John Bell Young
Scriabin Piano Sonata #5
http://www.mp3.com/johnbellyoung

Scriabin is controversial, and for all of the wrong reasons - his ideas
of theosophy and grandiose projects have sometimes overshadowed his work.
His contemporaries were more impressed with his ideas, and more immune to
judging him based on those ideas.  One of his friends, after listening to
him discourse for an hour came away thinking "Scriabin will compose a great
work, and I shall conduct it."

What is really subversive about Scriabin's music is not the harmony -
though it has been often imitated - but his entire approach to musical
structure.  He dispensed with the entire system of resolution which drove
Western music for 3 centuries, he followed Wagner and Liszt's ideas of
extramusical structure made tangible in musical technique.  It was the high
point of an idea which would be attacked by almost every major composer
of the early modern.  This idea is, today, still radical enough to cause
problems.  In the present music with extra-musical ideas presents a
simplified musical technique to make sure the ideas overwhelm the music.
Scriabin is the opposite of composers like Danielpour - he believed that
pure idea would overwhelm the listener - loosed by a musical substance
beyond pure comprehension.

John Bell Young is controversial pianist, for all of the wrong reasons.
He is controversial because of his uncompromising stance, for the vigour
with which he pursues his ideas, for eschewing the normal career path for
musicians, he looses his temper and tells people off.  In a world where the
mediocre claim the priviledge of annointing who is great, these habits of
mind and aspects of personality cause problems.

But this is not what he should be known for.  Instead what should be
controversial is his entire approach to pianism, and its relationship to
the works of Scriabin in particular.  The direction of post war pianism has
been towards greater and greater accuracy, often at the expense of all
other virtues.  Pianists learned to type perfectly - misspellings the
ultimate evil.

This direction is completely at odds with the entire school of Beethoven -
Which continues to this through the line captured by Czerny and Liszt.
In this school, the foundation of the Russian school of piano, the most
important single trait of a pianist is the understanding of the grammar of
the work, sensitivity to the meaning that that grammar is used to convey.
Mistakes of notes are as inconsequential to understanding as an accent
would be - only where they obscure the fundemental meaning are they
problematical.

The most celebrated Scriabin sonata cycle of our day belongs to Andre-Marc
Hamelin.  AMH is a pianist equivelant to Heifitz as a violinist - possessed
of tremendous mechanism, and who no technical problem holds any terror for.
This in many cases is a great asset - but in many it is a defict, because
AMH is incapable of conveying anything which he does not feel technically.

This is a particular problem in Scriabin.  Because the technical challenges
of the music hold no terror for him, his performances convey no terror to
others.  Let me take an analogy:  as a child ghost stories frighten us, but
not as adults.  However, an actor playing the Ghost in Hamlet must convey
terror by his art, or the effect of the play is lost.  Even if ghosts do
not frighten him, he must frighten others by being a ghost.

Thus while AMH's performances are invaluable for making people willing
to explore Scriabin's music, the are the entry, but not the destination.
Other pianists, and another kind of pianism, must convey the truth of the
music, much as a reading through of a Shakespeare play will remove the
stumbling block of language, but it will not be *Shakespeare* until it is
turned into a stage production, with all of the beauties of the language
returned to it.

In this sonata we see exactly what is needed - an understanding of the
grammar of Scriabin's piano music.  In this music, the thrust of the music
must be beyond the purely tonal implications of the chords, and instead
must rely on following the continuity of the counterpoint, which shapes
the sections of the music.  The playing surges at the point where the
line breaks, and not necessarily at the point of chromatic resolution.

This is crucial - instead of being the division between consonance and
dissonance, the chromatic shift is a sensuous and continuous motion.  It is
caressed by the pianists hands -- by a turn of the wrist which maintains
the line even though in - for example Brahms - the wrist would shift, thus
enforcing a break.

The composer of the same time who requires the same approach is Debussy,
and the result is the same - the liberation of melody.

The liberation of melody in the Scriabin sonata #5 is conveyed here by
having the larger melody conveyed.  Each climax must stand in relation
to the previous in its place of this middle ground melody.  To take an
analogy, in Chopin, he would occassionally write one note in an arpeggio
much larger so as to accentuate that this was the melodic note, and that it
stood in relation to the next melodic note as well as to the notes in the
arpeggio.  Scriabin, Chopin student that he was, and student of Taniev's
counterpoint, took this idea yet farther, and had many temporally separated
events and created melodies.  There are layers within layers within layers.

If you had before you a vinyl record of this performance, you could speed
it up, and the middle ground would become appearant to you, the sonata
would still make sense at this speed, there would be audible, the melody
that shapes the work.  In JBY's performance the full shape of this melody
is brought out, Hamelin, by his very evenness destroys this.

This is crucial for Scriabin.  In a composer such as Brahms, there is
a middle ground melody, but it is purely tonal logic which shapes it.
Dynamics are not a part of the equation.  The difference between the middle
ground of Brahms and the middle ground of Scriabin, is the same as the
difference in melody between Haydn and Beethoven.  For Haydn the melody
makes sense regardless of dynamic, for Beethoven, the dynamics are part of
the melody, the shifts from sf to p are intergral to its understanding.

Scriabin applied the same transition to middle ground melody that
Beethoven had to the foreground.  In this he broke with the New German
School.  Liszt and Wagner made the middle ground melody dependant on
*colour* not *dynamic*.  The school of composition that flows forward
searches for new colourations.  For Scriabin, as for other Russians, colour
is related to key, the logic of colour is no different from the logic of
key, it is dynamic which is flexible.  For Germanic tonality, dynamics
are related to key, and hence it is colour that is flexible.  This core
divergence, the focal point of Scriabin's theories of perception, is the
element which JBY makes clear to us.

For a Chopinist - as Scriabin was - colour is related to fingering.  Each
finger has a colour.  Chopin could correct students fingering *when he was
standing in the next room*.  So too with Scriabin - colour is *separate*
from pure dynamics at the keyboard, but encompasses a motion of the whole
body to produce the exact amount of tension, timing and dynamic which
*taken together* produce the effect of colour at the piano.

Perhaps I am sensitive to this because it is an element misunderstood
in my own music - that the cycle of climax to crash is not a mistake,
but instead an indication of structure.  To understand what JBY has
accomplished, one must realise that Scriabin interleaves melody by
expression - when you feel ecstatic - there is a sound which imprints
itself upon your psyche.  The next note in this melody occurs the next
time you feel ecstatic.  In Scriabin each state of mind is continuous with
itself, you must enter a twilight world of pure despair to understand the
logic of despair, pure ecstasy to understand the logic of ecstasy.  Hence,
without the ability to create the correct relationship between moments,
the door to this world is closed.

JBY opens this door by precise severings of phrase, by allowing us to fall
from progressively greater heights to progressively deeper chasms, until,
magically, the height and the chasm resolve themselves into one pure chord,
which is beyond the logic of any key.

One can only hope that now people have heard what Scriabin says, that they
will be driven to hear what he means.  Just as *Shakespeare in Love* is a
wonderous romp and act of Bardolatry, but it would be terrible if people
felt they *knew* Shakespeare.

With all religions, one must make the pilgrimage.

Stirling Newberry