La Nuit

Essential Information

Seller: naught Co., Ltd.
Founder: Mitsuhiro Ebihara
Founded: 2021
Official website: La Nuit (in Japanese)

The Brand’s History

I play the piano as a hobby, and I think classical music is one of humanity’s great legacies. Yet not very many people can earn a living from it. I want more people to discover how wonderful classical music is, but if we promote classical music only to classical music lovers, as the music industry currently does, the market will not grow. I thought that combining classical music with lifestyle items might broaden its audience.

Mitsuhiro Ebihara, from WWDJapan, April 2022

La Nuit, a project that translates classical music into scent, was launched with personal funds by Mitsuhiro Ebihara. After graduating from Keio University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, he worked as a magazine and media editor and now manages social media for luxury brands. Rather than calling himself a founder or creative director, Ebihara uses the title “conductor,” sharing “classical piano + literature, art, fashion, and more: culture and style that branch out from classical music.” What is interesting is that the project does more than simply represent classical music through fragrance. In other words, it seeks to convey the appeal of classical music through other arts and forms of culture.

The brand name La Nuit comes from Gaspard de la nuit by Maurice Ravel, a genius of orchestration, the art of expressing music through an orchestra, who is also known as the “magician of the orchestra.” The brand regards this work as “the pinnacle of piano music and Ravel’s greatest masterpiece.”

Chapter One: Music Heard Through the Skin

My only love affair was with music.

Maurice Ravel

The first release in La Nuit’s project to translate classical music into fragrance is a perfume set inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908), the work from which the brand takes its name. The composition draws on three poems from Gaspard de la nuit by the French poet Louis Bertrand, also known as Aloysius Bertrand, who is said to have greatly influenced Baudelaire. This collection established the genre of the prose poem, and Ravel composed his music with passion as a tribute to Bertrand’s world.

Poetry, Music, and Fragrance

Art always has two contrasting faces. It is, so to speak, like a medal that bears the likeness of Paul Rembrandt on one side and Jacques Callot on the other.

Louis Bertrand

The full title of Bertrand’s poetry collection is Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, rendered in the source as “Gaspard of the Night: Fantasies Based on Impressions of Rembrandt or Callot.” In other words, this is a collection of poetry that is also a set of fantasies, a musical form. The names in its title are not those of poets, but of the Baroque painter Rembrandt and Jacques Callot, a printmaker renowned for his etching technique. Perhaps Bertrand’s poetry grew from the impressions made by these two men, each of whom pursued a different art to its limits, weaving poems with the musicality of fantasies. Then Ravel expressed those poems through the art of music, and in the present day La Nuit has gone on to depict them through the art of fragrance.

Ravel selected three poems from Bertrand’s collection, conceiving the work with the piano sonata in mind. It consists of three pieces for solo piano, and is, incidentally, a work of extraordinary virtuosity. The poems he chose were “Ondine,” “Le gibet” (“The Gallows”), and “Scarbo.” Each is expressed as an eau de toilette, and the three together make up the brand’s first perfume set.

The fragrances were supervised by Izumi Kan, who also creates room fragrances for Rihga Royal Hotel (see Izumi Kan’s work here).

An Encounter Between Classical Music and Perfume

And Ondine offered me a ring,
that I might become her husband, the king of the lake in a palace of water.

But I told her that I loved a mortal maiden.
Ondine shed resentful tears, then showered me with mocking laughter,
and returned to the water.

Gaspard de la nuit, from the Japanese translation by Ken Shono

Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit begins by expressing Bertrand’s poem, in which the water spirit Ondine, or Undine, falls in love with a human man, is rejected, and disappears into the water in tears, through arpeggios, the successive playing of the notes of a chord, and tremolos, the rapid, repeated playing of a note at a single pitch. The music evokes the smoothness and beauty of water, as though the spirit Ondine were emerging from it and speaking to us. The first fragrance expresses the water spirit’s seduction of the man through lily of the valley (in Japanese) and violet.

The sound of a bell rang out from the distant ramparts,
and the criminal’s lifeless body swayed gently in the setting sun.

Gaspard de la nuit, from the Japanese translation by Ken Shono

As the music moves into “Le gibet,” the flowing character of the first movement gives way to a slow, decadent atmosphere. A B-flat bell that sounds throughout evokes a scene in which everything on earth has faded, as though the world were coming to an end. Is this the state of mind of someone advancing step by step toward the gallows, or the world as it exists after the hanging has already taken place? This deeply eerie, dark second movement is portrayed in a weighty, somber fragrance of leather, elemi (in Japanese), and cedar.

How many times I have seen him, Scarbo,
on nights when the moon shone like a silver emblem
on a pitch-black banner embroidered with golden bees.

How many times I have heard
his mocking voice in the shadows of the wall,
the sound of his claws scraping the bed curtains.

I have seen him slide down from the ceiling,
like a witch’s spindle,
and dance around the room, spinning on one leg.

Gaspard de la nuit, from the Japanese translation by Ken Shono

Then the mischievous sprite Scarbo appears out of nowhere. Created as a work of extreme virtuosity, considered the most difficult in the world, “Scarbo” sounds as though an elusive sprite were racing around and playing one trick after another. In complete contrast to the pure, beautiful character of Ondine, its quick, violent movements are nimble but unsettling. This third movement, running wild at midnight, is expressed through clover, neroli, and oakmoss.

Marketing

The case is inspired by piano keys, with a mechanism that makes a bottle spring up when its lower end is pressed. A booklet is also included, offering visually stimulating reading in the form of Bertrand’s poems, Ravel’s scores, explanatory articles, and interviews. In other words, the perfume set is designed to engage three senses: smell, hearing, and sight.

The collaborations are also designed to reach people who do not listen to classical music. At the Kyoto hotel MOGANA, the bar served cocktails inspired by each piece. Photographers Sakiko Nomura and Katsumi Omori were invited to take photographs inspired by the fragrances, and audiences at pianist Aya Nagatomi’s concert could enjoy the scents while listening to Gaspard de la nuit. These are among the brand’s various collaborations.

In practice, my impression from social media and elsewhere was that the project seemed to be introducing classical music lovers to the pleasures of perfume, rather than introducing people outside that audience to the wonders of classical music through fragrance. Ravel tends to bring Boléro to mind, a familiar piece, whereas Gaspard de la nuit is among his less familiar works. I suspect many people decided to try the perfumes because they already loved Gaspard de la nuit.
Yet one could also say that La Nuit’s perfumes are valuable precisely because the music is unfamiliar to people without an extensive knowledge of the subject. In other words, rather than knowing the music first and becoming interested in a fragrance based on it, the idea is to start with the beauty of the fragrance and become interested in the music that inspired it. I think this also reveals considerable confidence in the fragrances themselves.

Chapter Two: Music Heard Through the Skin

In April 2022, it emerged that the second chapter of music heard through the skin would be fragrances based on works by Scriabin, the Russian composer who was captivated by Nietzsche’s philosophy and played so much virtuoso music at the age of 20 that he injured his right wrist. The particular works were not stated explicitly, but from the event to be held during Isetan’s Salon de Parfum (in Japanese), I infer that the subjects are Sonata No. 7, “White Mass”; No. 9, “Black Mass”; and No. 10, “Insects.” How have they been expressed in scent? Or perhaps it would be interesting to smell the fragrances first and imagine the music afterward.