Green Aria: An Opera for Your Nose

June 6, 2009— -- This week I attended a rather extraordinary event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City: a scent opera. It is, remarkably, just what it sounds like: an "opera" to be smelled rather than watched.

The work is the brainchild of Stewart Matthew, a financier, and Christophe Laudamiel, a mohawk-wearing chemist-turned-perfumist who thinks of fragrance as a high art.

And why shouldn't it be? We already tell stories through words, paintings, music and dance; why not through scent as well? After all, olfaction, a largely unexplored sensory territory, is more tightly neurologically bound to memory and emotion than any of our other senses.

To craft the opera, Matthew laid the scaffolding with a libretto, which sketched the somewhat amorphous plot, moods and characters that make up Green Aria. Then he turned to Laudamiel to custom-design scents for the piece's 35 characters – a project that took him several years to complete.

Air on a Nostril

Meanwhile, composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson worked together to create the opera's music, smell by smell.

Recalling their process during a panel discussion, Muhly describes the first time they opened a jar of "Funky Green Impostor", one of the opera's more comedic characters. "It was one of the most intense experiences of my existence," Muhly said. "I realized this was a whole new game."

The most difficult part, Laudamiel explained, was figuring out how to deliver the smells to the audience.

First, there was the question of how to make sure each audience member received the same intensity of smell at the exact same time. That would have been impossible had the scents merely drifted around the room.

Smell the Motif

Instead, Matthew and Laudameil worked with Fläkt Woods, a ventilation company, to design and manufacture a "scent organ". From the centralized organ, the scents travel to each individual auditorium seat. The seats were then rigged with a thin, flexible "scent microphone" that an audience member could position as close to, or as far from, their nose as they pleased.

Next, there was the even bigger challenge of getting the timing right. "It was a big nightmare," Laudamiel said.

The scents are timed to the music, so the team had to figure out how to ensure that they reached the audience's noses at the same moment the sounds hit their ears – a process that involved understanding the intricate chemical details and diffusion rates of the various concoctions.

What's more, Laudamiel noted, smells have a longer resonance in the nose than sounds do in the ears, lasting anything from several seconds up to several minutes. Each consecutive smell would be tainted by lingering effects from the previous smell, and that had to be taken into account and corrected for when piecing the opera together.

Abstract Smells

The result was impressive to say the least. I had expected that once the smells started wafting up through my scent microphone, they would fuse together into an indiscriminate fog. Instead, each smell was as precise as a staccato note, lasting only a few seconds before giving way to the next finely-delineated odour.

As for the narrative, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. With a cast of characters such as Absolute Zero, Meretricious Green, Shiny Steel and Chaos, it was all a bit abstract.

The opera's "précis" reads: "Technology joins forces with Nature. Evangelical Green preaches the Gospel of Modernism forging a man-made world where scents sound, touch and pour… Life's medium transmutes; the immaterial takes improbable form. A parade of 'Greens' spill out until at last, Green Aria breathes."

Written in four movements, the olfactory tale tells of the earthly materials giving rise to base metals, which in turn give rise to industry. As man usurps nature's powers of creation, chaos ensues, and is quelled only when Evangelical Green calls for the holy alliance of nature and technology.

Synaesthetic Stew

The scents themselves were unfamiliar, though they evoked tinges of recognition: fresh cut grass, industrial chemicals, charred hearth and moist soil. Chaos was overwhelmingly fruity, while Absolute Zero somehow smelled cold.

In the dark, with different smells emerging in a soft breeze from my "microphone", I felt as if I was moving through a landscape of ever-changing scenery.

Combined with the music, the opera formed a strange synaesthetic stew. Beautiful and haunting, the music suggested the passage of deep time, the churning of the Earth, the swelling of the oceans, and a quickening progression toward something ominous.

The whole opera lasted perhaps thirty minutes, and I'm not sure my nose could have handled much more. Many of the smells were overpowering, and I can't say that I liked them, at least not in the sense that one likes the smell of freshly-baked cookies.

I was, however, awed by the innovative concept and the meticulous execution – and I am now convinced that smell, that oft-neglected sense, can indeed convey a story.