
Photo: Angela Andriot
1. DS & Durga’s Debaser
2. JUSBOX’s Spring Dance
According to JUSBOX, the perfume house founded in 2016 by the Milan-born siblings Andrea and Chiara Valdo, this perfume was inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, combining notes of grapefruit, rosemary, honeysuckle and jasmine. As the company puts it: ‘Vivaldi entrusted the lightness of the strings and the voice of the violin with recreating the excitement of life reborn…Spring Dance is a graceful dance, steeped in pure, essential melodies.’
Read: Osmodrama: a festival of smell
Read: 5 pieces of classical music inspired by paintings
Read: 5 pieces of classical music inspired by architecture
3. 4160Tuesday’s Pastorale
In 2015, the British artisan perfumer Sarah McCartney – founder of the perfume brand 4160Tuesdays – was asked to ‘scent’ a performance of Handel‘s opera Acis and Galatea at St John’s Smith Square. She responded by spraying the hall with Pastorale, their floral-herby mix, to conjure up ‘the scent of Galatea,’ as McCartney put it: ‘a lovely water nymph who visits earth dressed as a shepherdess and falls in love with the equally gorgeous Acis’. Then, to summon up the essence of Polyphemus – the villain of the piece – she used hints of oakmoss, leather and patchouli. ‘I wanted an earthy, muddy, sodden feeling for this lumbering creature,’ McCartney explains.
4. Colornoise’s Violin Music
This synaesthesia-inspired perfume from Colornoise is designed to replicate the sound of a violin in smell. One of a series of perfumes from the niche US-based perfume house that correlate to a noise, song, instrument or music genre, it combines notes of orange, lemon, sandalwood and florals to create something warm yet zingy.
Read: Bittersuite: a company mixing music, dance, taste and smell
Read: 10 pieces of classical music inspired by water
5. Aeosphere’s scent opera
Premiered in 2009 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the world’s first scent opera combined a sequence of 23 scents from French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel with 30 minutes of music from Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson and American composer Nico Muhly. The aim: to tell the story of the struggle between nature and industry.