Alexander Skrjabin
(Edited from Wikipedia)
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and
pianist. Scriabin, who was influenced early in his life by the works of
Frédéric Chopin, composed works that are characterised by a highly tonal idiom
(these works are associated with his "first stage" of compositional
output).
Later in his career, independently of Arnold Schoenberg,
Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical
system, which accorded with his personal brand of mysticism.
Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated
colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his
colour-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is
considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer.
Scriabin was one of the most innovative and most
controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of
Scriabin that "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater
love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere
expression of genius."
Scriabin had a major impact on the music world over time, and
influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol
Szymanowski. However, Scriabin's importance in the Russian and then Soviet
musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death.
According to his biographer Bowers, "No one was more
famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after
death." Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since
the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano have been increasingly
championed in recent years.
Scriabin was interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch
theory, and later became interested in theosophy. Both would influence his
music and musical thought. During 1909–10 he lived in Brussels, becoming
interested in Jean Delville's Theosophist philosophy and continuing his reading
of Helena Blavatsky.
Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was
"the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization,
the father of the future musician", and an antidote to "the Latin
reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the
"rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group."
Scriabin developed his own very personal and abstract
mysticism based on the role of the artist in relation to perception and life
affirmation. His ideas on reality seem similar to Platonic and Aristotelian
theory though much less coherent. The main sources of his philosophy can be
found in his numerous unpublished notebooks, one in which he famously wrote
"I am God". As well as jottings there are complex and technical
diagrams explaining his metaphysics. Scriabin also used poetry as a means in
which to express his philosophical notions, though arguably much of his philosophical
thought was translated into music, the most recognizable example being the
Ninth Sonata ("the Black Mass").
Keys arranged in a circle of fifths in order to show the
relationship with the visible spectrum in Scriabin's variant of synesthesia
Though Scriabin's late works are often considered to be
influenced by synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one
sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Scriabin actually
experienced this.
His colour system, unlike most synesthetic experience,
accords with the circle of fifths, which tends to prove it was mostly a
conceptual system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks.
Scriabin did not, for his theory, recognize a difference
between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example:
C-minor/C-Major). Indeed, influenced also by the doctrines of theosophy, he
developed his system of synesthesia toward what would have been a pioneering
multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a
grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the
foothills of the Himalayas Mountains that was somehow to bring about the dissolution
of the world in bliss.
In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff
recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to
find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys
with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that
the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained
that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with
red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov
protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight accorded
with their claim: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to
reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin
told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws
whose very existence you have tried to deny."
While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works,
they are among his most famous, and some are performed frequently. They include
a piano concerto (1896), and five symphonic works, including three numbered
symphonies as well as The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of
Fire (1910), which includes a part for a machine known as a "clavier à
lumières", known also as a Luce (Italian for "Light"), which was
a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's tone
poem. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in
the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including
the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in
New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen.
It has been claimed
erroneously that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English
painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction
supervised personally and built in New York specifically for the performance by
Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
On November 22, 1969, the work was fully realized making use
of the composer's color score as well as newly developed laser technology on
loan from Yale's Physics Department, by John Mauceri and the Yale Symphony
Orchestra and designed by Richard N. Gould, who projected the colors into the
auditorium that were reflected by the Mylar vests worn by the audience.
The Yale Symphony repeated the presentation in 1971 and
brought the work to Paris that year for what was perhaps its Paris premiere at
the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. The piece was reprised at Yale once again in
2010 (as conceived by Anna M. Gawboy on YouTube, who, with Justin Townsend, has
published ‘Scriabin and the Possible’).
Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated
turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in
Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.
