Beam Me Up: Scriabin’s Pleromatic ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’

CMT: Listen to the piano part in Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’. Isn’t that a pleroma chord, an arpeggiated pleroma chord? [‘Pleroma’—a Gnostic term derived from the Greek word for ‘plenitude’, all-encompassing, located outside the physical universe, not ‘of this world’.]

DSM: That word’s too fancy for its own good. A curious thing about the piano part, though, is how ‘sculptural’ or ‘landscape-like’ it is. The lyrical arcs are delicate, like boughs of a tree bending in a breeze. . . . And the horn part is pondering and re-pondering his situation. Wishing, desiring; then and now. But not just declarative statements—reconsidering, regretful, remorseful, and maybe even recanting as well?


    [30-sec clip, Miller, 1.4MB MP3]

CMT: More Greek for you, then: how about ‘metanoia’? Metanoiesis—not ‘change-of-heart’ in the way that New Testament scholars would have you interpret it, but more like meta-noia as ‘beyond-knowing’ or ‘after-knowing’ or ‘(re-)considering after the fact’ or ‘knowing-about-knowing’ or ‘mind-shifting toward a higher consciousness or transcendent understanding’. In other words, a Greek semiotics not restricted to NT Christian dogma. Isn’t this Scriabin piece about the limits of human understanding and the things that are beyond human understanding? Doesn’t this piece refer to the Divine, to existential unknowns?

DSM: I’ll consider that on my next hearing of the piece. But so far, no. I do hear phrases that could be a ‘change of mind’ in the horn part, a reconsideration as though revisiting an issue in hopes of now understanding it. That’s not a remorseful ‘change-of-heart’ as one who ‘repents’ of wrong-doing would have, in the NT sense. It’s more a revision of an intention or belief, about a topic of existential or metaphysical importance. Not necessarily a movement from a concrete perspective to a transcendent perspective, but instead a change of understanding about the trancendent. Or, maybe it’s an amendment of purpose—of someone who, on the basis of new facts, renounces something he has done or has been doing. The subject of this Romance is reviewing the meaning of a relationship—or the meaning of Life—and making new resolutions, maybe to think differently and undertake new courses of action. ‘Mind’ transcended to ‘Nous’. That’s what I hear. And incidentally I agree with you: I think that NT scholars have misunderstood metanoia far too long. And they keep citing each other, propagating the error, smoking their own dope. If what was intended was semantically equivalent to ‘repentance’, then metamelomai would’ve been used, not metanoia.

CMT: Scriabin took inspiration directly from Vyacheslav Ivanov and other metaphysical poets who were his contemporaries, but he wasn’t an avant-gardist. He was squeamish, introverted, pedantic, obsessive-compulsive, the product of a privileged upbringing—not flamboyant or reckless. And this ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ was composed in 1890—Scriabin was then 18 years old. Not that much water under his bridge yet. This piece is emphatically not juvenilia. But what does an 18 year old know of transcendence, even a brilliant gifted 18 year old?

S  criabin [was determined] to cease to be an artist, to become instead a prophet, a votary, a predicant. Yet he refused to admit that his design reached beyond Art, that he violated the frontiers of Art and thus ceased to be an artist. On the contrary, he argued that the commonly accepted view of Art was too narrow, its true meaning lost, and its significance obscured. ... To him, Art was the religion of which he was the sacristan.”
  —  Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Univ California, 1987, p. 234.

I  t would be a pity if appreciation of the music required us to follow Scriabin into this world of cosmic hocus pocus.”
  —  Hugh Macdonald, Skryabin. Oxford Univ, 1978, p. 10.

N othing is easier than to pour ridicule upon Scriabin’s gradual and finally total self-delusion. Ever since the bubble of his persona was so rudely burst in the 1920s, his quasi-religious convictions have been under relentless fire from the few critics who have paid him any attention at all, and must be eliminated from any possibility of serious consideration, now or in the future.”
  —  Hugh Macdonald, Musical Times 113:22, 1972.

DSM: This piece is encapsulated wonderment through boggling/incomprehensibility. It reveals a world with a fullness completely beyond rational or human emotional cognition.

CMT: Wonderment, maybe. But boggling? I think what we see a glimpse of here is Scriabin’s early ‘ecstatic truth’ / ‘transgressive truth’ vs. ‘compliant truth’ / ‘accountant’s truth’. Explanation of the pleroma chord’s structure only came with scholarly investigation of the octatonic scale, consisting of alternating half-steps and whole-steps, eight notes to the octave instead of 12. The horn has such a large voice! The piano part is ‘sculptural’ in this duet partly because of its timbre relative to the horn.


DSM: Well, besides that, Scriabin’s musical propositions do take the form of bold, unambiguous statements. Lushly lyrical—or, as Taruskin says, ‘ironic’ or even ‘ingenuous’—statements.

CMT: However emphatic or aggressive his writing may be, Scriabin never bewilders. The ‘signaling’ aspect of Scriabin’s compositions—typical of Schnittke and other Russian composers, too—is universally, insistently present. Miller’s gorgeous tone and fine phrasing are well-suited to the challenges of this bold, expansive piece. Beautiful.

T  his semiotic aspect is what makes the music so ‘easily read’—or rather, so easily paraphrased on whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 101.

DSM: If Scriabin is through his music expressing the ineffable—the non-paraphrasable—how is it that Taruskin can say this is so ‘easily paraphrased’?

CMT: I think what Taruskin means is that the ineffability expressed by the music can be apprehended on various levels, depending on the receptivity and situation of the listener. I think that the word ‘paraphrase’ is not an apt choice. The moral implications of a passage can be ineffable, but can still be grasped and accurately understood by and localized to the context of a specific listener. The hermeneutics of your understanding of it may be different from mine, say. Taruskin is simply saying that the meanings are multi-valent, pluralistic meanings. It’s not discursive music, like a string quartet. It is inchoate music; it aspires to be a natural phenomenon like the aurora borealis. Deriving the meanings is entirely up to the individual listener. It’s deeply intimate music.

T he result is socialist realism minus socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy, even oracle, meanwhile (unlike most oracles) providing built-in ponies . . .”
  —  Richard Taruskin.

DSM: This piece has an unabashed, un-selfconscious immodesty—an ‘I-against-the-world’ aspect to it.

CMT: It has a ‘singing-in-the-shower’ karaoke feel to it—is what you mean to say.

DSM: No, I’m serious. There’s Ivanov’s notion of Scriabin’s vision consisting in surmounting the boundaries of the personal ‘I’—a musical transcendentalism—and a communal mingling of all humanity in a single ‘I’—a macrocosmic universal consciousness.

CMT: It has a certain monumentality, a megalomaniacal quality to it.

DSM: But its spirituality is highly personal and ‘context-dependent’. So experiencing the meanings it contains does require a certain suspension of disbelief, just as you would suspend your disbelief if you were watching a play or a film.

CMT: In other words, you need a bit of incense burning, in order to understand this piece—in order to understand what Scriabin intended!

DSM: If you don’t intend to give the music a chance, fine. That’s your choice.

CMT: But if you give it a chance—if you do suspend your disbelief for a time and project yourself into the piece—then it doesn’t disappoint.

DSM: Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ expresses what are, to me, some primitive, animalistic oppositions. It’s hard to imagine that the font of these musical ideas and compositional techniques would have rationally ‘transitioned’ to Scriabin’s later atonality, in the way James Baker suggests in his book.

S  criabin’s art survives because he was a master of the craft of musical composition. Much as he might have been disappointed, it is through the study of his musical structures that we can best know him today.”
  —  James Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin, p. 270.

B aker’s] answer has to be regarded, finally, as an evasion, since the phrase ‘we can best know him today’ obviously ought to read ‘I wish to know him.’ It is Baker who has decided that Scriabin can and ought to be assimilated to ‘classical’ culture with its attendant formalism. It is Baker who has decided that autonomous existence may be ascribed to these products of the composer's creative labor.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 314.

CMT: So you think Baker was wrong? You think there was no deliberate abandonment of tonality and adoption of atonal compositional methods by Scriabin?

DSM: I’m not asserting that there was ‘none’. I'm only objecting to Baker’s (a) forcing the round peg Scriabin into one of the available square holes and (b) implying that Scriabin deliberately sought to fit into that square-hole category. I think Baker found Scriabin, and doing a simplistic hatchet-job on Scriabin, a very convenient vehicle for his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book. There are few, after all, who would come to Scriabin’s defense. For my taste, Baker was just too simplistic and normative in his analysis, that's all.

A ll conventional music history, whatever the period, is now written in this way; that is precisely what makes it conventional. And in the wake of what is often termed the second wave of modernism—the ‘scientistic’ one that took shape during the Cold War, and in response to it—techno-essentialist values have been a guiding stimulus on musical composition as well.”
  —  Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 315.

CMT: Martin Cooper, though, does take time to attend to Scriabin's gestures—Scriabin’s use of motifs that Cooper considers shamanistic zovï (summons) and prigovori (spells).

DSM: And Scriabin’s friend, Belïy, recounted that Scriabin viewed music as superceding poetry. Once Scriabin had composed the music for ‘Poema ekstaza’ he suppressed the words of his poem; he never allowed the words of the poem to be printed in concert programs.

CMT: Is this piece post-romantic? It seems purely ‘romantic’ to me, albeit with more chromaticism than Chopin or others. The horn part is thoroughly ‘tonal’, but the piano is off in space, doing ‘atonal’, bizarrely chromatic things, showing these things to the horn. The horn voice is oblivious, absorbed, ecstatic.

DSM: C.G. Jung said in ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ that, in dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we don’t need to ask what the material consists of or what it means. But this question is inevitable in dealing with the visionary mode of creation. The obscurity of the sources of the material in visionary creation is problematic. It’s the opposite of the psychological mode of creation. By ‘psychological mode’ Jung means creation at the level of craftsmanship or manipulation of elements within a pre-defined system—the conscious construction of the work. ‘Visionary creation’ refers to the core of artistic endeavor—what’s expressed and why. It’s clear that Scriabin was a master of both types of creation, regardless how delusional he may have been. Miller evokes a transcendence that is all his own in this Scriabin Romance. So, yes, it’s arguably romantic, not post-romantic. As to whether it’s concordant with Scriabin’s intentions we’ll never know . . .

L  ux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.” (The Light shineth in Darkness, and Darkness has not understood it.)
  —  John 1:5.

CMT: You know, the piano in this piece is not so much an ‘accompaniment’, as it is a musical ‘context’—an enabling, cradling ground within which the horn’s lyricism is made possible.

DSM: I think the key—with this ‘Romance’ and with other of Scriabin’s compositions—is to consider that the composition was devised to cause a change in the listener. It is not an expository statement to be received passively by the listener; it is not attempting to enter into a dialogue with an active listener. Instead, it’s an objet d’art that aims to become a life experience for the listener. And not exactly in the normal present-tense either—instead, what Ivanov called sobïtiye zhizni, somewhat like the German Erlebnis, or the French Déjà vécu or Déjà visité. Beautiful, though, whether we’ve lived it before or not. This entire Greg Miller CD is excellent, don’t you think?

• Greg Miller, horn; Ernest Baretta, piano. Bach to Bernstein. (Musicians’ Showcase, 2003.)
  
• Richard Taruskin page at Univ California Berkeley
  
• Bowers F. New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers. St. Martin's, 1973.
  
• Baker J. The Music of Alexander Scriabin. Yale Univ, 1986.
  
• Damm P, Rosel P. Franzo:sische Musik fu:r Horn und Klavier. (Berlin, 1999.)
  
• Dennett D. The Intentional Stance. MIT, 1989.
  
• de Schloezer B. Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Univ California, 1987.
  
• Hustis G, Harlos S. Lyrical Gems for Horn. (Crystal, 2002.)
  
• Leland K. Music and the Soul: A Listener's Guide to Achieving Transcendent Musical Experiences. Hampton Roads, 2004.
  
• Macdonald H. Skryabin. Oxford Univ, 1978.
  
• Ruske E, Muzijevic P. Virtuoso Music for Horn & Piano. (Albany, 2001.)
  
• Swan A. Scriabin. Library Reprints, 2001.
  
• Taruskin R. Defining Russia Musically. Princeton Univ, 2001.