Extrait de Musique: The Man Who Turned a Cathedral Organ into Scent

“Perfume, like music, is an artistic medium that needs no concrete references. Perfume is the art of the sense of smell.”

— Filippo Sorcinelli (from an interview with Nose Paris)

Contents

Basic Information
The Founder and the Origins of the Brand
The Brand’s Distinctive Approach
By the Way…

Basic Information

Founded: 2016 (launched under the predecessor brand name SAUF; later renamed Extrait de Musique)

Founder: Filippo Sorcinelli

Official website: filipposorcinelli.com/en/pages/extrait-de-musique

The Founder and the Origins of the Brand

Childhood: Sensory Memories Nurtured by Cathedrals

Filippo Sorcinelli was born on July 1, 1975, in Mondolfo, a small hilltop town in Italy’s Marche region. He grew up in a family with a tradition of craftsmanship, including weavers and tailors, yet from an early age it was the space of the town’s churches that captured his imagination. By the age of five, he was reportedly already enthralled by the forms of liturgical vestments displayed in the sacristy, the sound of the pipe organ reverberating against the walls, and the scent of frankincense in the air.

He later described those sensations as follows.

“My many childhood encounters with art and beauty, with frankincense, Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, organ music, choirs, ancient and modern sculpture, liturgical vestments, paintings… All these stimuli enveloped and permanently imprinted the emotions of an excited young mind.”

Then, at thirteen, Sorcinelli became the organist of Fano Cathedral. While children his age were playing football or tag, he was playing the organ at the bishop’s liturgical celebrations. Exposure to this “special” environment from childhood was the starting point for his later, wide-ranging career as a painter, photographer, graphic designer, vestment maker, and perfumer.

Academic Study and the Cultivation of Craft

In 1992, Sorcinelli obtained his Maestro d’Arte qualification, marking completion of an art course, at the art institute in Fano, while also studying organ at the Gioachino Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro. In 1997, a scholarship took him to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome for further study.

“The organ has always been part of me, ever since I was little. I cannot live without its sound. It is the focus of my research, and I feel as though the world revolves around its sounds. It is the only instrument that can reach into the depths of the human soul with an unparalleled capacity for physical and emotional involvement.”

He subsequently continued to serve intermittently as organist at the cathedrals of Fano, Rimini, and San Benedetto del Tronto, while also acting as artistic director of prominent music festivals throughout Italy. His work also included faithfully reconstructing liturgical vestments depicted in paintings by the seventeenth-century French artist Georges de La Tour for a special exhibition at the Louvre. Even then, his activities were already crossing the boundaries between art and religion.

The LAVS Atelier and the Pope’s Tailor

In 2001, while studying in Rome, Sorcinelli drew on the help of the small tailoring atelier run by his aunt and sisters to hand-sew a vestment for a friend who was being ordained as a priest. That single vestment became the starting point for everything.

What emerged was LAVS, an acronym for Laboratorio Atelier Vesti Sacre and also a Latin word meaning “praise.” Making vestments, furnishings, and accessories for the Catholic liturgy, the atelier quickly gained a reputation in Italy and abroad as a pinnacle of liturgical clothing, eventually establishing close cooperation with the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff.

He created at least fifty vestments for Benedict XVI and, in 2013, made the vestments for Pope Francis’s inaugural pontifical Mass, a historic ceremony broadcast around the world. In 2021, the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy awarded him the “Art and Liturgy Prize” for innovation in sacred vestments. He now also makes vestments for Pope Leo XIV.

Despite his somewhat unusual title of “the Pope’s tailor,” Sorcinelli’s visual identity defies easy categorization. Minimalist all-black clothes, silver earrings, geometric tattoos: he says the tattoos inscribe on his body a searing experience in which “the mirror broke.” Openly gay, he continues to construct his artistic world as someone living between the sacred and the secular, faith and sensuality.

UNUM and Perfume as a New Language

In 2014, a practice of scenting the boxes containing finished LAVS pieces, spraying a few drops onto the vestment packaging before delivering it to clients, led Sorcinelli to explore perfume as a new artistic language.

“None of my perfumes could exist without music.”

As these words suggest, perfume is, for him, an expressive medium that extends from music. The works emerge through collaboration with a perfumer, or nose: Sorcinelli himself supplies the concept, philosophy, and inspiration, and the perfumer gives them form in the laboratory. He describes this as “giving inspiration to my mood board and bringing about transformation.” The names of the noses with whom he collaborates are reportedly not disclosed.

The resulting UNUM collection, whose name means “the unique one” in Latin, consists of perfumes deeply imbued with Sorcinelli’s personal worldview, encompassing Gothic architecture, the sacred music of the papal court, and a tribute to photographer Mario Giacomelli.

The Birth of SAUF: Turning a Cathedral Organ into Scent

Following the success of UNUM, Sorcinelli launched a new collection rooted even more deeply in his personal world. Unveiled in 2016 at Pitti Fragranze in Florence, it was called SAUF.

The French word “SAUF” carries the dual meanings of “except” and “saved.” Exceptionality and salvation: these two ideas also succinctly expressed the spirituality Sorcinelli had entrusted to perfume.

For SAUF’s debut, he chose to do more than simply display the works at the venue. He held an organ concert in a church in Florence, joining soprano Laura Catrani for an event entitled “Vox in Organo: Improvisations in Sound and Smell.” It was an attempt to present the fusion of sound and scent as a lived sensory experience.

The collection was inspired by the stops of the Grand Orgue at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, a place with which Sorcinelli has a deep connection. As an organist, he has had rare opportunities to photograph and study the cathedral’s organ, and says that he “also had the honor of playing the organ in the basilica of Notre-Dame.”

Sorcinelli describes the concept of SAUF in these words.

“SAUF depicts the registers of the Grand Orgue of Notre-Dame de Paris through different tonalities of incense. This is the essential difference between SAUF and UNUM. Incense in all its forms: worked, overworked, pushed, reinvented, and sometimes even betrayed. At times real incense, almost figurative; at others, a feeling, a mere illusion.”

When he recognized that music and perfume share the terms “tones,” “organ,” and “harmony,” and that both are “intangible,” Sorcinelli found the intersection of his two passions. His statement that “SAUF is nothing less than a return to the source of perfume and humanity” expresses that discovery precisely.

The brand was subsequently renamed and rebranded as Extrait de Musique. The official website was redesigned and the packaging updated, with the bottles and outer boxes evolving toward a finish more akin to gallery art.

The Brand’s Distinctive Approach

Synesthesia Through Incense

The former collection, which began as SAUF, centered on a synesthetic approach: translating the texture of sound into scent, with incense, specifically frankincense, at its center.

“Here, music and perfume are closer than ever. In both, we can speak of ‘tones,’ ‘organ,’ and ‘harmony.’”

Referring to Septimus Piesse’s systematization of correspondences between musical notes and perfumery materials in 1865, Sorcinelli brings that tradition into the present through the specific instrument of Notre-Dame’s organ. Each perfume also uses musical terms such as “SUBJECT,” “BACK SUBJECT” (countersubject), and “CODA,” strikingly describing a fragrance’s structure as though it were a musical composition.

Bottles and Boxes of the Former Collection: Faithful Reproductions of Organ Stops

The bottle design is a faithful reproduction of the stop knobs of Notre-Dame Cathedral’s Grand Orgue. Modeled on pull-out knobs, or drawbars, the bottles give each fragrance its own identity while lending unity to the collection as a whole.

The outer packaging consists of wooden boxes finished entirely by hand, designed to evoke the casing of a pipe organ’s large soundbox. Sorcinelli designs all the bottles and outer boxes himself, making these “containers” part of the artwork too.

Materials: The Many Transformations of Incense

In the former collection, incense served as a theme connecting the fragrances. Lauryn Beer, senior editor at CaFleureBon, offered this assessment.

“This recurring incense note gives the collection a harmonic quality, creating continuity and kinship, although each work stands apart like the organ’s different timbres.”

The Fragrance Lineup

Extrait de Musique encompasses the former collection named after organ stops and the seven ORGAN fragrances introduced in 2026. Stops select pipes of different tone colors to shape an organ’s sound. The earlier perfumes explored the character of individual stops; ORGAN turns toward church scenes and Filippo Sorcinelli’s own memories, held together by music.

The Former Collection: The Character of Organ Stops

The first three fragrances, launched as SAUF in 2016, were Contre Bombarde 32, Plein Jeu III-V, and Voix Humaine 8. Further works under the Extrait de Musique name expanded the collection to six. Taking the Grand Orgue of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris as their point of departure, they express differences in sound through combinations of woods, resins, flowers, and spices.

Contre Bombarde 32 is named for a stop with a powerful, trombone-like sound. Its inspiration is the great pipes deep inside the instrument, accumulating the smells of dust, incense, and wax over many years. Juniper and elemi, cedarwood and sandalwood, vanilla and amber connect the weight of the sound with the smells retained by the instrument itself.

Plein Jeu III-V takes its subject from a stop in which several ranks of pipes sound together from a single key. The grandeur of those overlapping voices becomes a composition of lemon, ginger, black pepper, and mimosa with jasmine, incense, and amber, supported by vetiver, cedarwood, and sandalwood. Bright citrus and spice meet the fullness of resin and wood within a single resonance.

Voix Humaine 8 grew from a stop that recalls a solo human voice and its vibrato. Bergamot and elemi, jasmine and ambrette, musk, amber, and vanilla give it a soft character with floral and sweet facets. Its inspiration is a sound close to the body, like a voice spreading from the mouth, rather than the volume needed to fill a cathedral.

Added in 2018, Unda Maris 8 means waves of the sea in Latin. It explores the undulating sound produced by two pipes of the same shape tuned to slightly different pitches. Marine notes, myrtle, nutmeg, and geranium are combined with incense, vanilla, and benzoin, among other materials. Reviewing it at launch, Lauryn Beer described an impression moving from bitter orange to soft incense and associated it with Debussy’s La Mer.

Violon Basse 16, also from 2018, draws on the sound of a bow against strings and the hard wood used for the pipes. Cistus, labdanum, vetiver, woods, and smoky accords connect with that heavy, rough texture. Beer found impressions of leather, smoke, and charred wood, comparing it to Mozart’s Don Giovanni beside the La Mer of Unda Maris 8. These musical works were the critic’s associations while smelling the perfumes, not names or instructions specified in their creation.

The sixth fragrance, Trompette 8, centers on a reed stop with a metallic, brass-like sound. Incense, labdanum, and black pepper absolute meet cedarwood, chili pepper, bergamot, pink pepper, and elemi. Two kinds of pepper and chili are layered over wood and incense to evoke the sharp tone of a trumpet.

ORGAN: Seven Memories Held by Music

Presented at Esxence in 2026, ORGAN comprises seven extraits de parfum that succeed the former collection. Sorcinelli reconsidered how to introduce the fragrances. He shifted the focus from technical descriptions of the organ’s mechanisms and tone colors toward moments when music changes the impression of a place and accompanies life’s joys and sorrows.

Sorcinelli explained that memory reaches the heart directly. The bottle size changed from the former collection’s 50 ml to 100 ml. The record incorporated into the new packaging also grew from his own experience of first hearing organ music on an LP. Organ improvisations corresponding to the seven fragrances were recorded on a 33 rpm record.

ORGAN #1 is set in a small chapel arranged with gladioli. The memory of accompanying his mother as she prepared the church on Saturdays connects hands arranging flowers with the coldness of stone. Orange blossom, tuberose, and suede meet saffron, ebony, and cypriol, placing green and earthy textures beneath the brightness of the flowers.

ORGAN #2 depicts Easter Vespers. Traces of the morning ceremony linger in the church as candles are lit and the organ’s sound spreads through the building. Incense is layered with oakmoss, styrax, labdanum, and oud, with pink pepper and lime zest. The fullness of resins and woods meets bright citrus, suggesting the rich resonance of celebration.

ORGAN #3 looks beyond the keyboard to the machinery room: metal, warmed dust, and the oil that keeps the mechanism moving. A continuous supply of air and the physical workings of the instrument sustain the sound heard in the church. Cedarwood, leather, and cypriol are combined with notes of rose, jasmine, thyme, and civet. The subject is the place of wood, metal, and air before sound is born.

ORGAN #4 explores the work of polishing reliquaries. A cloth passes over silver and gold surfaces, and candlelight reflects in the metal. Notes suggesting brass and latex, amber woods, oakwood, peony, and iris convey that metallic presence and a faint sweetness. Its subject is the hands-on preparation of sacred objects before an elaborate ceremony.

ORGAN #5 depicts a Saturday afternoon when the young Sorcinelli played at the keyboard while his mother washed the church rugs. Water, freshly washed cloth, and music passing among the hanging rugs make the church a familiar place in memory. Cypress, clove, geranium, cistus, cypriol, and black amber are among the fragrance’s notes. Everyday work such as washing and cleaning becomes a cherished scene held together by music.

ORGAN #6 takes its theme from the blue stained glass of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Light passing through the windows spreads over columns and floors, enveloping the space alongside low organ notes. Bergamot, mandarin, and lemon leaf are combined with lavender, juniper berries, nutmeg, sage, sandalwood, and cistus. Blue, the scents of herbs and woods, and low-pitched sound become a single sensory experience.

ORGAN #7 depicts the close of a newborn’s funeral Mass, when the organ and church bells sound together. Its theme is music that receives the grief of those left behind and guides it toward prayer. Oakmoss, musk, and myrrh meet powder and coconut-milk notes, adding softness to a scene of farewell.

The seven are distinct fragrances, and no one-to-one correspondence between the six older works and the new numbers has been established. A discovery set called CARTRIDGE contains 2 ml of each of the seven fragrances.

By the Way…

The perfume Notre-Dame 15.4.2019, which Sorcinelli released on April 15, 2020, one year after the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, belongs to a separate line, Délire de voyage, rather than Extrait de Musique. It is nevertheless worth mentioning as an expression of his deep connection to that event. Its cap is made from a “monolith of burnt wood,” and he stated that part of the proceeds from the perfume would be donated to Musique Sacrée, Notre-Dame Cathedral’s sacred-music organization. This episode shows that Extrait de Musique’s concept, an olfactory homage to Notre-Dame’s organ, is more than merely a concept: it is rooted in genuine love and respect for the cathedral.

References