant portions of the exhibition devoted to work that was created much further in the past than two years ago. For the 2012 Biennial, the seminal German film director Werner Herzog created a film montage of works by 17th century Dutch artist Hercules Segers (c. 1590–1638). Plus there was an entire room of work devoted to the forgotten eccentric Texas painter Forrest Bess (1911-1977), whose work was more compelling to me than most of the work on exhibit that was actually created between 2010 and 2012. (That said, I quite liked the paintings of Andrew Masullo and the sculptures of Vincent Fecteau, both San Francisco-based artists, and it was very difficult for me to draw myself away from Lutz Bacher’s Pipe Organ, an installation whose centerpiece is an old, seemingly decayed Yamaha organ whose keys are triggered by a computer program yielding a random array of harmonies and rhythms—totally my kind of thing.) I should point out, however, that presumably the “art work” Biennial spectators were supposed to be considering was not any of the paintings of Forrest Bess, but rather their collection in the room by sculptor Robert Gober. Another work presented at the Biennial (by Nick Mauss) recreated a 1939 antechamber of the French perfumer Guerlain which anachronistically incorporated art works by Andy Warhol and others. Curation itself was in fact the theme of this year’s accumulation of art—the 2012 Biennal was supposedly about how our perceptions of art and everything else are shaped by the way things are packaged and presented.

Ultimately, I was disappointed. But luckily my encounter with a fake Guerlain display room was followed by visits to several real perfume emporia which inhabit Madison Avenue. Two deserve special mention here. I had never experienced any of the singular scents created for the firm of Frédéric Malle (the nephew of the famous French film director Louis Malle) before discovering the sole Frédéric Malle boutique in the United States on the corner of 72nd Street and Madison Avenue. I was immediately impressed that, unlike any other perfume brand I know of, Malle’s perfumes prominently feature the name of each of the perfumes’ “composers” on their bottles. (I love that the name for someone who creates a perfume is composer.) However, perhaps even more impressive than Malle’s giving credit where credit is due, are three large vessels, reminiscent of the tanks in Altered States, in which a few spritzes of a scent are sprayed and effectively contained for their olfactory perception by visitors to the boutique. It was a great way to experience Jean-Claude Ellena’s 2003 almond-themed Eau d’Hiver, but Edouard Flechier’s all-encompassing Une Rose, also created in 2003, didn’t need the assistance. Remarkably, the blotter a dollop was sprayed on Saturday still holds the scent two days later.

Frederic Malle Scent Containers

The scent containers at the Frédéric Malle Boutique on Madison Avenue. Photo by Frédéric Malle courtesy Marina Lodato of HL Group.

Perhaps even more extraordinary, though, was a fragrance I smelled composed by Annick Ménardo and manufactured by the New York-Grasse firm Le Labo called Patchouli 24. It, too, has remained perceptible on the blotter after 48 hours and is truly strange—as its name suggests, it is based on patchouli but it smells somehow barbecued. Le Labo’s fragrances are part of a massive display of fragrances at Barney’s, whose offerings trump Macy’s, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, and every other place I’ve visited since becoming obsessed with perfume after experiencing The Scent Opera three years ago. Like the waitresses who deal in dim sum at Golden Unicorn, the sales reps at Barney’s various consignment stands lure you with their offerings by dazzling you with their olfactory possibilities. But after about ten different scents, it is difficult to perceive anything.

Le Labo

A scent kit issued by Le Labo (no longer available) that enabled people to build their own scents; talk about information overload.

This is not true for experiencing tons of pieces of music, which I have done time and time again for years and did so again to cap off all these other sensory encounters. Saturday night was the final concert of Carnegie Hall’s 2012 installment of Spring for Music, a festival offering a week of adventurous programs by North American orchestras. Last year I went to three of the seven concerts. I planned to outdo myself this year and go to all six concerts. Jetlag got the better of me the first night, so I missed the Houston Symphony’s Shostakovich extravaganza, but I attended everything else. There were many aural delights throughout the week. On Thursday, the Alabama Symphony (under the direction of Justin Brown) opened their concert with a fascinating new piece by Avner Dorman called Astrolatry (I’m eager to see the score) and closed it with an incredibly insightful reading of a piece I thought I had heard enough times not to be surprised by, the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven (Beethoven?!?). The next night, Edo de Waart led the Milwaukee Symphony in a very lush performance of Qigang Chen’s Chinese-music-meets-Messiaen cantata Iris dévoilée. (To drive home the connection, there was also Messiaen on the program.). But until Saturday, the highlight for me had been Wednesday’s stunning performance by soprano Hila Plitman and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jacques Lacombe of Edgard Varèse’s final composition (the unfinished Anaïs Nin-inspired Noctural, which was completed by Chou Wen-Chung), even though for most people in the audience it seemed to be trumped later that evening when Marc-André Hamelin joined the orchestra to play Ferruccio Busoni’s 70-minute everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Piano Concerto (1904), which ends with a male chorus.

ESO Flag Wavers

The most enthusiastic audience of the week by far was that of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra which included 1100 Edmonton residents (who flew to NYC just to attend the concert), among them the town’s mayor and several members of the Canadian Parliament. Photo by Steve J. Sherman; courtesy Véronique Firkusny at Mary Lou Falcone Public Relations.

But Saturday’s concert, by the Nashville Symphony under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero, was the program I wanted to hear most of all. It opened with the Larry Austin completion of Charles Ives’s final composition, the Universe Symphony, which he worked on, on and off, for almost 40 years until the end of his life in 1954. It remains one of American music’s most enigmatic and controversial works. While Saturday night’s performance did not definitely answer any of that work’s mysteries, it certainly shook up Carnegie Hall with its 5 conductors and 20 percussionists scattered across the orchestra.

Terry Riley & Tracy Silverman

Composer Terry Riley in rehearsal with electric violinist Tracy Silverman. Photo courtesy Mitchell Korn.

For Terry Riley’s new electric violin concerto, The Palmian Chord Ryddle, the orchestra was joined by Tracy Silverman, who proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that a violin can rock as hard as a guitar. If that wasn’t enough, they followed all that with Percy Grainger’s The Warriors, a 1916 composition for large orchestra featuring three pianos and almost as many percussionists as the Ives. This work also required multiple conductors. It was Grainger at his wildest. Too bad Ives and Grainger didn’t know each other. Or did they?

Usually I attend art exhibitions, restaurants, or perfume shops and contemplate how much music presenters can learn from what these other communities do. But this time around, the music people totally got it right. The music proved to be my favorite part of the day, although I’m also still thinking about Patchouli 24, can’t wait to return to Golden Unicorn, and think that next year I’ve got to find a way to have an encounter with something tactile as well.

If You Listen With Care

Posted on January 31, 2011 by - Columns

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Home Sweet Home (Photo by FJO)

Despite the extremely exciting time I had in France last week and the significantly worse weather here in New York City, it’s still very nice to be back at home. No matter how wonderful a new experience is—even though I’ve lived my life always in search of new experiences—there’s great comfort in the assurance that comes with familiarity, however mundane. E.g. It feels so good to know how to control the temperature and water pressure in the shower, and easily finding your home beats getting lost trying to find your hotel room.

As I ponder this joy of feeling safe as a result of totally being at ease in one’s usual surroundings, it makes me realize what an incredible leap it is to hear a new piece of music even though it’s a leap I’ve been committed to taking all the time. For most people, however, music is just one of many different things out in the world that occasionally captures their attention and so a new experience is frequently not optimal.

I was initially completely befuddled to hear someone who was sitting at the table next to mine at LPR during the amazing Gyan and Terry Riley concert on Saturday night exclaim to her friends only minutes before the end of the gig, “I can’t stand this anymore; I’m waiting outside.” How could anyone not have enjoyed that performance? Yet thinking about it with some hindsight a couple of days later it is understandable that if she had never heard any music like this ever before, her lack of context for it made it difficult to comprehend, let alone enjoy.

The numerous fond remembrances of Milton Babbitt posted this past weekend inevitably referenced the essay he wrote for High Fidelity which the editors, against his wishes, re-titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” There is an ocean of difference in the meaning of that title and Babbitt’s original moniker for it, “The Composer as Specialist.” With enough exposure, any music however erudite can become familiar, but if you are not exposed to its vocabulary at all and are thrown into it hearing it for the first time, it can be a very unpleasant experience. Music usually offers untold rewards the more you listen to it and the more carefully you pay attention to it. And familiarity eventually leads to comfort, though hopefully never complacency, but that’s a topic for another day.

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Basically you put your nose against this object that looks like a microphone and then press a button in order to “listen” olfactorily. (Photo by FJO)

After MIDEM ended, I took a short train ride from Cannes to Grasse to briefly visit the International Perfume Museum which I’ve been obsessed with ever since reading Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent a couple of years back. It was amazing to once again experience scents through what I can best describe as a nose phone, the same device that was attached to the audience seats at the Guggenheim Museum for their presentation of the Scent Opera in 2009. A short film interview with the celebrated perfume composer Edmond Roudnitska (so cool that they use the same word as we do) really made the case for perfumers being artistic creators on par with visual artists and music composers: “Just like a composer does not create music with his ears but with his mind, I use my nose but I create with my mind.” Yet, pace Roudnitska, seeing the Orgue à parfums of the mid-20th-century master Jean Carles (1892-1966) might have been more mind boggling to me than seeing Liszt’s piano when I was in Budapest eleven years ago.

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The Orgue à parfums at which Jean Carles created his perfumes. (Photo by FJO)

Trying to comprehend and appreciate details about the composition and aesthetics of perfumery has given me a fresh perspective on what it means to come to music without context. Scents that I was repelled by before I began immersing myself in this subject—truth be told, once upon a time I was nauseated by just about every perfume—have proven their aesthetic rewards through exposure. Yet, admittedly, it might still take years before I can fully appreciate Dior’s extremely pungent 1980 Jules, a fragrance currently unavailable in the United States which I felt compelled to purchase in Nice after reading Turin’s raves about it. It seems to me that being comfortable smelling, let alone wearing, Jules is much harder than sitting and listening to a piece of music by Terry Riley—or Milton Babbitt, for that matter—but maybe that’s only because of the disparity in my exposures to music and perfume.

Mary Ellen Childs: On Merging Sound and Scent

Posted on June 17, 2016 by - Conversations

Mary Ellen Childs sitting on a bench in front of a branches.

Even though Mary Ellen Childs had a lot to say about sound when she visited with us last month, we also spent a lot of time talking about the other senses since many of the works she has created have been immersive multi-sensory experiences.

Still I was totally unprepared for Childs’s ruminations about the aesthetic possibilities of scent, despite my harboring a personal fascination with the relationship between music and perfumery ever since I attended a performance of something called a “scent opera” seven years ago. As a result of our mutual obsession, when I asked her about her attempts to incorporate olfactory perception into her own work our conversation took a significant detour. While this digression ultimately seemed a distraction from our larger musical conversation, it is yet another manifestation of Childs’s unique approach to the creative process.

A conversation at New Music USA
May 6, 2016—2:30 p.m.
Video presentations and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

FJO: Literally 15 minutes before you walked in the door I just read an article about you wanting to develop a piece that involves olfactory sensation.

MEC: I’m really fascinated with this. I’ve been researching it now for years. I’ve done some kind of cursory, more experimental sort of public events, but I haven’t yet created the piece that I really want to create, which would be instrumental music written to pair with senses. Specifically I’m interested in writing the music first and having a scent designer create pieces inspired by those pieces of music. And then giving the audience a way of experiencing the two things together.

FJO: There’s an ephemerality to both sound and scent. They’re both produced by physical objects, but they are also both non-corporeal. We live in such a visually dominated world, and these are two phenomena that you can’t actually see. At least sound we can now preserve on recordings. Scent is more elusive. You can bottle a scent, but when you use up that bottle, it’s gone. The other fascinating parallel for me is that the people who make perfumes are called compositeurs. They’re composers. It’s the same word, and it’s the only other usage of this word I know.

MEC: Well, and they work with notes. I have done a ton of research on this. I’ve read a lot, I’ve smelled a lot, and I’ve talked to neuroscientists who work in this field. I’ve gone to France and I visited the Museum of Perfume in Grasse, and I’ve met with a master perfumer near Paris and talked with the director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. I’ve thought a lot about how this is going to work. I think it just takes the right moment with the right amount of money. It’s one of those pieces that has not really gone forward because it needs some financial support to make it all happen. But I’m very keen to do it.

Not too long ago, I came across reference to a study that was done showing that what we listen to affects how we smell. I was so pleased. I knew it. That was my hunch, because both those senses can make us have an emotional reaction. They might even make us experience time or space differently. Think of a smell that you want to recoil from. You physically want to contract. So you feel space differently. Sound can do the same thing. You may actually feel more spacious because of what you’re listening to. And you can slow down your perception of time through music. I think you can also do those things with scent. And so you put the two together, and the impact that they would have on you could be quite interesting.

I did an installation-style event as part of Northern Spark a little less than a year ago. Northern Spark is a festival in the Twin Cities that happens overnight, usually around the time of the solstice. It starts at sundown and it ends at sun up. I did a piece called Ear Plus Nose, because I just wanted to sort of get it out there. I just wanted to see how an audience would respond. I used recorded music, my own music. It was a room bigger than this, but not a lot bigger than this, and there was one fragrance that was diffused into the space. Then there was one long table where there were four fragrances. You could take a smell strip and dip it into the fragrance and then could combine that experience with what was diffused into the room along with what you were hearing.

I asked people to write their responses afterwards. I had two stations with two different sets of cards—two questions. The first question was basically just to write about your experience in this room. You know, what was it like? What did you respond to? And the other one was to write a scent memory. And once you’ve written that scent memory, tell me if there was any sound associated with it. I thought maybe some people will do that. But I still haven’t gotten through all the responses! I have a huge bag full. In the course of those hours, I also learned which of my pieces worked in that setting and which didn’t. I was going to try to cycle through various kind of moods and sound worlds, and keep track of when that music was playing and what responses I was getting. That became too much of a headache to keep track of, so that went out the window pretty fast. I ended up gravitating towards one piece that was pretty steady state. It created a mood, but it didn’t have a lot of ups and downs and changes, and I just let that play over and over again. And that was the thing to do in that particular setting.

FJO: Well, what’s interesting is that music has this narrative arc over time and changes. Even most very hardcore minimalist pieces are about the very subtle changes that occur in them over time, because when changes happen so slowly it makes the moment of change feel extremely significant. In a way, such pieces are similar to the way we experience a scent. It initially seems like a steady state but, due to the physical properties of chemicals, it changes over time and certain notes that were less prominent become more foregrounded. Perfume writers often compare a fragrance’s top notes, the olfactory combination you originally encounter when you smell it, with the base notes that appear after its dry down. Of course, this is a function of physical reality.

MEC: Right, so in a concert setting the way that I’m curious about exploring the use of scent is with diffusion techniques and to see if the landscape of scent will change over time. I actually wanted to have additive scents. Let’s say you start out with a citrus note, then you add something more floral, then after that something a little more savory, stronger in some way. Over time you change the scent in a way that actually works. But there are some challenges with that. It’s not a straight forward thing to do because what happens with the way our noses work is that once you smell something you tend to stop smelling it after a while. So, in order to change the scent landscape over time, I would probably have to diffuse the citrus note and then bring in more citrus plus the second scent. And then also consider that the experience of somebody who might walk in midway through would be different because they’re getting the first impact of everything.

It would take some work, and it would take some very knowledgeable people to explore this with me. I don’t know that that particular thing has been done very much, and I’m really interested in exploring it. But on a different note, the other thing that I’ve been doing just to try to start working with this material is I’ve been hosting a series of scent dinners at my home where we have a food course, then a scent course, then a food course, and a scent course. I love to have people over for dinner. I love to cook. I love to make an experience of the evening, and so adding in scent was kind of an interesting thing for me to do. And so I did the first few scent dinners without music, then I thought I should just be taking advantage of these people who are here to pair the scents with music, and so I started doing that and then asking people for their responses. And that’s been pretty interesting, too.

When I talk about working with scent and music, mostly people are very curious and very interested and they want to know more. And they say, “I want to come whenever you do this piece.” But I also get people whom you can tell they’re put off by it, or they’re a little bit worried about it, or they’re not sure they would want to come to a performance like that. And I think it’s because you can close your eyes, we can even plug our ears, but scent actually comes right into our bodies. It comes right inside your lungs. People have strong reactions to it and it is different for everybody. You have different scent preferences. And you have different things that you associate with scent. I was surprised when I heard there were some people who love the scent of skunk. I always thought that that was a miserable scent that you wouldn’t want to be around if you didn’t absolutely have to. But there are people who actually enjoy that scent. And I think that just tells us how individual people’s responses to scent can be. It has to do with your own personal history. I also think it has to do with your cultural background. So I feel like this is such a rich thing to be exploring with music, and I’m actually very eager to do more.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Posted on September 29, 2009 by - Columns

In the “Can you believe the things that clog up my email inbox?” department, yesterday I received an all-caps “MEDIA ALERT” announcing that “the Romantic era is tops with fans” according to a survey just conducted by an organization called “Classical Archives.” This actually wasn’t the first time I received this missive, if memory serves, but something about the large bold font in all capital letters demanded that I think that this is important news, so here goes.

Unfortunately the press announcement didn’t include how many people participated in this survey, but a trip to the Classical Archives reveals that 223 people out of 514 people picked the Romantic/Late-Romantic/Post-Romantic period (e.g. Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Rachmaninoff) as their favorite era in music. Hardly a groundswell considering the number of respondents and not even a majority based on their own stats. Those 223 people represent 44.7% of the vote, which is something of a stretch from “capturing almost 50% of all the votes” as the media alert claimed.

The other options for folks to choose from on the survey were: Baroque (Bach, Handel, Scarlatti), which came in second place at a whoppin’ 23.1%; Classical (Mozart, Haydn), a close third at 17.8%; followed by a bizarre catch-all Impressionist/Modern/Contemporary (Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and strangely no one alive despite the word “contemporary”), which was way behind at 10.5%; but at least beat out Medieval/Renaissance (de Machaut, Palestrina, Byrd) which received a piddly 3.9% and turned out to represent the views of a mere 20 visitors.

Admittedly music from the 19th century (although Rachmaninoff outlived Debussy and died only barely before Bartók) continues to dominate subscription programs at symphony orchestra concerts and opera houses, as well as most of what is played on classical radio (although these folks tend to be plugging the 18th-century guys more and more nowadays). But it still somehow feels like the whole thing was designed as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People tend to like what they know more than know what they like, whether it’s cuisine, perfume, clothing, or music in any genre. It strikes me that making an issue of people liking music from the 19th century more than twice as much as music of our own time, which someone might erroneously deduce from these statistics, is tantamount to making a headline out of most Americans not knowing who Harry S. Truman was or where Australia is. It makes folks who have a broader view feel bad, but doesn’t ultimately prove anything, much less make a difference. Indeed, what we need to do is advocate for the bigger picture, not wallow in how small some people’s perceptions are.

Mind you, I say this as someone who loves repertoire from all periods including the 19th century. But I doubt that if, for example, Joaquim Raff (1822-1882) was given as one of the choices for the Romantics that as many votes would have been cast for that era. I bring up Raff because I’ve only recently discovered his music and am totally entranced by it. Of course, there are countless others from all eras. Contemporary music does not have a monopoly on under-appreciated great composers. However at least we living composers can still scream and make our voices heard. To that end, I’m curious how readers of this site would have responded to such a survey and what such results might imply about the new music community. But I want to vary it a tad, just to make it a little more pertinent to us.

I know that for me it would be an extremely difficult call, since I hate playing favorites, but for aesthetic as well as societal reasons I’d have to choose Contemporary. What about you?

Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Yet…

Posted on April 1, 2000 by - Analysis, Articles



Kenneth Goldsmith
Photo by Melissa Richard

Conventional wisdom says: Don’t quit your day job yet. Stick it out until you are sure that the opportunities and cash is plentiful enough. Then quit. It could be a long time. Let’s face it: day jobs suck. Or do they? I’ve recently spoken to 5 composers who have not only loved their day jobs but felt that they have actually enhanced, influenced and informed their composing. Perhaps among artists, attitudes toward work are changing. During my last job, one of my co-workers was a famous novelist who made scads of money lecturing, writing articles and publishing books. When I asked her why she was working 10-7 as an online strategist instead of being the glamour queen that she was, she replied that being home all day alone drove her crazy; she missed the interaction with other people (which fueled her writing in the first place) and felt like the world was passing her by.

Innovative artists, on the other hand, generally don’t find themselves in the glamorous spotlight too often and if they do, it’s often only after working for a long time in obscurity. While their more conservative peers often find themselves swamped with commissions for everything from operas to car commercials, those who fall on the more experimental side of things usually have to do something to make ends meet. Unfortunately, history has confirmed this: in the late 1950s, well into his career and just before fame struck, John Cage worked as a designer for the textile firm of Jack Lenor Larsen; Virgil Thomson scribbled as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune; Charles Ives raked in the dough as an insurance exec; and Marcel Duchamp served his time dealing art and living off a family fortune for decades until the culture finally caught up with him in the 1960s.

While it might sound like a drag, the composers I spoke with have created their own agendas and made choices that seem to suit them. In fact, some of these composers could very well make a living off their own compositions, but stuck with their day jobs for reasons other than money: Morton Subotnick‘s 4 decade-long infatuation with electronic music and computers has led him to writing software, CD-ROMs and websites that teach kids how to read and compose music; David Soldier‘s day job as a scientist directly influences his conceptual-based musical projects; Joan La Barbara, by performing other’s compositions, has led her to develop a vocabulary of her own; Stephen Vitiello, had he not worked in the artworld, would have still been a rock musician instead of a noted improvising experimentalist; and David Behrman did god’s work by helping his fellow avant-gardist’s recordings to find their way into the hands of the mainstream back in the 60s when he did a stint at Columbia records as a producer.

I suppose my old-fashioned notion of what constitutes an artist’s pride made me approach my subjects gingerly. With each interview, I almost apologized for prying into the nuts and bolts of one’s financial life and made sure to ask if they felt absolutely comfortable discussing this subject with me. No one seemed to mind and several were surprised at my timidity. In the end, I was taken aback by the strange reversal of common knowledge; what emerged from this series of interviews is an overall positive attitude about employment, rather than the usual tired notions of work as enslavement. But in hindsight it makes sense: all of the composers I interviewed refuse to see their work – both art and employment – in conventional terms. In the end, I discovered that it was I who was holding on to dogged notions of what employment means.

Is There Really No Place Like Home?: American Composers Abroad

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Analysis, Articles



Guy Livingston

Writing from Paris, in the beginning of the new millennium, the city of light seems pretty tame compared to its awesome role a century ago. From about 1880 until World War II, Paris was the rarely-contested center for new and avant-garde music, painting, and writing. This cultural hub attracted vast numbers of foreigners, most particularly Americans. The story of Americans abroad in the 20th century is thus primarily one of Paris, but also one of London, Morocco, Rome, and more recently Amsterdam and Berlin.

What is it that has so strongly attracted Americans to Europe? What was so intriguing about European culture (particularly in the 1920s) that made Americans eager to pack their bags and rush to board the next ocean liner? Was it the food, the music, the poetry, the modernism, or the tradition?

America invented her politics and economy first, and culture much, much later. ‘American’ music existed before 1910, but those who performed it (except for religious music) were minstrels, bandleaders, folk musicians, and other performers relegated to the fringes of society. ‘Cultured’ music in America was defined solely by its relevance and closeness to European models. Pre-1900, the European education was the only choice for any serious composer, and the grand tour of Europe the only possibility of developing a refined musical background for American romantics Gottschalk, MacDowell and their fellow artists.

At the turn of the century, the situation began to change. However obscurely, composers like Ives were defining a homegrown American music, and patrons and critics were beginning to encourage a search for idioms separate from the European tradition. Ives, Cowell, Ruggles, and a few others developed ruggedly individualistic Yankee styles without leaving home, but they were too far outside the system to get significant attention. Meanwhile, more mainstream American composers were coming back from studies in Paris and Rome, full of fresh ideas for an “American Music.”

In the late 1920s, George Antheil, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland returned from Europe with a splash, writing new and vivid music. Ragtime, early jazz, and African-American musicians were becoming popular in Europe and were being recognized for their artistry on both sides of the Atlantic. Crossover Broadway/classical artists like Gershwin began to mix jazz and European music. And by the ’30s and ’40s, mainstream U.S. composers were producing 100% ‘American Music’ for newly receptive symphonic audiences. No longer was the European model necessary to America: the U.S. had gained musical independence.

Not that composers stopped going to Europe. On the contrary: after World War II, the reasons to go abroad had changed, but the pull was still strong. In the ’50s there was the new attraction of Darmstadt, and in the ’80s the glistening underground IRCAM electronic music center. Here, composers could devote themselves entirely to new electronic and serialist idioms, without fear of a hostile or uninformed public (or sometimes without fear of any public at all).

The US-Vietnam war caused many Americans to seek anonymity or peace abroad. But it also made them extremely unpopular throughout Europe. In Rome, recounts composer Richard Trythall, the war and the changing economy “sent a lot of composers back to the States or elsewhere in Europe.” After IRCAM and Darmstadt became institutionalized and gained a reputation for bureaucratic academicism (which didn’t take long), the Dutch improvisation and new music scene exploded in the late ’80s, attracting composers from South America, Scandinavia, and the States. By the ’90s, established Dutch iconoclasts like Louis Andriessen and younger experimentalists like Richard Barrett and Ann Laberge, themselves foreigners, had turned Amsterdam into a major new music center.

Most recently, the burgeoning rave and techno scenes in London and Berlin are having a major international impact. For many young American composers and DJs, West Berlin, with its wealthy and hip audience, is now the place to be, while East Berlin still offers cheap food and accommodations. London balances a familiar language with sky-high rents and explosive growth.

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