Perfume "composer" Christophe Laudamiel

It is of course, the stuff dreams are made of—or at least childhood fantasies. Remember watching TV as a kid and wishing that one day there would be smell-o-vision? That you’d be able to really smell the burger on the ad or eat the ice cream or whatever? Well, ladies and gents, we are now one step closer to officially realizing that dream. Sure, it’s in a highfalutin, arty way, but smelling the experience is now a reality, thanks to Nico Muhly’s new ScentOpera, which premiered at the Guggenheim last night, and also plays tonight.

The premise is simple. Young NYC composer Muhly and Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson teamed up with writer Stewart Matthew and a master perfumier, Christophe Laudamiel, to produce a four-movement piece of music accompanied by perfectly nuanced smells, which would tell a story. Just like watching a regular opera, except that the singers and actors are replaced by smells. If this idea sounds, like, kinda interesting in theory, read on for the full, ridiculous and wonderful reality—which found two-hundred people sitting in a blacked-out room, each of us with our own “scent mike” poked up toward our noses, wafting perfumes both nice and nasty at our faces.

Before the actual show, there’s a panel discussion with the whole Green Aria team; the most interesting account of the composing process comes from Laudamiel, the Mohawk-haired, tight-tee-wearing Frenchman (who, besides creating scents for Clinique, Ralph Lauren and so on, makes perfumes for poems, and for the movie Perfume). He talks about the ins and outs of composing scent with a musical vocabulary (notes, chords etc.), and also about weird technicalities, like the speed at which different smells travel (thus explaining why we all need our own “scent mikes”). The chair asks Laudamiel if there were any hitches during preparation? “Ach,” he says, exasperated, “How the scents would not travel through…I wanna say the frickin’ tubing?”

Muhly says that he and Sigurdsson were given an outline of the story and the smells, and had to compose within that—so they drew a storyboard, as if they were scoring for a film. Working with smell meant a change of pace, too—rather than writing in time with a heartbeat, or running, say, you have to time this music to the rhythm of breathing (roughly six seconds), so it’s slower. And try to breathe naturally, he says, admitting that his first reaction to the smells was to snuffle and sniffle like a pig hunting for truffles. “But,” says the writer, “If you wanna take extra sniffs, that’s fine.”

While I had assumed that the narrative would be straightforward and the smells would be everyday scents (bread, cut grass, that sort of thing), the opera dealt in Big Concepts: in nature verses technology and the struggle of industry. The “players” were introduced onscreen before the opera commenced, each name appearing with a waft of scent and its own musical motif. Some are so beautiful, so right, it’s emotionally moving: Earth, for instance, really is like lying on the grass with your nose in the dirt. Others are just gross. The first whiff of Funky Green Impostor makes people laugh out loud, such is its stink, and pull back from their mikes. Ech!

And then the lights go down, and the piece swells into being. It is an odd, extraordinary experience, partly because we all have very specific associations with certain smell combos, uniquely our own. You’re taken aback: How did someone manage to make the exact smell of an Indian hotel lobby? My dad’s garage? Riding on the subway as a kid? It also makes me think, Maybe this is what it’s like to be a dog, or some kind of super-smell-oriented animal, permanently on the smell-trail of whatever exciting thing is round the corner.

After the show, there are canapés and cookies in the foyer, but having been gently assaulted with the likes of Meretricious Green, Shiny Steel, Technology and (repeatedly) the pleasingly vile Funky Green Impostor, the idea of eating is kind of horrible. Far more exciting is the prospect of spending the subway ride home sniffing the specially scented playbill.