Search Results

This chapter starts with the January 1943 appearance of the Ellington orchestra in Carnegie Hall. Ellington composed a work of symphonic dimensions, Black, Brown and Beige. Strayhorn’s contributions to this work are unearthed. A strong structural analogy between Ellington’s Black and Strayhorn’s Pentonsilic suggests that the exchange of ideas, rather than actual co-composition, formed the essence of their collaboration. The next section looks at the suite-format and sums up the advantages: it silenced criticism regarding form, it accommodated the division of tasks, it enabled the insertion of unused numbers, and it facilitated the later addition of programmatic explanations. The chapter continues with The Perfume Suite, the first acknowledged Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration, followed by Beggar’s Holiday (1946), unraveling Strayhorn’s contributions to this adaptation of the Beggar’s Opera. As Strayhorn contributed a growing number of arrangements, his style slowly permeated the orchestra’s sound.

Discusses an over-looked dimension of Gregory’s apophaticism. By virtue of apophatic union with the Word, the soul, while remaining unknowing, paradoxically takes on the qualities of the Word. The Word speaks (logophasis) in the deeds and discourse of Paul, Peter, Thekla, andthe bride.

The concept of tasting notes has spread from wine to other beverages, especially beer, coffee, and tea. There are descriptions such as "aromas of dark chocolate, flowers, and graham crackers" that could apply to any of these beverages. Food like chocolate and cheese can also be described by a specialized vocabulary. Descriptions of perfume show many parallels to wine descriptions, and a fragrance wheel has been constructed. The language of music criticism can be added. Word for describing people also show similarity with wine words. Many are evaluative terms are evaluative as well as descriptive. To be thrifty is positive; to be stingy is not.

This chapter surveys the wealth of literature that has explored the history of the perfume trade. Not only were some of the first histories of smell histories of perfume, but histories of perfume also outnumber all other studies of smell in society. A survey of this literature provides a greater understanding of the commercialization of scents, as well as the commodities that are at the heart of many discussions of smell. Thus the chapter addresses the earliest production of fragrances and charts the geographical shifts in both the centers of the incense trade and scent manufacture. It focuses on certain products that were at the heart of health-care practices and religious ceremonies. It then concludes with an exploration of the emergence of the modern perfume industry and its related products, packaging, and practices.

This chapter describes events that occurred from 15 September 1894–28 February 1895. It covers changes in the weather; punching the pimp; artificial flowers and strange perfumes; on the prowl; death in Kensington; Christmas lists and resolutions; decorative salaciousness; a man's game; first (k)nights; changes for the worse; renewing hostilities; women who did; and trivial comedy, serious people.

This chapter details a variety of historical contexts where distinctions between masculine and feminine scents were less clear or only beginning to be outlined with clarity. The distinction between male and female scents emerges as a relatively recent invention in the long history of perfume. Only in the last couple of decades have perfumers attempted to reintroduce consumers to unisex, let alone queer, scents. Moreover, while in the last century the perfume industry may have employed disproportionate numbers of male scientists to improve rates of extraction and build global empires, the captains of this vast industry during periods of great expansion were just as often women. This chapter aims to address these and other aspects of smell culture and to broadly chart the overtly gendered olfactory landscape from ancient to modern times.

This chapter examines female alliances that were built through the exchange of gifts. It considers four specific gift objects that seventeenth-and eighteenth-century women made or used and then recorded in their writings: a jar of marmalade, a bottle of perfume, a piece of embroidery, and a painted picture. These gift objects were intended to speak to the gendered tastes, skills, and habits cultivated by privileged women in this period and therefore to create bonds between elites. But in creating and giving these luxury objects, women stressed instead their economy and thrift. The chapter examines the reappropriation of luxury by illustrating the ways in which elite women manipulated expensive ingredients in order to use them in ways that emphasized their supposedly feminine attention to emotion, care, and household economy.

Before the 1920s perfume was strongly encoded. Musky scents and tropical ‘heavy florals’ were associated with prostitution, oriental perfumes with decadence and Catholicism, and light floral scents such as rose and lavender with virtuous femininity, while citrus colognes were unisex. Blending perfumes was held to be decadent in itself. The discovery of synthetic aldehydes increased the range of possible scents, and perfumers began experimenting. The modernization of perfume began with mixing scents from different semiotic categories, thus moving from naturalism to abstraction. ‘Chanel No. 5’ was the most successful of these new inventions, and was consciously conceived of as a synthetic creation.

This chapter presents the study of smell from a general theoretical and methodological perspective. Although South Asian religious discourse and practice abounded in complex smells, until now scholars have frequently reduced these odors to the simple category of “perfume” and then effectively ignored them. The chapter highlights the assumptions implicit in much Western scholarship on smell, and also explores some previous contributions to the study of smell in other disciplines. Finally there is a discussion of the career and work of the scholar P. K. Gode, who effectively paved the way for such studies as the present one.

What were perfumes and incense actually like and what did people do with them? This chapter explores the theory and practice of perfumes. Medieval South Asians did not talk of “top notes” and “base notes”, but of “allies” and “enemies” in the structure of a perfume. Perfumes ranged from simple pastes of sandalwood and saffron to complex oils containing dozens of ingredients subject to numerous processes. The chapter also analyzes a literary episode involving a perfume-addicted, love-sick prince as a case study to confirm and to complicate what we have learned so far about the uses and meanings of smells and perfumes in medieval South Asia.

Building on the wide-ranging study of smell, perfumes, and aromatics in the previous chapters, this chapter examines the question of why people offered these materials to the gods. A passage from the Mahābhārata provides a very clear answer to the question “Why do we give flowers and incense to the gods?” After a close reading of this text, the chapter presents two later sources. Here it appears that the aromatic practices and olfactory sensibilities of the gods changed over time, from simple incense made of Indian myrrh to far more complex perfumes made of exotic aromatics. Although adornment is shared between the “sacred” and “profane” worlds, nevertheless there are important differences between the olfactory tastes and sensory capacities of the gods and of humans, such that one can justifiably talk of a religious olfactory aesthetics.

In artistic perfumery, new perfumes are not based on last year’s top sellers, but on original, often unconventional ideas such as making a perfume that smells like melancholy. While this can sound promising to potential consumers, it poses a real challenge to the actors involved in the product development process: they need to organize their work in such a way that the immaterial, often deeply personal emotion can materialize into a concrete product. The chapter presents data from longitudinal, qualitative research on perfume making in artistic perfumery and outlines how the question of materializing the immaterial is approached by the creative director and two perfumers. Central to the chapter’s findings is a visual concept that serves as a material representation of the emotion. Throughout the process, it takes on different roles in response to the specific situational challenges (boundaries) and relationships in which it is embedded. Together, they define the relational movements that are necessary for the product’s becoming. The authors discuss insights and implications for understanding how materiality comes to matter in organization studies.

This chapter explores how Greeks in classical times converted natural products for use as food, drink, cosmetics, perfumes, and medicines. On-farm processing was limited and probably often conducted on a co-operative basis among neighboring farms, though there may have been some for-profit processors of olives or grapes. Preparing food and drink required little skill and though it provided a living to many participants, it was probably a scanty one. Cosmetics, perfumes, and medicines appear to have been served by two segments: large importer-wholesalers and individual vendors. The larger operations employed a number of slaves, and probably sold direct to the public through these slaves as well as to independent resellers. These independent vendors might source their own ingredients or buy from importer-wholesalers; in either case their success would have depended heavily on glib salesmanship.

This chapter analyzes the notion of the Third World, and examines Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare (1977), Turumba (1983), and I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991). The term Third World became a metaphor for Tahimik's politics and aesthetics, for as the product of colonial and imperial history, the notion of the Third World marks the failure of the resistance to colonial occupation—a failure from which Tahimik insists that one must learn just as one must learn from the breadth of the imperfect historical legacies of colonialism. Tahimik's masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow, is a diary film that chronicles the momentous decade from 1981 to 1991 that saw the rise of the People Power movement, the deposing of Ferdinand Marcos, and the accession to power of Corazon Aquino.

Air quality became increasingly important in accounts of healthy living and disease prevention. We find that concerns shift from putrid air and ‘miasmas’ to a focus on the properties of winds and the dangers of cold damp air. Medical authors focused particularly on the impact of dangerous cold airs on the head, brain, hands, feet, and pores. The Hippocratic text Airs, Waters, Places had great influence over medical advice, stimulating this new attention to winds and local climates. Likewise health advice within Vitruvius’ and other classical texts had considerable impact on Renaissance palace building and debates on the healthiness of urban versus rural living. The chapter examines objects and practices adopted to improve domestic air; from fireplaces and foot-warmers to windows, wall hangings, and perfumes, albeit noting a decline in perfuming practices. Lay correspondence echoes the importance attributed by medics to the impact of air and wind on the body.

This chapter examines how James Joyce deploys scent, and particularly perfume, as a means of expanding the conventional boundaries of what is “scentually” appealing to include the repulsive and the repellent in a pungent dialectic of pleasure and unpleasure. It begins with a brief history of perfume's synthetic revolution and considers how modern writers such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell registered the impact of these material changes in their work. It then offers a reading of Joyce's novel Ulysses to show how literary modernism incorporates easy, somatic pleasures but renders them through contorted kinds of unpleasure and challenging reading effects. It discusses the significance of odor for Joyce and explores how his “perfumance” in Ulysses poses counterintuitive acts of olfactory pleasure as a model of eroticism and readership that seeks to expand his audience's repertoire of sensation in idiosyncratic ways.