Artist description On this site pianist JOHN BELL YOUNG performs works of Alexander Scriabin. This site is currently under development, and will eventually serve as a forum not only for the music of Scriabin -- including some extremely unusual and not before published or recorded works (including Alexander Nemtin's "completion" of Scriabin's unfinished opera "Keistut and Birute"), but as a source of information, for students and scholars alike, about the composer and his unusual aesthetic universe. For more recordings by John Bell Young, go to mp3.com/johnbellyoung.com

Music Style Classical

Musical Influences Chopin, Tanyeev

Similar Artists N/A

Artist History From: SCRIABIN DEFENDED AGAINST HIS DEVOTEES. By JOHN BELL YOUNGIf anything has compromised the reputation of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) in the west, leading to one interpretive misunderstanding after the other, it is hardly the pristine construction and highly charged character of his music. Perhaps in an effort to exploit popular interest, the media and superficial biographical treatments have blown Scriabin's embrace of mysticism out of all proportion. His fascination with color, light, sex and spirituality, together with his determination to use music as a means to transcend reality, appealed to the turbulent political climate of change that blew across the cold war era. It also appealed enormously to the escapist, psychedelic populist mentality of the 1960s. Scriabin became a kind of guru to music devotees, disenchanted by the status quo and eager to explore, as he did, the potential of the senses as a means to artistic (and thus spiritual) enlightenment. But Scriabin was a spiritual creature. He embraced an aesthetic informed by the so called "mystical anarchists" and symbolists of Russia's Silver age (who included the poets Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov and the painter Kandinsky) and their celebrated Doctrine of Correspondences. Even his reported synesthesia --a neurological condition wherein the senses go all ajumble and short circuit perception, thus "translating" the acoustical properties of music into vivid colors or odors -- has been misinterpreted. Scriabin was no synaesthete, as his most famous apologists claim, but an artist who embraced the aesthetic metaphors popular with the intelligentsia of the day. Synesthesia was a badge of intellectual honor, a vote of confidence in the values of his contemporaries, and above all, a symbolic gesture of his faith in its procedures and ideology. Scriabin attempted to codify his mystical beliefs in sound, inventing an unusual harmonic (and rhythmic) language that relied on a kind of decentralized, perpetually shifting hierarchy of chordal and scale structures. These remain exotic even to late 20th century ears. A devotee of the Vedanta philosophy of the Hindus and Madame Blavatsky's eclectic interpretation of it, Scriabin strove not only to reproduce, but to actually duplicate the notion of ego transcendence. This he did by exploding conventional expectations of resolution and dynamic tension, but in the context of enormously dense contrapuntal textures that weave and hemorrhage in and out of each other like streams of smoke in chill air. The implicitly erotic, and overtly sexual element in his music proceeds from spiritual issues. The entire notion of transfiguration of man into a higher being of absolute consciousness saturates every moment of Scriabin's mature works: the idea of conflagration and apocalypse had been a core myth of Russian Christian Orthodoxy for centuries. Scriabin's never completed last works, the Mysterium and the Prefatory Action were intended to embody the apocalypse as they united the collective consciousness and obliterated time as we know it. Though Scriabin owed no overt debt either to Russian folk music, nor to ancient liturgical chant, he nevertheless shared a certain camaraderie of intent with those genres: the ceremonial elements of his late works, strove to dissolve the barriers between being and non-being, between activity and nature, between man and God. To rescue Scriabin from the oblivion, performances of his works must bring to life the droning intonations and obscure cadential prolongations his music shares with the undulating rhythms of Russian prayer. The interpreter's job is to illuminate those hypnotic moments that allude to liturgical recitation and underlie the ideology they share with the ceremonial functions of religious ritual. The performer must also satisfy the procreative impulse, so deftly suggested by the music itself: harnessing the forces of musical tension with breathless intensity, Scriabin indulges whole sequences of truncated climaxes with cumulative rhythmic energy that simulates orgasm. The dialectic between performer and composition thus fathomed, corporeal union is symbolically projected.Copyright 1999

Albums PRISMS (www.americuscd.com)

Location Moscow, Russia - Russia

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