Smell

We mix our senses when we play music. We develop eyes that hear and ears that see. A string player's sense of touch, which would include a sense of space and distance (the distances that our arms move up and down the fingerboard when we shift), follows the dictates of our ears and eyes. But what about the musical associations with our senses of taste and smell? We do have a few commonly-used words in music that make reference to taste, like "dolce," which is Italian for a sweet you eat. When someone plays a note out of tune or with a bad sound, we often refer to those notes as "sour."

There is a body of scholarship concerning taste and music: The Taste of Music, which references Berlioz, and explanations regarding ways that the music you listen to (while you are eating) can change the way your food tastes. There's also a good article in Scientific American. I suppose for those of us who make the music we listen to ourselves, we can make musical choices that are in either good taste or bad taste.

Smell is complicated. People who have synesthesia can have hard-wired (from early childhood, I suppose) associations between sound and smell. Could you imagine what it would be like to have specific smell associations with pitches the way people with absolute pitch and synesthesia have specific color associations with pitches? If we experience more than one smell at a time, having that condition would bring the impact of dissonant harmonies to a whole new level.

If I feel a fugue coming in a piece of music I am hearing for the first time, I have been known to say, "I smell a fugue." I don't do it with my nose, of course, but I do it with the wealth of musical experience I have stored in my unconscious memory. Physical smell can surround us immediately. It can evoke memories. It can repel us. It can compel us. It can repulse us. It can move into the background, and we can become temporarily immune to it after a while. Sometimes we don't even know when it has gone away. (I lost my sense of smell once, and wrote about it here.) But smell that is not physical, i.e. the memory of smell, or the memory of a memory of a smell is something that "smells" musical to me.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to share a passage from one of the chapters (Chapter 43, to be exact) that Robert Musil withdrew from the original publication of The Man Without Qualities. It captures, in a most striking way, the illusive quality of the smelling part of the imagination.

The repulsion was perhaps reminiscent of the frozen stiffness of chalk drawings, but the room also looked as if it might smell in a grandmotherly, cloying way of medicines and ointments; and old-fashioned and unmanly ghosts, fixated with unpleasant maliciousness upon human suffering, were hovering within its walls. Agathe sniffed. And although the air held nothing more than her imaginings, she gradually found herself being led further and further backward by her feelings, until she remembered the rather anxious "smell of heaven," that aroma of incense half aired and emptied of its spices which clung to the scarves of the habits her teachers had once worn when she was a girl being brought up together with little friends in a pious convent school without at all succumbing to piety herself. For as edifying as this odor may be for people who associate it with what is right, its effect on the hearts of growing, worldly-oriented, and resistant girls consisted in a vivid memory of smells of protest, just as ideas and first experiences were associated with a man's mustache or with his energetic cheeks, pungent with cologne and dusted with talc. God knows, even that odor does not deliver what it promises! And as Agathe sat on one of Lindner's renunciative upholstered chairs and waited, the empty smell of the world closed inescapably about her with the empty smell of heaven like two hollow hemispheres, and an intimation came over her that she was about to make up for a negligently endured class in the school of life.

In the original German:

Das Abweisende mochte dabei vielleicht an die gefrorene Steifheit von Kreidezeichnungen erinnern, doch sah das Zimmer auch aus, als röche es großmütterhaft verzärtelt nach Arznei und Salbe und es schwebten altmodische und unmännliche, mit unangenehmer Geflissentlichkeit auf das menschliche Leiden gerichtete Geister in dem Raum. Agathe schnupperte. Und obwohl die Luft nichts als ihre Einbildungen enthielt, sah sie sich von ihren Gefühlen nach und nach weit zurückgeführt und erinnerte sich nun an den bänglichen »Geruch des Himmels«, jenen halb entlüfteten und seiner Würze entleerten, an den Tuchen der Sutanen haften gebliebenen Weihrauchduft, den ihre Lehrer einst an sich getragen hatten, als sie ein Mädchen war, das gemeinsam mit kleinen Freundinnen in einem frommen Institut erzogen wurde und keineswegs in Frömmigkeit erstarb. Denn so erbaulich dieser Geruch auch für Menschen ist, die das Richtige mit ihm verbinden, in den Herzen der heranwachsenden weltlich-widerstrebenden Mädchen bestand seine Wirkung in der lebhaften Erinnerung an Protestgerüche, wie sie Vorstellung und erste Erfahrungen mit dem Schnurrbart eines Mannes oder mit seinen energischen, nach scharfen Essenzen duftenden und von Rasierpuder überhauchten Wangen verbinden. Weiß Gott, auch dieser Geruch hält nicht, was er verspricht! Und während Agathe auf einem der entsagungsvollen Lindnerschen Polsterstühle saß und wartete, schloß sich nun der leere Geruch der Welt mit dem leeren Geruch des Himmels unentrinnbar um sie zusammen wie zwei hohle Halbkugeln, und eine Ahnung wandelte sie an, daß sie im Begriff sei, eine unachtsam überstandene Lebensschulstunde nachzuholen.