Demystifying Scriabin

This book is an innovative contribution to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, as well as his interaction with contemporary Russian culture. It offers new and original research from leading and upcoming Russian music scholars. Key Scriabin topics such as mysticism, philosophy, music theory, contemporary aesthetics, and composition processes are covered. Musical coverage spans the composer's early, middle and late period. All main repertoire is being discussed: the piano miniatures and sonatas as well as the symphonies. In more detail, chapters consider: Scriabin's part in early twentieth-century Russia's cultural climate; how Scriabin moved from early pastiche to a style much more original; the influence of music theory on Scriabin's idiosyncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin's writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer's mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic 'tonal function' of Scriabin's late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer's music.

Contenu

Introduction: Demystifying Scriabin
Kenneth Smith & Vasilis Kallis

Part I. Shaping Creativity
1 About That Chord, and about Scriabin as a Mystic
Simon Morrison
2 Scriabin and the Russian Silver Age
Rebecca Mitchell
3 Scriabin as a Writer: The Development of Scriabin's Thought as Shown in a Lifetime's Writings
Simon Nicholls
4 Russian Pedagogy in Composition and Music Theory during Scriabin's Creative Period
Kostantin Zenkin
5 Studying Scriabin's Autographs: Reflections of the Creative Process
Pavel Shatskiy

Part II. The Music as Prism
6 Scriabin's Miniaturism
Stephen Downes
7 The Scriabin Tremor and Its Role in His Oeuvre
Inessa Bazayev
8 Demystifying the Mystic
Vasilis Kallis
9 Temporal Perspectives in Scriabin's Late Music
Antonio Grande
10 Scriabin's Multi-dimensional Accelerative Sonata Forms
Kenneth Smith
11 Setting Mystical Forces in Motion: The Dialectics of Scale-Type Integration in Three Late Works
Ross Edwards

Part III. Reception and Tradition
12 Scriabin's Synaesthesia: the Legend, the Evidence, and Its Implications for Multimedia Counterpoint
Anna Gawboy
13 Playing Scriabin: Reality and Enchantment
Marina Frolova-Walker
14 Scriabin and Music Analysis: The Search for the Holy Grail
Vasilis Kallis & Kenneth Smith
15 Scriabin and the Classical Tradition
Ildar Khannanov
16 Scriabin's Critical Reception: 'Genius or madman?'
James Kreiling

Bibliography
Index