‘A Science of Tonal Love’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth‐Century Harmony: the Erotics of Skryabin

Abstract

Leonid Sabaneyev attested that Skryabin's compositions contained within them ‘a science of tonal love’, and Skryabin himself described his two Op. 57 pieces –Désir and Caresse dansée– as ‘new ways of making love’. But what makes this music so erotic in nature? The composer theorised about the nature of desire and sexuality in his writings, but this discussion rarely spills over into analysis of his compositional system. Given that Skryabin was so steeped in psychology throughout his life, I appeal to the work of Freud and Jacques Lacan, and particularly to their distinction between drive and desire (essentially, the fundamental instinct of the id versus its imaginary representation), a distinction found in Skryabin's own philosophical writings. But the progression between these two states bears comparison with both his philosophy and his harmonic processes, and I thus focus on the function of the dominant chord, exploring ways in which it can replicate the structures of drive and desire. In so doing, I scrutinise several piano miniatures to show that part of Skryabin's method of embodying drive in music lays out ambiguous chord structures which bear simultaneous tendencies to move in a number of different directions, as multivalent as the drive in the human subject. Further, I attempt to show that, out of mystical sonorities, Skryabin temporally unfolds a dialogue of different dominant ‘drives’, and eventually selects and nurtures a single one at the expense of others, a motion equivalent to desire.

Pitch Organisation in Scriabin's Tenth Sonata

“…1 also flows along the transformational stream, yet even though the transformational potential between the octatonic (8–28), ‘mystic’ (6–34) and whole‐tone (6–35) scales is recognised, he models the music as shifts between various transpositions of the ‘Mysterium scale’, the fusion of the octatonic and the ‘mystic’. Kenneth Smith () also applies transformational theory, although his approach is informed by psychoanalytic theory in music, his analysis of pitch structure being based on hierarchically codified ‘drives’.…”

“…A healthy amount of analytical scholarship on Scriabin addresses the role of scales in the organisation of pitch. See particularly Kallis (), Reise (), Smith (2010a and 2010b), Cheong () and Pople ().…”