Voice-Leading Parsimony in the Music of Alexander Scriabin

Abstract

Discussions of pitch structure in Scriabin's later oeuvre typically take as their point of departure a description of the mystic chord, a member of set class 6-34. Dahlhaus (1987) describes this chord as a dominant ninth with a flat fifth and an added sixth, whereas others, including Leonid Sabaneyeff (Taruskin 1997, 342), have considered the chord to be generated by the harmonic series, specifically the seventh through thirteenth partials omitting the twelfth. However, since the former supposes a tonal context and the latter ignores context altogether, neither of these descriptions accounts for how this chord is employed in a non-tonal language. A second limitation is that the mystic chord is not the only sonority encountered in Scriabin's music. Instead, there are numerous collections, each of which is closely related to the others by slight alterations of set content. In order to understand the close relation of these collections and their usefulness for Scriabin, it is necessary to determine the properties which bind these collections together, rather than to simply provide an aural description of each collection taken in isolation. The most prominent pitch-class collections in Scriabin's later works are shown in Figure 1. Figure lb reproduces the mystic chord in scalar form. Figures la and Ic share a similar relation to Figure lb. Lowering the A of Figure lb by a half-step to Ab while holding the remaining five

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