About that chord, and about Scriabin as a mystic PDF

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Chapter 1 About That Chord, and about Scriabin as a Mystic Simon Morrison I n the past few years, the A. N. Scriabin Memorial Museum in Moscow has increased its offerings to include concerts, exhibits, lecture series, and ‘night in the museum’ events sponsored by Moscow’s Department of Culture. Chil...

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Chapter 1 About That Chord, and about Scriabin as a Mystic Simon Morrison

I

n the past few years, the A. N. Scriabin Memorial Museum in Moscow has increased its offerings to include concerts, exhibits, lecture series, and ‘night in the museum’ events sponsored by Moscow’s Department of Culture. Children ages five to eight can attend a forty-five-minute lecture dedicated to the composer’s childhood,1 then visit the Museum of Optical Illusions a block away. Older children are invited with their parents on a walking tour through the Old Arbat neighbourhood, which dates to the eleventh century as a stretch of street lined by wooden houses, stalls, and churches. The workshops of carpenters and silversmiths ceded to the homes of noble families made of stucco with intricate balconies and fanciful facades. Distinguished nineteenth-century families, including the Volkonskiĭs and Trubetskoĭs, lived on the Old Arbat, as did the poets Pushkin and Tsvetaeva. The 1917 Revolution tore it up. Houses were demolished, pedestrian lanes expanded, and pavement was slapped over the tram rails. But Scriabin’s residence survived. It houses the composer’s grand piano, Belgian art nouveau furniture, a small bookcase, a portrait of his mother, the prototype of the colour-sound keyboard for his 1910 tone poem Prometheus, framed concert announcements and reviews, images from different periods throughout his abbreviated life, and reproductions of paintings by Ferdinand Hodler, Nikolaĭ Shperling, and Leonardo da Vinci on the subject of death. On 24–27 April 2015, the museum held four free concerts and an international conference titled ‘Path to Scriabin’. Topics included Scriabin’s influence on Béla Bartók; his first wife’s Jewishness; the reviews of his tamer Romantic compositions in the pages of Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta; Scriabin’s image in the press at the time of the First World War; his letters to Sergeĭ Kusevit ͡ skiĭ and to Nikolaĭ Struve, manager of the Russische Musikverlag publishing house; Scriabin and Pasternak; and the inspiration the Bolshoi Theatre ballet master Aleksandr Gorskiĭ drew from Scriabin’s music as a prophecy of revolution.2 As with the family-friendly museum tours, emphasis fell not on the Silver Age itself but what came before and after. Russia’s great nineteenth-century artists had previously come from the noble ranks 1

https://scriabinmuseum.ru/poster/excursions (accessed 10 March 2020). The composer did not spend his childhood in the apartment housing the museum. He only lived there the last three years of his life. 2 My thanks to Anna Gawboy for a copy of the program.

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and the raznochintsy (middle-class intelligentsia). During the Silver Age highbrow culture embraced traditional and avant-garde voices, religious philosophers hostile to the traditional church, peasants, and proletarian figures. Moscow was lit up by the creative energies of Symbolist and Futurist painters, poets, and composers as well as literally by the streetlights newly strung across its thoroughfares. Scriabin’s residence survived both these changes and those to come with the revolution. But some of the context of his life has been lost – a loss that has had positive and negative consequences for our perception of Scriabin and his achievement. My task here is to provide some context about a sound, or group of sounds, that did not receive much attention at the conference but dominates Scriabin studies. Scriabin’s post-1908 compositions have been unpacked in the technical literature to highlight a fundamental chord (see ex. 1.1), a sound that crosses the divide between rationalist and sensualist aesthetics. An argument René Descartes made in his Compendium musicae of 1618 holds court in Scriabin studies: ‘particular musical proportions’ stimulate the ‘passions of the soul’.3 Scriabin’s fundamental chord is ‘mystic’, but also ‘mythic’, diversely idealised. Theorists Jim Samson and George Perle, both referenced in an unexpectedly nuanced Wikipedia article about the mystic chord, consider it more mundanely music-historical than otherworldly. For Samson, it has quasi-dominant functionality; for Perle, it points to serialism.4 The sense here is that, had Scriabin not died in the Silver Age, he might have come up with the Z-cell. In Irina Skvortsova’s analysis, to the contrary, the ‘Prometheus chord’, as she calls it, relates to the overtone series, pointing metaphorically skyward.5 The mystic chord has also been considered not a chord at all. In 1998, in an essay about voice-leading parsimony, Clifton Callender defined the mystic chord as one of six interrelated pc-collections, the first morphing into the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth through the ‘minimal’ alteration of a semitone.6 Inessa Bazayev has charted where the ‘mystic’ collection, set class (013579), falls on the composer’s path to post-tonal composition. It is one of three ‘prevalent’ sets in the later works, living near the octatonic and whole-tone

Example 1.1. Scriabin’s mystic chord. w w w b ? #w w w &

{

3 Larry M. Jorgensen, ‘Descartes on Music: Between the Ancients and the Aestheticians’,

British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 2 (October 2012): 407–24.

4 ‘Mystic Chord’, Wikipedia, accessed 10 March 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Mystic_chord.

5 Irina Skvortsova, Stil’ modern v russkom muzykal’nom iskusstve rubezha XIX–XX vekov

(Moscow: Kompozitor, 2012), 277.

6 Clifton Callender, ‘Voice-Leading Parsimony in the Music of Alexander Scriabin’, Journal

of Music Theory 42, no. 2 (August 1998): 220.



Scriabin as a Mystic 13

collections in a ‘homogeneous land’. ‘Wrong’ notes are not ‘disruptive’, but enlivening.7 Several of Scriabin’s post-1908 compositions insist on a non-chord tone throughout that resolves only at the end or, beguilingly, not at all. The mystic chord has also been heard as a formal device: The non-resolving essence of the mystic chord, its suspended dissonance, mesmerises time, suggesting a realm of experience beyond the empirical ticking of the clock. I myself have described the mystic chord as the basis of the ‘death’ harmonies in the sketches for Scriabin’s unfinished and unfinishable Mysterium project.8 This all-consuming spectacle would have used the chord and its brethren as an incantation, a kind of Symbolist ‘Open Sesame’ unveiling a realm of ‘eternal freedom’ where spirits commingle.9 Such power in six little notes. Scriabin probably himself realised that he was in over his head with this particular project, but he was not, as Nikolaĭ Rimskiĭ-Korsakov insinuated, out of his mind.10 The notes in question, C–F♯–B♭–E–A–D in one guise, G♭–D–A♭–C–F–B♭ in another, give us most of a whole-tone scale and most of an octatonic scale, with the pitches shared between these scale segments being equivalent to a French Sixth chord. Another, messier definition turns the mystic chord into a pentachordal subset of the whole-tone collection with a half step inserted in the bass, for example A– B♭–C–D–E–F♯. An alternate spelling along these lines gives us C–D–E–F♯–A–B♭. Flipping pages in the scores we also find it voiced as a quartal harmony. The chord has been assigned a partner, mystic chord B, and it has been respelled as a dominant thirteenth chord with fifth omitted, and its partner as a dominant thirteenth chord with ♭9, fifth omitted. So, chord 1: C13♯11; chord 2: C13♭9 (assuming no eleventh or fifth). In a discussion of Scriabin’s Op. 58, Feuillet d’album, Vasilis Kallis further relates the mystic chord to the acoustic scale: set class (024679t).11 Though it exists in multiple contexts, the mystic chord is a singularity that relates to scales of invariant transpositions but has no clear-cut definition of its own. Consider one of Scriabin’s extremely short final piano preludes, Op. 74, no.  2, a composition that ends as it begins. Here the iterations of discrete motifs, which have been analysed through the lens of the octatonic scale, the acoustic scale, and the mystic chord, seem to be part of the same time image, adding depth to the instant as does the illusion of perspective on a flat canvas. The singularity of the mystic chord has been generalised, with the actual pitches of the chord mattering less than the 7 Inessa Bazayev, ‘Scriabin’s Atonal Problem’, MTO 24, no.  1 (March 2018), https://

mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.1/mto.18.24.1.bazayev.html.

8 Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, 2nd edition (Oakland:

University of California Press, 2019), 174–6.

9 Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), 178; quoting Valeriĭ Briusov’s 1904 essay ‘Kliuchi taĭn’ [Keys to the mysteries]. 10 V. V. Yastrebtsev, Nikolaĭ Andreevich Rimskiĭ-Korsakov: Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959–60), 2:423–4. 11 Vasilis Kallis, ‘Principles of Pitch Organization in Scriabin’s Early Post-Tonal Period: The Piano Miniatures’, MTO 14, no. 3 (2008), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.3/ mto.08.14.3.kallis.html.

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concept to which the chord has been connected. Scriabin’s intimates considered Op. 74, no. 2, his finest piece. ‘This is not music’, Leonid Sabaneev affirmed to the composer when he listened to it, ‘this is something else’. The composer agreed: it’s the ‘abyss’, he whispered, ‘the Mysterium’.12 The various spellings of the chord offer different vantage points: from inside out, top down, or bottom up. These simultaneous, yet multiple, perspectives – almost akin to the analytical Cubism of Picasso – produce a special resonance. Sabaneev captured this quality in his account of the prelude. The piece exudes ‘a supreme peace, a cleansed sound’, Sabaneev writes. ‘You know’, the composer eagerly rejoined, ‘this prelude leaves the impression of something indeed lasting entire centuries, indeed forever, millions of years’.13 Thus the mystic chord echoes in the ear and in the mind, inspiring a journey back through several speculative layers. Eternity is to be found and fixed in the passing instant. To quote another celebrated mystic, William Blake, from his poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour’.14 So, about that chord: Is it functional or motivic? Tonal or atonal? Synthetic or naturally derived? A scale, or motif or a collection? Single or multiple? Yes. These are only conflicts if we insist on some resolution as a goal, whether aesthetic or analytic. But paradoxes are allowed to stand as illuminating in and of themselves as irreducible, even irredeemable. Scriabin was obviously a wilful artist, and that wilfulness extended beyond the séance-like atmosphere he cultivated in his salon. He and his music brooked no limits. But Scriabin proselytised his dream of spiritual communion, such that everyone had to participate for it to succeed, which of course ensured its failure. But even here failure and success are not terms that need be opposed. Nor are the eroticism of Symbolism and the eroticism of Modernism. The divide has been navigated by Kenneth Smith, who assesses Scriabin’s Op. 57 (Désir and Caresse dansée) within the context of ‘tonal love’, the ‘drive and desire in twentieth-century harmony’.15 He takes a similar stance on the fourth piano sonata.16 Scriabin, Smith writes, derived his erotic affects from Richard Wagner, chiefly Tristan und Isolde. As evidence, Smith offers the following quotation from Scriabin (here I adjust the translation that circulates in the English-language literature): ‘For a long time now I have been convinced that the creative act is inextricably bound up with the erotic act’, Scriabin writes. 12 Leonid Sabaneev, Vospominaniia o Skriabine (Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2000), 314–15;

italics in the original.

13 Ibid., 313–14; italics in the original. 14 William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, 1803, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

poems/43650/auguries-of-innocence.

15 Kenneth Smith, ‘“A Science of Tonal Love’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth-Century

Harmony: The Erotics of Skryabin’, Music Analysis 29, no. 1/3 (March–October 2010): 234–63. Smith elaborates the argument in this article in his monograph Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 16 Kenneth Smith, ‘Erotic Discourse in Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata’, British Postgraduate Musicology 7 (2005), http://britishpostgraduatemusicology.org/bpm7/smith.html.

Scriabin as a Mystic 15



I certainly know that, in my own case, the creative urge bears all the physiological traits of the sexual urge […] And let’s not forget the connection between the artist’s creativity and erotic sensation. As the artist becomes impotent, so too does his art. To reach the creative zenith is to reach the erotic zenith. Consider Wagner. Tristan is his zenith, but Parsifal is a marked decline into decrepitude.17

The Fourth Piano Sonata is graced by a poem by Scriabin that concerns, as does Tristan und Isolde, union in the transcendental immaterial realm of death. The poem also, however, speaks of the subject’s (Scriabin’s) desire for celestial heights, invoking distant spheres, and a ‘wilting’ before the infinite. Here Scriabin might be referencing the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, especially the meltingly beautiful poem ‘Élévation’ from Les Fleurs du mal. Scriabin’s close paraphrase of Baudelaire – both poems speak of bathing, of a subject who swoons in waves – is enchained in Smith’s assessment to Wagnerian language.18 Scriabin wrote poems, libretti, and philosophical meditations, but he was not a writer of Baudelaire’s stature. The eminent French Symbolist bottled up essences in untranslatable illusions, poetic hallucinogens meant to reveal a dream space wherein truth could be found. Scriabin, in contrast, relied on clichéd binaries and attached his derivative texts to his pathbreaking compositions. Did he want his music to be heard along these subpar lines? Smith recognises the deficiencies but considers the relationship between poetic doggerel and musical gesture compelling. Nothing is erased from the music because of the texts; rather, the music increases in potential through the imposition of narrative. The Fourth Sonata represents the masculine and feminine ‘principles’ in search of union, the earthbound male subject hoping to be seduced by the female star. Referencing William Reich’s description of ‘the function of the orgasm’, Smith identifies musical equivalents in Scriabin to ‘fore-pleasure mechanism’ and ‘end-pleasure mechanism’.19 Smith writes in detail about the notes – how the left- and right-hand voicing, and the harmonic language, suggest unrequited desire: The opening bars of music embody the kernel of this gender polarity where two voices are synchronically revealed, both moving in contrary directions to create a beautiful impression of blossoming sound. Each of these voices contains characteristics of gender representation [that] were prevalent in the nineteenth century. The first sonority we hear in the left-hand is essentially a B “major 7th” chord, the outer parts containing the interval of the seventh. A parallel chromatic descent begins which lasts throughout the first four bars.20

That chromatic descent, ‘as trope of feminine seduction’, is likened to Wagner, but Smith nuances his analysis, moving it beyond the gender binary. The music, he implies, is trans-sexual in the sense of being more than sexual, transcendentally so.

17 Ibid.; Sabaneev, Vospominaniia, 301. 18 Smith, ‘Erotic Discourse in Scriabin’s Fourth Sonata’. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

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Simon Morrison

With this point in mind, we can reconsider the nature of the poetic texts, by Scriabin via Baudelaire, to which the Fourth Sonata is attached. Scriabin gives us, in translation: ‘In a light mist, transparent vapor / Lost afar and yet distinct / A star gleams softly. / How beautiful! The bluish mystery / Of her glow / Beckons me, cradles me./ O bring me to thee, far distant star!/ Bathe me in trembling rays/ Sweet light!’21 Baudelaire, for the record, gives us: ‘Above the valleys and above the meres, / The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas,  / Beyond the sun and ether distances, / Beyond the confines of the starry spheres’.22 The source verses for the music seem anti-erotic, and as such, no longer mundane, in the literal sense of being ‘of the world’. The words describe the spirit ascending, the sinful material human condition being discarded, and the depravities of postlapsarian existence negated. The unencumbered spirit touches, or attempts to touch, the divine. If a text-music association is warranted, what do we do with the ‘wrong’ pitches, the thwarted harmonic resolutions, the left- and right-hand lines expanding and collapsing? In music, as in dance, eroticism is exoticism, but the divine lies always somewhere else – beyond the human, outside culture or narrative. As Scriabin himself tells us, ‘Désir’ is a ‘Caresse dansée’. Scriabin expands and collapses the range of the Fourth Sonata, allowing his sonorities to echo in vast proportions. Insistently embellished dominant and augmented sixth sonorities lead to a place where the ‘wrong’ notes are ‘right’. Or even better: the music ascends into a place where both labels apply, where the wrong is also right, where that which is inside is also outside, with the experience of pleasure (consonance) and pain (dissonance) in oscillation. Objects cast shadows, and shadows project objects. Given that desire and ecstasy are amorphous categories, they must be represented by music that exceeds itself by erasing the artificial boundaries of harmonic contrivance. Let us consider the bravura concluding measures of the second movement (ex. 1.2). These resolve a long-standing irritant: a sixth scale degree (D♯) that has stubbornly refused to fall to the fifth (C♯). That fifth belongs to the tonic chord in F♯ major, whose ‘grandiose exposition’, to return to Smith, thwarts the ‘chromatic seduction’. Indeed, D♯ falls from D♮ to the C♯ of the tonic triad. But the tonic triad has no function, and its rallentando grandeur is perhaps nothing more than a terminating convenience. The tonic triad is a contrivance, and its iteration in triplets brings down the curtain on events that it has not otherwise participated in. The so-called ‘wrong’ pitch has encroached upon everything in the score and is thus no longer wrong at all. Here the wrong pitch resonates, unchained, liberated from the expectation of a correction, a resolution. Likewise, symbolist poems isolate phonemes, allowing them to resonate free from signification. Just as poetry is not an exercise in denotation but an exploration of connotation, so too the meanings of a pitch (or a chord, or a complex, or an entire piece) cannot be contained within the limits of functional harmony.

21 Ibid. 22 Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal [Flowers of evil], https://fleursdumal.org/poem/102.

The translation is by Jack Collings Squire, from a 1909 edition of the poem.

Scriabin as a Mystic 17



Example 1.2. Scriabin, Piano Sonata no. 4, op. 30, mvt. 2, closing bars.

## # & # ##

160

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> Œ ‰ œ™ ‰ œJ œ œ œ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œ œ

>j > œ™ œnœœ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ

> > >j œ ™ œ ™ > >j œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œœ ‰ œJ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œnœ œ œ #œœœ œœœ nœœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ #œœ œ œœ œ

> nœœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœœœœ œœœ œœ œœœœ œœ œ œœnœœœœ n œœœ œ #œ œ œJ ‰‰ œ œ œ ‰‰ #œ œ œ œJ

n œ œœ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œ œ n œœ œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ #### # ‰ œ œ œ ? ‰œ œ œ œ nœœ œœ ‰ œ œ œ œœ œœ ‰ œ œ œ nœœ œœ œ œœ œœ œ œœ œœ & # œ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œœœœœ ? #### # œ œœ ‰ ‰ œ œ™ #œ œ œ ™ œ œ œ ™ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ # œ œ J œ œ # œ œ œ...