Points of discussion: Scriabin's belief of the purpose of music and the reason for his intrepid interest in a world beyond the scope of the physical, the mundane, and the human.
As part of research on Scriabin's philosophy revolving his musical endeavors, his belief in Theosophy and the objectives of composing, I have come to relate to Scriabin from a much different perspective, one that I think was his original intention all along. Music was a helpful tool for a realization that went well beyond the confines of pitch, rhythm, and tone could. In this blog post, I want to discuss a singular point that I was struck by, although there are many other points which deserve ample space for discussion. The goal of posts such as these is to strength my understanding around key tenants of research, thus improving my own self-knowledge through the public sphere of open dialogue with myself and the silent Other. It is through airing my thoughts that I hope to invoke discussion or thoughts in others.
Stated quite plainly, in a rather long quotation from his Secret Notebooks on page 108, Scriabin points out how trite it is when composers just create music, often separating themselves from the music, invoking nothing with their music except emotion-laden programmaticism, a quintessential aspect of the Russian ethos. He writes, "I cannot understand how to write just music now" going on to say that music adopts a certain perspective and its hermeneutics [meanings] "within a whole view of the world." Rearticulating his message for the less-Enlightened [including myself I must admit], when Scriabin wrote these words in the early 1900s, after having fully realized his theurgical mindset but not yet being conjoined with Theosophical doctrine, a relationship he is most often known for, he states that real music is not without an opinion of the world in which it inhabits. "Real music" [a sobriquet that I will use here] is only created when the musical substructure is given a chance to define itself through being linked with an idea, inspiration, or position of the world it 'lives' within. Without this linkage, the sound is meaningless.
Scriabin goes on to say, "People who just write music are like performers who just play an instrument," denoting the emptiness of the act, an argument that is sometimes launched at instrumentalists that they are not really invoking any novel experience for themselves or others, and are just well-trained automatons acting-out movements which produce noise. While I might not share in the pointedness of this statement, it is worth thinking about. The word 'just' means that the act itself is seen as a solitary instance without much of a genealogy or teleology to think of. It happens, the object is created and life moves onwards. All of Scriabin's music, each Prelude and 'concert work,' a mundane reality for the heady composer that Scriabin was not fond off in the slightest, serve a cogitative purpose and do not exist to exist for itself, or for sonic pleasure, or any other immediate desire or necessity. One could argue that much of what Brahms wrote, especially during the Viennese Period, was exactly as he insinuates: Empty music with empty motives, talking empty speeches. It exists to exists, to please, upset, inspire, rationalize, think about, hate, and nothing more.
We now have come to the apex, what Scriabin referred to as 4 on his, what I call, Scriabin’s Cosmic ‘Rule of Teleology,' although whose name according to Scriabin was simply his 'Rule.' It's worth mentioning what exactly that was, and for increased clarity I have written down what I have recorded as my understanding of the linear flow of consciousness...
Cosmic Rule of Teleology
0 - Nothing - Bliss
[the ultimate bliss comes from the thinglessness, but it’s a latent bliss not yet recognizable]
1 - I wish. I rise out of Original Chaos, the Primordial Ooze
[The desire to be in physicality]
2 - I differentiate the undifferentiable
[The bountiful is then atomized into thingness, which comprehends dissimilarity]
3 - I differentiate. I begin to define the elements of time and space, the future of the universe [Teleology is given a voice into existence and a temporal/spatial body to inhabit therein]
4 - I reach the summit, and from there recognize that all is one
[Human liberation from diametricality, not yet ascended from the human plane of being]
0 - Bliss - Nothing
[The bliss has been realized as one has ascended atomization, physicality/non-physicality]
The elongated quotation ends with the most important point, and one that I must stress the wise and hopefully adept reader can understand is at the heart of so many of your most beloved composers like [as listed by Bowers] Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, R.K, Wagner, Debussy, Strauss, Holst, Messiaen, and even [Alan] Hovhaness, a criminally unknown 20th-century Armenian composer whose music was a wake-up call to the dormant nobility of the human soul and his music fed on the "the desire for the regeneration of mankind" as he stated in his 1940 application for Guggenheim Scholarship. So, without vagueness and the usual ambiguities that is common for the Scriabin lexicon, he writes in earnest appeal, "The purpose of music is revelation," a deafening attack on the post-Modernist's vitriolic attack on the concept of knowing, of meaning, and of any measurable comprehension of totality, both within the natural and supernatural domain. Here, Scriabin confronts the menacing critic, of whom he had a plenty during his lifetime who say his music was cacophonic humdrum and many even now, who see Prometheus and other gloriously arcane works of epic proportion as largely meaningless or byzantine.
The anecdote "Singing is praying twice" seems apropos here, as it gets to the heart [or at least one of them] that Scriabin was meaning by saying this short, seven-word dictatum of epic proportion. The Greeks knew this to be true, the Egyptians, Romans, Orthodox and other antiquarian religious paths as well. Heck, even the common person knows this to be true in some latent capacity. And yet, we have not come to fully comprehend what is meant by 'revelation' and the supra-universality of the thing which we call music, ordered vibrational sequences emanating from man-made instruments which we say is where the musical body comes from. We know that music has transportational properties, but we do not internalize this teaching fully, at least not enough to raise ourselves to the conscious level to see the incarnations and multitudiness formations of Sphota [Godhead/Creator] in not only each one of us, but in everything, in all acts, "in all things seen and unseen."
Faubian ends the chapter entitled "Mysticism" with this scathing dictatum of his own...
He [Scriabin] permanently refused to believe in this [human] world, which does not believe but only believes in believing.
You, the reader, know that music can awaken the God consciousness in you. Now do it!
For your viewing pleasure and processual "de-illusionment," here is Yale's 2010 performance of Op. 60 "Prometheus; Poem of Fire" organized by Anna Gawboy.
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