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)

Basic Information
The Founder and the Origins of the Brand
The Brand’s Distinctive Approach
The Fragrance Lineup
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. His deep immersion in the Vatican’s liturgical spaces and the world of sacred music during this period shaped all his subsequent creative work.

“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

Every Extrait de Musique creation is informed by 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: 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

Incense is the core note running through the entire collection, with each work positioned as a variation upon it. 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

Here we introduce the six works that made up Extrait de Musique’s former lineup. All were offered as unisex extraits de parfum. The current official website, meanwhile, presents a new collection of seven works, “ORGAN #1–#7.”

Contre Bombarde 32, one of the collection’s earliest creations, was inspired by the Bombarde, a reed stop of French origin. As the most powerful organ stop, situated deep in the pedal division, it embodies an image of accumulated dust, incense, and polish layered over time. Its notes are juniper and elemi at the top; cedarwood and sandalwood in the heart; and vanilla and amber in the base.

Plein Jeu III-V takes as its motif the most majestic of stops, in which several ranks of pipes sound simultaneously for a single note on the keyboard, and is conceived as “the free polyphony of angels.” Refreshing citrus and black pepper create a distinctive contrast with crisp frankincense.

Voix Humaine 8 is named after a stop originating in the Baroque period, intended to imitate a solo human voice. Sweet white florals are combined with a slenderly structured incense accord.

Unda Maris 8, added in 2018, means “waves of the sea” in Latin. It expresses the physical phenomenon of “undulation” created by the subtle difference in pitch between two pipes through light, wave-like bitter orange and incense. A critic likened it to “Debussy’s La Mer.”

Violon Basse 16, another 2018 addition, is named after the organ stop that shares its name with the double bass. Dense leather, smoke, and charred wood unfold with overwhelming force, giving it a powerful character described as “Don Giovanni.”

Trompette 8, a later addition to the former lineup, embodies the trumpet of the reed-pipe family, the collection’s oldest family of registers. Its history reaches back to descriptions of large organs in gladiatorial arenas in the first century BCE. A combination of incense, labdanum, and black pepper absolute expresses its distinctive metallic, sharp timbre in scent.

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.

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