You don’t read this score. You smell it. Or rather, you smell it and then you read your own reaction to it. Somewhere, long ago, the scent of coriander met your grandmother’s fingers. That is now part of the score. It will never be the same twice.
A Method of Scores That Refuse to Be Read
These are the tactile scores, or what I now prefer to call the Smelling Sheets, having spent a month in a heatless studio in Tribeca where a soprano with no nose (the result of a childhood skin disease, she told me) performed an entire trio from a score laced with bruised lilac, aged balsamic, and burning rubber. She memorized the scent cues based on audience reaction. Her pitch was perfect. Her lungs were ruined.
We tried patchouli on stave three. It stained her gloves. She wept and said it reminded her of the hallway in a Vienna hostel where she once miscarried.
Was that in the score? Or did the score simply make space for it?
The Mechanics of Emission
Scratch-and-sniff was too crude. We tried microcapsules embedded in gampi paper, but humidity ruined the diffusion pattern. Eventually we settled on an ink made from cedarwood oil, civet absolute, and saffron tincture. You couldn't see it. But when you opened the page, the room changed.
Each scent acted as a trigger. But not for the audience—for the performer.
The bassoonist was instructed:
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If scent resembles resin or pine → sustain note to the edge of breath
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If scent burns → interrupt the phrase with silence
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If scent is floral but impure → modulate into upper register tremolo
These were not “rules,” of course. These were entanglements.
The Taxonomy of Air and Paper
We attempted a codex:
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C1: Myrrh (melancholic harmonic minor)
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C2: Ambergris (drone + vocal fricative overlay)
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C3: Cumin (cut-time rhythm interruption)
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C4: Vetiver (choose silence or multiphonic instability)
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C5: Skin musk (performer memory override—refer to emotional ledger)
Each code was scratched into the margin in invisible ink. The performers could find them only by olfactory triangulation—a score without index or legibility, where performance emerged through forensics of the air.
One violist mistook vetiver for galbanum and began weeping during the second movement. We kept the take.
What Cannot Be Archived
You cannot archive these scores. They rot. They fade. They stink, they fail, they leak memory. That is their instrumental beauty. You might find a page from Trio for Two Nose-Breathers and One Mouth in a library someday, but the patchouli will have turned to mildew, and the sandalwood will have become nothing.
This is part of the design. Decay is the tempo marking.
A Brief Note on My Own Attempt
In 2019, I composed a work called The Misremembered Breath of My Former Lover. Each page of the score contained a single embedded scent, chosen from bottles I had once hidden beneath her sink. I arranged them out of order. I wore gloves to avoid trace contamination. Each scent dictated not a pitch or rhythm, but a confession. The pianist improvised based on what they believed I might have done. It was a mistake. Too literal. Too safe.
In the 2022 revision, I removed the instruments entirely and replaced them with a box of 32 perfumed tissues. Each performer wiped their hands and face with one and sat in silence. The audience coughed. One person fainted. A critic called it “unforgivable.”
But I forgave it. Because some smells are just wounds that haven’t been notated yet.
The Breath Is the Score
All this leads me back to the beginning. A page. Not to read, but to disturb. To scratch. To bruise. To inhale. In these scores, sound is a function of breath, and breath is a function of history, and history is always molecular.
There are no dynamics. Only diffusion.
No tempo. Only decay.
No staff. Only skin.
To perform the tactile score is not to play a part, but to breathe someone else's memories. That’s not performance. That’s possession.
And the best part?
No one can ever prove what you heard.
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