In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Scriabin's birth, Kenneth Smith and Vasilis Kallis have edited a collection that examines the composer's music from analytical, historical, and performance-based perspectives. As the book's title suggests, Scriabin and his music have remained shrouded in mystery for over one hundred years. The authors state that the mystery behind Scriabin himself results from his wide array of philosophies and their many contradictory tenets (1). ( 1) Furthermore, Scriabin claimed to have a rigid compositional system in which "there is not a single extra note" (Sabaneev 2000, 54), but he was evasive about the mechanics of that system.(2) As the editors have shown, this ostensibly fixed method of composition has eluded scholars for decades and has resulted in the development of widely divergent approaches ranging from Russian/Soviet expansions of functional harmony to purely atonal pitch-class set analysis. (3) [2] The editors have compiled chapters from leading Scriabin scholars, both theorists and musicologists. Beyond demystification, the collection has two goals in mind: (1) to challenge persistent myths regarding Scriabin's philosophies and musical structures and ( 2) to open new perspectives on the study of Scriabin and his music. The book succeeds on both counts. Chapters by Simon Morrison and Anna Gawboy, in particular, aptly dispel misconceptions about Scriabin's music, whereas the remaining chapters explore Scriabin's beliefs and music by featuring an extensive study of the philosophies that prevailed in late nineteenth-century Russian society and surveying several novel approaches to the interaction of distinct pitch collections in his late music. While each chapter is valuable in its own right, the book's collective achievement is that it forges connections among the theoretical and historical chapters. These connections, in turn, are likely to inspire future areas of interdisciplinary research.[3] The editors group the book into three sections that cover historical context (Chapters 1-5), analytical systems (Chapters 6-11), and reception and tradition . This arrangement serves the collection well; but to highlight the aforementioned connections between the theoretical and historical chapters, this review will trace a non-linear path through the work.22. Khannanov states that the formal ideas of Kholopov were given in lectures (285).Return to text 23. The first collection is not always the same octatonic collection between pieces. For example, the sixth sonata begins with Oct 1,2 , whereas the seventh sonata begins with Oct 0,1 .Return to text 24. Example 4 models the interaction of parsimoniously related collections (via indicators) after Kallis (see Example 3). Return to text 25. Smith analyzes the beginning of the first movement as m. 22 (194), but it is important to note that the beginning of the entire work also does not feature an octatonic collection, but rather Mystic chords (013579) and other non-octatonic/diatonic collections.
