Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is well known as a composer for his inventive tonal language and as a performer for his approach to rubato. As is evident through his piano roll recordings, Scriabin's pianism epitomizes the performance practice of the early twentieth century and raises significant issues for the modern interpreter of Scriabin’s scores.
The diversity in Scriabin's compositional style has prompted a variety of analytic approaches. Chapter one surveys Scriabin’s stylistic development in terms of his piano music and explores relevant analytic and interpretive approaches. Chapter two explores Scriabin's pianism as described by his close friends, pupils, and critics of the time. These reports characterize Scriabin's playing as rhythmically flexible, sensitive to different layers of voicing, and subtle in its dynamic nuances. In Chapter three, the two central topics of the dissertation—rubato and climax—are explored in general and in relation to Scriabin’s music. In Scriabin’s early piano music the indication for rubato correlates with a specific melodic contour, and the broader connection between rubato and melodic contour is explored. The study of climax draws on Austin T. Patty’s theory of pacing, in which climaxes of different types arise through different handling of various musical parameters. The musical components of Scriabin’s climaxes evolve during his output. Chapters four and five examine the Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 30, and Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70, respectively. These case studies provide a formal-thematic overview of each work, consider the use of rubato and the handling of climaxes with respect to the theoretical frameworks established in Chapter three, and assess performance choices with reference to several recorded performances.
This dissertation provides an alternative outlook to the performance of Scriabin's music. Tempo graphs reveal the pacing between phrases and sections and permit comparisons among artists from different generations. The recordings surveyed for both sonatas indicate that the flexibility in timing within individual phrases or thematic sections is much greater in the earlier recordings compared to more recent ones, as is the degree of tempo contrast between slow and fast sections.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35791 |
| Date | 02 August 2013 |
| Creators | Chiang, Emily Chia-Lin |
| Contributors | McClelland, Ryan |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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