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Alexander Skryabin was a composer, poet, and mystic philosopher who sought to unify these three endeavors in his artistic works. He sought means of influencing and enlightening the human spirit through multimodal artistic expression, with his ultimate goal being the enactment of an omnisensory performance called The Mysterium that was to bring about the apocalypse by raising the spiritual consciousness of all humankind beyond our earthly forms. The music and writings that Skryabin produced have mystified audiences and critics for over a century due to their highly idiosyncratic construction. This dissertation seeks to bring the music and mysticism closer together, and explore their complex interrelationships.Skryabin’s philosophical outlook is difficult to discuss due to its ever-shifting nature; Skryabin frequently wrote and stated contradictory beliefs in sometimes shockingly close proximity. This dissertation argues in favor of understanding Skryabin’s philosophy as an ongoing work-in-progress that is nonetheless structured by a handful of core ideas that underpin all of the changing superstructure. This dissertation seeks to understand Skryabin’s music and mysticism by analyzing it through the lens of phenomenology, as this methodology allows for analysis of far more musical characteristics than only looking at harmony or form. The phenomenological method outlined here focuses particularly on the experience of musical time, musical space, and the embodied motions of the pianistic performer. Skryabin was a pianist-composer who primarily wrote for and at the piano, and this dissertation finds myriad connections between Skryabin’s philosophical outlook and the ways that he encourages a pianist to move. A recurrent theme throughout this dissertation is a distinction between the exoteric and esoteric, which is most readily apparent in the two primary musical analyses – Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910) and Piano Sonata No. 10 (1913). Prometheus is a grand, exoteric expression of Skryabin’s philosophy intended to communicate outward with the masses, while in contrast, Piano Sonata No. 10 is an inwardly-focused esoteric expression of hierophantic ritual.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) composed primarily for his instrument, the piano. He did, however, compose five major works for orchestra and a piano concerto. Scriabin's last work for orchestra, Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Op. 60 (1910), exemplifies his mature compositional style. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute a solo transcription of Prometheus to the piano's rich literature in that genre. Furthermore, the dissertation aims to identify and examine the problems encountered in transcribing this work for solo piano and the decision-making that led to musically acceptable solutions. Throughout the process of arrangement, one major question became apparent: What informs the transcription? In turn, this question and its numerous answers served as a guide during the transcription's realization and are the focus of the project.

This thesis will demonstrate that the Mystic Hexachord popularized by AlexanderScriabin functions as a key structural element in three Parables by Vincent Persichetti.The Mystic Hexachord provides the harmonic basis for each piece on many differentstructural levels. Chapter 1 explores Persichetti’s compositional process and philosophybehind his Parables, illuminating the key aspects that interconnect them. Chapter 2explores the structural properties of the Mystic Hexachord and its potential for generatingcompositional structures. The final chapters contain analyses of three of Persichetti’sParables for brass instruments examined through the analytical lens crafted in Chapter 2.The compositions analyzed in Chapters 3–5 are: 1. Parable VIII for Solo Horn, Op. 120 (analyzed in Chapter 3) 2. Parable XIV for Solo Trumpet, Op. 127 (analyzed in Chapter 4) 3. Parable XVIII for Solo Trombone, Op. 133 (analyzed in Chapter 5)

The two enclosed essays reflect a growing portion of my musical interests over the past several years. The first essay looks into the history and transformation of Quan Ho folk singing in northern Vietnam's Bac Ninh region, with critical analysis of the many ways in which this tradition is being reshaped and molded to conform with contemporary ideals. The second essay traces the development of Alexander Scriabin's harmonic and symbolic language through his late piano sonatas, exploring the impact of this revolutionary Russian composer on the history and development of music in the 20th century, specifically within the genre of the pianoforte sonata.

Part I of this dissertation is a large-scale composition for orchestra and mixed choir entitled The Forgotten Child of Zeal. This is a programmatic work inspired by the classic 1995 role-playing game Chrono Trigger. The piece chronicles the story of an enigmatic young boy named Janus, who possesses innate magical powers, and his terrifying transformation into Magus, the dark sorcerer who terrorizes the world. The composition is organized into two contrasting movements, Premonition and Degeneration, which vary greatly in style, but are unified through a recurring 4-note “mystic motive.” There are also key quotations of Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and Prefatory Action within the piece, creating a bridge between the musical and programmatic content of all three works. The Forgotten Child of Zeal lasts approximately 22 minutes in performance.Part II of this dissertation is a theoretical paper that analyzes the pitch organization of the first movement of Alexander Nemtin’s realization of Scriabin’s unfinished masterpiece, Prefatory Action. Prefatory Action is a programmatic work written for orchestra, mixed choir, vocal soloists, and tastiera per luce (light keyboard), lasting roughly two and a half hours in length. The piece is divided into three massive movements entitled Universe, Humanity, and Transfiguration. Scriabin originally began writing Prefatory Action as a prelude to the Mysterium, which he envisioned as a divine musical ceremony that would transfigure the human race and end the universe. More than half a century later, Nemtin spent 26 years of his life completing the piece, using the literary text and musical sketches that Scriabin left behind as a guide. This paper is organized into six chapters – the first two chapters discuss the genesis of Prefatory Action and its subsequent realization, the middle two chapters explore Scriabin’s post-tonal style, and the final two chapters offer an in-depth analysis of Universe.

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s second piano sonata, op. 64, titled “Fire Sermon,” is a masterpiece of neo-Romantic piano writing. This treatise is meant as a performer’s and listener’s guide to the sonata. My analysis explores Rautavaara’s compositional techniques in this piece, especially his pervasive use of axes of symmetry, symmetrical scales, and a submerged tonal center. I also situate the piece within the macrotext of Rautavaara’s output for the piano, noting strong intertextual similarities across the piano works and detailing performance pragmatics for the use of pianists wanting to approach this music. My analysis then proceeds to discuss the title “Fire Sermon” and its implications, compiling and assessing the paratext of the composer’s brief statements and the relevant literary texts. I also present a possible program that I have discovered for the second movement of the sonata, in Rautavaara’s account of his early mystic experience on the way to the island of Valamo. Using this discovered program and structural analysis following the work of Robert S. Hatten, Michael L. Klein, and Byron Almén, I analyze the whole sonata as an overarching narrative structure. My narratological approach reads the sonata as a whole as a mystic narrative or as a cosmology.

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s second piano sonata, op. 64, titled “Fire Sermon,” is a masterpiece of neo-Romantic piano writing. This treatise is meant as a performer’s and listener’s guide to the sonata. My analysis explores Rautavaara’s compositional techniques in this piece, especially his pervasive use of axes of symmetry, symmetrical scales, and a submerged tonal center. I also situate the piece within the macrotext of Rautavaara’s output for the piano, noting strong intertextual similarities across the piano works and detailing performance pragmatics for the use of pianists wanting to approach this music. My analysis then proceeds to discuss the title “Fire Sermon” and its implications, compiling and assessing the paratext of the composer’s brief statements and the relevant literary texts. I also present a possible program that I have discovered for the second movement of the sonata, in Rautavaara’s account of his early mystic experience on the way to the island of Valamo. Using this discovered program and structural analysis following the work of Robert S. Hatten, Michael L. Klein, and Byron Almén, I analyze the whole sonata as an overarching narrative structure. My narratological approach reads the sonata as a whole as a mystic narrative or as a cosmology.

When discussing Alexander Scriabin’s music, it is impossible not to mention his expressionism, for it takes center stage. Especially, the piano sonata by Alexander Scriabin is an important genre that shows the development in his expressionism. Among his ten piano sonatas, the Fifth Sonata Op. 53 (1907) is unequivocally significant in that the work indicates Scriabin’s transition to his expressionist music. In his later piano sonatas, Scriabin explored and built more complex and highly individual styles, which are characterized by expressionism; however, according to the prevailing opinion among critics, it is difficult to say that the Fifth Sonata represents Scriabin’s matured expressionism. They claim that Scriabin’s expressionist phase begins with the Sixth Sonata, and the Fifth Sonata lacks the expressionist qualities found in Scriabin’s late sonatas. This dissertation will respond to this existing suggestion by comparing it with the following five late piano sonatas that has widely been considered as the expressionist music. Also, in order to show how expressionism comes to play itself in musical language of the sonatas, it will look at Scriabin’s four early sonatas prior to the Fifth Sonata that show the beginnings of expressionist languages. In the end, it will take into account the development of Scriabin’s expressionism focusing on the Fifth Sonata that is filled with the features of expressionism and it will assert that Scriabin’s expressionism already began in his Fifth Sonata.

A comparative analysis of the work of the composer Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915) and the graphic artist Nikolai Shperling (1881-1946) reveals that both men found inspiration in related sources. Resisting disciplinary boundaries throughout my research has enabled me to trace crosscurrents of influence in their work against the cultural and historical backdrop of the Russian Silver Age and developments in European Modernism more broadly. Further, examination of their contact with the Symbolist milieu has illuminated the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of their oeuvre and the spiritual motivation that lay behind it; given the markedly mystical approaches of both men, I have brought interdisciplinary scholarship to bear which looks at the intersection of esotericism and creativity and the underlying Theosophical context which unites them.

The Silver Age has long been considered one of the most vibrant artistic movements in Russian history. Due to sweeping changes that were occurring across Russia, culminating in the 1917 Revolution, the apocalyptic sentiments of the general populace caused many intellectuals and artists to turn towards esotericism and occult thought. With this, there was an increased interest in transcendentalism, and art was becoming much more abstract. The tenets of the Russian Symbolist movement epitomized this trend. Poets and philosophers, such as Vladimir Solovyov, Andrei Bely, and Vyacheslav Ivanov, theorized about the spiritual aspects of words and music. It was music, however, that was singled out as possessing transcendental properties.In recent decades, there has been a surge in scholarly work devoted to the transcendent strain in Russian Symbolism. The end of the Cold War has brought renewed interest in trying to understand such an enigmatic period in Russian culture. While much scholarship has been devoted to Symbolist poetry, there has been surprisingly very little work devoted to understanding how the soundscape of music works within the sphere of Symbolism. The question that arises is: what about music can be understood as transcendental? In the Symbolist journal Novyi Put’, Andrei Bely noted the piano compositions of Nikolai Medtner as being the perfect example of theurgy. Bely’s description of this, however, is extremely vague and our understanding of where theurgy lies in the compositional process is hard to grasp. The same ambiguity exists in making sense of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose music is reviewed prominently in Symbolist journals. A composer who tried deliberately to embody the spirit of Symbolism and theurgy in his music was Alexander Scriabin, who planned to compose a seven day long piece that was meant to actually summon the apocalypse. Due to his untimely death, this was a work that never came to fruition. Confusion over the musical construction of Scriabin’s late works, by musicians and scholars alike, is generally coupled with a sympathetic yet dismissive view of his own messianic and maniacal ideologies. The opaque sense of meaning surrounding musical transcendentalism in this repertoire has presented a considerable challenge not only for performers, but for scholars as well. Musicologists have spent a considerable amount of time on the formal aspects of this music, but have still been hesitant in deciphering its meaning. Literary scholars have been able to interpret some semblance of meaning in music described by Symbolist poets, but have not shown where this lies within the music. What is necessary in trying to understand the Symbolist concept of musical transcendentalism and theurgy is a study that attempts to take into account all facets of research. In this dissertation, I present a means by which to understand this music without compromising formal structure, cultural context, or performance.

The late œuvre of Alexander N. Scriabin (Op. 60–Op. 74, 1910–1914) constitutes one of the most intriguing and perplexing bodies of early twentieth-century music, with analytic and theoretic approaches toward this body of work ranging from the extendedly tonal to set-theoretic approaches that place this music as atonal or post-tonal. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate Scriabin’s late works as exemplifying an extendedly tonal idiom by constructing a fundamental bass theory that takes into account both transpositional symmetry and common-tone retention, and Scriabin’s idiosyncratic orthographic preferences. Chapter 2 surveys the literature of prominent theorists commenting on the preferential sonorities and collections of Scriabin’s late works, and examines various tonal and transformational relationships that obtain among these sonorities. Transpositional symmetry and common-tone retention is posited as the primary logic governing harmonic root motion. By invoking Rameau’s principle of root progression via the constituent intervals of a klang, Chapter 5 synthesizes these results with those of Chapter 3 to form a fundamental bass theory for the works of the late œuvre. By extending Cheong Wai Ling’s concept of the octatonic referent, Chapter 3 of this dissertation presents an idealized super-space summarizing Scriabin’s spelling practices: the chromatic referent, which subsumes spelling practices adopted on both surface level chord structures and deeper levels of chord-to-chord progression. Chapter 4 offers a mathematically formalized look into the properties of this chromatic referent, demonstrating its unique status within the space of over 354,294 distinct ways of notating a chromatic scale within our conventional notational system of thirty-five orthographically distinct notes. Chapter 5 outlines the fundamental bass theory, which elevates root motions by tritone, followed by motion by minor and major third, to the status of structural progressions. The orthographic preferences of the chromatic referent are shown to govern the later levels of chord-to-chord progression, and shown to extend as deeply as the total space of “keys” in which the late works are cast. Each of the late works is shown to compose-out a single referent root or tonic, with the large-scale structural progression typically articulating a tritone transposition to the raised-fourth scale degree. An extension of Rameau’s principle of interpolation is presented as a possible explanation for those cases in which such tritone related harmonies are spelled on lowered fifth scale degree roots, instead of the raised fourth scale degree predicted by the chromatic referent. Chapter 6 provides selected analyses of preludes, etudes, poems, and dances from the late œuvre by way of demonstrating the efficacy of the fundamental bass theory and its associated chromatic referent.

While piano teachers often assign Chopin Preludes, Op. 28 and students often want to learn various Rachmaninoff preludes, the Scriabin preludes offer an attractive alternative. This document serves as a pedagogical guide to Scriabin’s Twenty Four Preludes, Op. 11, and is intended for piano teachers of intermediate and advanced students who wish to introduce their students to Romantic Period literature using less traditional teaching materials. As a pedagogical guide, this document provides an overview of each prelude in the set, along with a discussion of the musical, interpretive and technical challenges presented by each prelude. A level of intermediate, late-intermediate, early-advanced or advanced is assigned to each prelude, while specific preludes from the set are suggested as potential alternatives to more standard pieces by Rachmaninoff and Chopin. A leveling chart is included to provide a quick reference for locating preludes at a specific skill level, or with specific technical or musical challenges.

This dissertation investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific context that allowed for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the European fin de siècle. In contrast to standard impressionistic accounts of the Inter-Arts, it foregrounds and examines the time's immensely popular synaesthetic metaphor, while culturally and formally analyzing interartistic works. This work surveys the diverse and heterogeneous discourses that engage with synaesthesia: the figurative mixing or conflation of sense-impressions, for instance, in the perception of sound as color. It shows that the synaesthetic metaphor, usually treated as a trite Modernist mannerism, not only epitomized the synthetic aspirations of the Modernist arts, but also invigorated the exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle by bridging aesthetic, scientific, and ethical discourses. As a nexus of controversial and fascinating cultural debates, synaesthesia acquired an intricate depth and complex resonance, which this dissertation examines by identifying synaesthetically informed fin-de-siècle cultural and scientific concepts (such as electricity and the phonograph) and using them as interpretative tools to analyze three specific interartistic sites of literary, artistic, and musical modernism. Chapter One shows how Oscar Wilde's Salomé overcomes its own language by turning to the senses, generates new extra-verbal life, both sensory and interartistic, and is transposed across the senses and the arts in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and Richard Strauss's opera. In the second chapter, this work examines Aleksandr Skriabin's synaesthetic symphony "Prometheus" and the Russian Symbolist poetics of mystical and electric light. The final chapter discusses the phenomenological synaesthetics of Rainer Maria Rilke's middle-period thing poems (Dinggedichte) and their involvement with the visual arts, by focusing on Rilke's fascination with Rodin. It then studies the development of Rilke's synaesthetic theory in his late "Sonnets to Orpheus." Figured as a synaesthetic and phono-graphic translation, Rilke's poetic act seeks both a primordial and a technologically motivated wholeness of sensory experience. Additionally, this work offers an online companion to the dissertation that makes all the musical examples playable: an important feature of the dissertation is its combining of musicological and literary analysis, as well as visual analysis. "Beautiful Colored, Musical Things" proposes a new way of conceptualizing early interartistic Modernism, by suggesting that the synaesthetic metaphor defines and motivates the interartistic exchanges at the fin de siècle. In its critical and methodological goals, this dissertation seeks to foster interdisciplinary exchange, and to overcome the limitations of discipline-bound criticism.

References to the music of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) abound in books and articles; dedicated analyses of the music, however, are somewhat rare. The most complete attempt at understanding Scriabin's musical style comes from the 1986 monograph by James M. Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin. Baker focuses on Scriabin's "transitional" period, employing a combination of the predominant methodologies of the day: Schenkerian analysis and set-theoretic analysis. This thesis proceeds from the same basic premise that Baker's book did over 20 years ago. That is, the balance of tonal and post-tonal elements in Scriabin's transitional music gradually shifts from primarily tonal motivations to primarily post-tonal motivations. In order to accomplish an examination of Scriabin's use of tonality along with a response to Baker's work, I analyze two preludes from early in his middle period, Prelude Op. 48, no. 4 (1905) and Prelude Op. 49, no. 2 (1905) through the perspective of Schenkerian analysis and contextual voice-leading analysis. This leads to my titular concept of "tonal mirages" whereby the appearance of tonality in a piece slowly fades as one gets closer to the piece's surface.