MUsic and body movement are closely related. Saint Augustine already defined music as the science of well-designed singing and equally as “scientia bene movendi”, namely as the knowledge of how to move properly. Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin must have been so permeated by the music he wrote that it was reflected in his way of walking. As a child, Boris Pasternak saw his father Leonid go for a walk with the composer: “Scriabin loved to continue the run following a run, with the momentum, as it were, hopping like a rock thrown as a ricochet glides across the water, only a little was missing, and he would have broken away from the earth and swam through the air. “
Swimming through the air, floating above the ground, is a state that Scriabin’s music prefers to create. Not as a threat, as an exposure. Rather than a secure floating, as it is stored as a motor memory in our cerebellum: our swimming in the amniotic fluid before we were born. Cradles, recliners and rocking chairs were invented to bring children and adults back to where we used to be for a brief moment. The happiness in weighing, swinging and swimming is a moment of sensorimotor regression.
Scriabin understands metrics and harmony as sensual codes of gravity to play with. His musical innovations are aimed at prenatal happiness that can only be felt by those who have internalized the language of music through learning the culture to such an extent that it triggers physical reactions in them.
The opening piece in C major from Scriabin’s 24 Preludes op. 11 for piano is notated in two-half time. But it works with three groups of five eighth notes (quintuplets), which are drawn two eighth notes before the bar line. The easily singable melody of the upper part simulates – as a dc lead – a full measure beginning, but begins in the prelude. A multiple phase shift causes the feeling of the center of gravity to tumble. Everything shimmers and flickers.
Scriabin’s harmony pursues the same goal – at least up to the fifth piano sonata: without erasing the feeling for the root note, it keeps the action in the through soft, unresolved dissonances and alienating the chords – which obscure their aim, and thus their syntactic meaning Levitation. The entire first movement of the fourth piano sonata in F sharp major, Op. 30, savored this harmonic state of suspension for minutes and increased it by metrical superimpositions of six to eight eighth notes.
Scriabin found here, around 1900, an optimum in the use of tonality. He goes to their limits, not to shatter them, but to use their inner gradient of tension and relaxation for sensory overload of the most beautiful kind. With the transition to atonality and the construction on the so-called mystical chord in the late work, the ecstatic of his music becomes a more intellectual game that leaves the body behind as a storage location for internalized order. Floating is only felt as happiness if you know gravity. Where the force of gravity and even the memory of it are completely canceled, floating loses its appeal.
Scriabin himself was at the same time a synaesthetic and combined tones, more precisely tones, with very concrete color ideas. In his “Prométhée. Poème du feu “Op. 60 for piano, choir and large orchestra, he uses a color piano. One can see from the notated light voice that the color creates a formal connection that the harmony can no longer achieve on its own, as Barbara Barthelmes once described.
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