by Andrew Rampton
Whence is that goodly fragrance flowing,
Stealing our senses all away,
never the like did come a-blowing,
Shepherds, in flow’ry fields of May,
Whence is that goodly fragrance flowing,
Stealing our senses all away?
A well–known reflection on the Nativity, this French carol describes a scent so lovely that it steals all of the senses away. But how could a scent impact, for example, hearing?
At the Societas Liturgica congress in Leuven this summer, we had the opportunity to visit the Benedictine monastery in Chevetogne. As a part of sharing their life with us, we heard a brief talk about their famous incense workshop from the brother in charge of that work. Part of the fame of Chevetogne’s incense is their ability to craft detailed, custom scents. Their offerings include a mixture, Cerasus Mertonensis, made for Merton College, Oxford, which smells like the blossoms of the cherry trees on the college property. Not a scent most of us associated with incense prior to our visit!
The crafting of these custom scents involves a great deal of research and scientific experimentation. The workshop at Chevetogne uses no synthetic compounds in their incense, so the desired scent must be carefully constructed from fragile, organic materials. Combining scents is a delicate and complicated effort. Not only must complimentary scents be placed together, the ratio and proportion of ingredients must be just right, or the scent produced falls flat rather than producing the combination of high, middle, and low notes that we enjoy smelling.
In researching how best to do this, the incense makers came across the work of nineteenth-century chemist and perfumer George William Septimus Piesse. Piesse had arranged familiar scents – citrus, floral, etc. – but in an unusual way. Rather than recipes for particular perfumes, Piesse had arranged the individual scents along musical scales. It is from Piesse’s writing that we get our terminology of “notes” when discussing scent today.
Piesse, however, took his model very seriously and described combinations of scent in ways that sounded more like musical theory than perfume chemistry. To the surprise of the incense makers at Chevetogne, when they began building “chords” with the scents as Piesse prescribed, it worked! Musically familiar “chords” reproduced using the plants Piesse indicated produced lovely perfumes with the ingredients in just the right proportions.
What to make of this fascinating concordance in our senses? Could perfumers and musicians work together and allow us to smell an organ toccata or hear the cherry blossoms of Merton College? What does this connection between sound and smell tell us about the way we perceive beauty in Creation?
Perhaps this is what the writer of the famous French Nativity carol meant. A fragrance of such overwhelming, perfect beauty that to smell it steals away all other senses, drowning them all in the perfect harmony of the incarnate God.
Andrew Rampton is a masters student in liturgy at Huron University College in London, Ontario.
Please leave a reply.