Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire

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Contents: Introduction: Skryabin, philosophy and the music of desire
Desire, creativity and gender polarity in the compositional explosion of 1903
The hidden breakdown of masculinity: an appointment with Sister Death
Towards the flame: panpsychism, theosophy and hyper-subjectivity
An incorrigible mystic? Skryabin the dialectical materialist, Lacan's 'graph of desire' and Le Poeme de l'extase
Level IV: the real drive and Skryabin's mystic 'chora'
Bibliography
Index.

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Commentary on Skryabin has struggled to situate an understanding of the composer's music within his idiosyncratic philosophical world views. Early commentators' efforts to do so failed to establish a thorough or systematic approach. And later twentieth-century studies turned away from the composer's ideology, focusing instead on 'the music itself' with an analytic approach that scrutinized Skryabin's harmonic language in isolation from his philosophy. This groundbreaking study revisits the questions surrounding the composer's music within his own philosophy, but draws on new methodological tools, casting Skryabin's music in the light not only of his own philosophy of desire, but of more refined semiotic-psychoanalytical theory and modern techniques of music analysis. An interdisciplinary methodology corrects the narrow focus of Skryabin scholarship of the last century, offering insights from New Musicology and recent music theory that lead to hermeneutical, critically informed readings of selected works.

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Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association

Kenneth Smith superbly brings together philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches to Scriabin's music. ... It is an important book for a music scholar or a performer alike who wants to truly understand the multidimensional spectrum of Scriabin's music

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