Alexander Scriabin' s Mysterium

Alexander Scriabin

Alex Ross writes in The Rest is Noise, maybe the best book about music ever written, about the daring reexamination of the chord in orchestral music at the dawn of the twentieth century and has this to say about Scriabin:

In Russia, the composer-pianist Alexander Scriabin , who was under the influence of Theosophist spiritualism, devised a harmonic language that vibrated around a "mystic chord" of six notes; hi unfinished magnum opus Mysterium, slated for a premiere at the foot of the Himalayas, was to have brought about nothing less than the annihilation of the universe, whence men and women would reemerge as astral souls, relieved of sexual difference and other bodily limitations.

That I need to hear! Forget a bunch of church burning Tolkein-enthusiast Norwegian metal nihilists; their corpse paint and weapon-festooned photo shoots cannot hold a candle to Scriabin's aims.

At the foot of the Himalayas! Puts old Yanni, flashing lights on the Acropolis, to shame.

Scriabin experienced synesthesia, a condition where experiences in one sense trigger an effect in another, most commonly portrayed as seeing colors when music plays. According to Wikipedia, creating a full spectrum transmogrification was the goal of his final piece:

Scriabin planned that the work would be synesthetic, exploiting the senses of smell and touch as well as hearing. He wrote that

"There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."

Scriabin intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by "nobler beings".

Scriabin began work on this piece in 1903, and it remained unfinished at his death in 1915, but click here to experience that chord, if you dare bring about the imminent destruction of all humanity with its playing, that is.

The poem of ecstasy

Mural above Mulate's. The poem of ecstasy that was this weekend is best told in pictures.

Norman Mailer, An American Dream
Josh Alan Friedman, Black Cracker
Gloria Coates, String Quartet No. 9
Roberto Carlos Lange, Music for Memory
Beatrice Long, Scriabin: Mazurkas (Complete)
Scriabin, The Poem of Ecstasy
Konstantin Ivanov, Scriabin: Prometheus - The Poem of Fire
Paul Crossley, Scriabin: Late Piano Pieces




Friday night I took Maya and a friend to the observatory to look at Jupiter during its closest pass in 60 years. The astronomer let them press the buttons that open the hatch. When I win the lotto, I want to live in the observatory and will still open it up on the weekends for viewings and science, but we will have DJ's laying down retro-future space grooves under the lectures from the astronomy club.


Saturday morning brought me to my buddy John and the first tailgate breakfast of the season: Nicaraguan cross-cut ribs. Like across the slab with a bone saw. It is like bacon except it is ribs. You don't even know how existentially satisfying it is to gnaw away on one of those little circles of bone.


I left before this came to fruition: a pork butt marinated in lemon, soy sauce and Cristal, wrapped in banana leaves. We suggested that next time they further tenderize it by having a virgin use it as a loofah, a bodybuilder as a "surrogate" and Mike the Tiger a chew toy. Maya and I didn't attend the game because we usually don't and were full of meat.


Things started changing around here on Sunday.


Sunday afternoon's book research led me to High Performance at the Atchafalaya Club. High Performance recaptures the essence dance bands of the 60's where accordion meets pedal steel out in the lotus patches of the swamp hopped up on cheap beer and fishin' boat fumes. Video forthcoming.


It is kinda gorgeous out there. Even the wake of a small boat is  transcendent.




And they have a gator pond.


And a lighthouse.


I had another show lined up in Lafayette but had the time wrong, so I circled back down the old road to Breaux Bridge, looking for this fabled place called Desiree's Shangri-La and instead wound up at good ol' Mulate's


Note the cypress columns


the seafood gumbo


and the ubiquitous swamp mural. Mulate's is spoke of as the original Cajun restaurant and has been a landmark of Breaux Bridge for decades. It's been at least one of those decades since I've been there; it was closed for a long stretch after a fire but has been restored to its homey glory.


Everybody stops there.


I hollered at Dickie Landry to see if he wanted to tag along but his pan-Louisiana supergroup (in every sense of the word) Lil' Band O' Gold heads out for a New Zealand tour this morning.

On the way home, I got stuck in traffic heading toward the bridge and the bridge untethers some sort of nervousness in me. Normally I don't wallow in the what-if's of others' competencies that plague the average control freak, but I like to just get across this bridge without dying each time, TYVM, and snailing across it in the dark of night  is rattling. Somehow Scriabin's crazy ass countered all this, so I am tacking in his wind for the day.

bringers of fire

I've been thinking about Scriabin again. His troubled but tranquil Prometheus: The Poem of Fire features the usual dense conflicted piano work that is the composer's hallmark, lost in a dark wood provided by the pocket orchestra. It is a rewarding listen, but the real instrument of interest is one you can't hear - a Chromola, or color organ, an electromechanical devise to project lights on a screen in accompaniment of the music. Scriabin unfortunately never got to see the final product in action: the light projector failed during a 1911 Moscow performance.

A technically successful performance of this piece using a color organ operated by Preston Millar took place in New York in 1915 - check out this NY Times article from March 28 of that year their archives. A trial run of the color organ was conducted a few weeks before at a small theatre (with actress Isadora Duncan in attendance) but Mr. Millar was dismayed that he could not find a theatre suitable to to stage the full synthesis of color and music that he saw for the piece. "We had to fall back on Carnegie Hall, and even there we were limited to four feet of stage at the back of the platform on which to set up our apparatus." Unfortunately Scriabin, did not attend this limited realization of his vision, and died from septicemia two weeks later on April 27, 1915 in Moscow.

Coincidentally, I just got an assignment to cover Noize Fest this Sunday in New Orleans, a homespun avant garde festival running concurrent to the behemoth of Jazzfest in a guy's back yard. Here a number of fringe musicians will be pulling out their bags of tricks, igniting the air with feats of rouge technology - there will be a circuit-bending booth where instruments and noise makers will be modified on site to realize some of this music - and individual expression. It is not difficult to find parallels in the vision of Scriabin and the ambitions of these musicians.

Noize Fest begins at noon at the home of Michael Patrick Welch (of one mand soul/racket onslaught the White Bitch, more info at his MySpace page) at 609 Lesseps St. Bring your fresh ideas, busted instruments, and maybe some kibble for his pet goat which will be roaming the yard. Oh, and if anyone has a working 1915 light organ, I'm sure some set up for its enjoyment will be enthusiastically arranged.

going up

John Coltrane - Ascension (Editions I and II) (listen) The transmigration of the soul into the heavens is likely a harrowing process, like some metaphysical trauma akin to birth in reverse, and instead of sounding like a twinkling harp as you float through clouds in a really nice bathrobe, like the kind I expect Diddy has in his guest bathroom, it instead is the atomic tearing-apart punctuated by fevered bliss that occurs on this record.
John Bell Young - Prisms (listen) Yesterday on a whim I started looking up things about Alexander Scriabin's Mysterium again. Mysterium was a monumental 7-day-long orchestral work Scriabin wanted to stage at the foot of the Himalayas, at the end of which the world would be destroyed and the nobler phase of being would begin. I came across this (HTML version of a doc) about a mountain climber that took a flag depicting this album of Scriabin works up an unclimbed Himalayan peak as a means of partially fulfilling Scriabin's vision. The jury is still out as to whether we are in receipt of cosmic ennobling ensuing from this act or not.

Sisyphus longing for the stone

Rhys Chatham - Guitar Trio is My Life!
Chatham's Guitar trio is a compelling piece of rock-meets composition - a one-note riff is established and embelleshed upon for 20 minutes over a rock drumbeat, building and complicating until it fills all the spaces. This 3CD set captures 10 of these performances, all seemingly similar in tone and intensity. At first adhering to my tendency toward song endurance tests I was determined to listen to all of them, but that is like Sisyphus longing for the stone when he should be enjoying the downtime.

James Blackshaw - Litany of Echoes
This disc bridges the rigor of Chatham's cheeky minimalist aggression and the new agey-er sides of the Takoma guitarists (John Fahey, Robbie Basho, young Leo Kottke) without falling into the traps of either direction. This album is lush and lovely, almost Hollywood swell at points, but ultimately smart for music so occassionaly breathless.

J.S. Bach - Complete Lute Suites, performed by Sharon Isbin
Um... the instant win Rhapsody has over Yahoo! Music which it is replacing is that Rhapsody has classical music up in its catalog. I don't really listen to as much classical as I did in my college years, where 20th century composers was nearly all I listened to for a while, but man, it is nice to have it at a click's reach.

Alexander Scriabin - Late Piano Pieces, performed by Paul Crossley
Like this. Ever since reading about his Mysterium, I've wanted to know more about Scriabin. The pieces here are dreams for piano, in that melodies twist and cavort under their own obscured logic, each connection from note to note makes perfect sense, obvious sense even, but the full twist of this river is determined by darker sources. This music might make perfect sense on cough syrup, perhaps some enterprising and hip Houston music student could craft a "chopped and screwed" Scriabin and open up that black hole of destruction he wanted to invoke with Mysterium at the foot of the Himalayas.

Morton Feldman - The Viola in My Life, parts I-IV
This seemed a fitting full-circle to Ryhs Chatham. Like most of Feldman's pieces, The Viola in My Life is long and unfathomably spare - small tight events happen in the distance: a cluster on the piano, a whinny from the strings, a sigh from the woodwinds, a feather rustling a cymbal somewhere out there in the gray-green fog.

Still though, Feldman's misty moor is a sentimental plane where one slowly pulls apart the machinations of love and remorse and the passing of time, holding each gear and belt up to the dim light for examination. I'm not sure if I know anything new after listening to Morton Feldman, but I feel like I know what I already did know a little better.

ghost jazz

Alexander Scriabin - Piano Concerto in F Sharp Minor
After all the grand finger-on-the-button gestures presented by Scriabin in my previous post, this piano concerto, finds our world-crusher in a state of dizzying sentimentality, the piano nearly sighing in the higher registers while occasionally a low note will thud through against orchestration that acts as an overtone, an atmospheric projection of the artist's mild melancholy, perhaps like those mists he wanted to alter the architectural perception of his doomsday concert hall.

I am on a mission to seek out a recording of Mysterium.

Mississippi John Hurt - Today!
I am a huge fan of the archival Avalon Blues recorded back in the 1920's, so much that I needlessly eschew his rediscovery recordings from the 1960s, but Today! has changed my mind. So clear a babble doth issue forth from his brook, the bass strings of his guitar resonating the whole house. I know John Fahey saw Hurt as a fountainhead, but I will conject that old Nick Drake had been listening to some Hurt as he set about creating Pink Moon. Influence apart, though, Mississippi John Hurt remains one of the more listenable old blues artists - I don't ever feel that twinge of "I am enjoying the Blues" pretension when I throw him on.

Sidney Bichet - Jam Session
I am not a huge fan of Sidney Bichet and that early era of New Orleans Jazz, sure I appreciate it but a little goes a long way. I picked this up at the library and it sat on my desk unplayed until I set to clean off the desk, returning it to the library being a procrastination tactic in the cleaning process. I popped it in the car stereo just cuz and wow, what a weird, stunning record.

I'm not familiar with Bichet's recorded output to know if this is the norm, but his clarinet had a haunted echo to it, as if it was emanating from behind a doorway at the far end of a darkened hall, while the hushed band sat i the room with you, trying to play along without letting their presence known. I played around with the fade/tone settings on the car stereo, thinking that maybe something had been set haywire, but no - straight-up old-time ghost jazz.

Maya and I spent the day tooling around New Orleans yesterday, with Sidney's phantom woodwind offering a pleasing counterpoint to the Essence music festival crowds, the ubiquitous backup on the highway, and the essay I have been commissioned to write about Baton Rouge post Katrina, how it became the city it always feared becoming when the population of the city came to the next safe place. I always think of that when I pull off the Tchopatoulas exit and wind up in front of the convention center, the tragic stage where grandmas starved and people begged for help to CNN's cameras. Those same red bricks are still there, the same ones upon which that some girlfriend and I had a big fight two decades ago, the same ones that paved the 1984 World's Fair where I was allowed to roam on my own in New Orleans for the first time. Yesterday, it was filled to the R&B fans in all their finery, elaborate hairdos slowly collapsing in the heat like they have there for 200 years.

an elaborate scheme to take a bunch of people to a chicken place

There are so many wondrous things in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art but among my favorite pieces are these windows looking on New Orleans' warehouse district plus the view of old lonely General Lee from the roof terrace.

Tuesday:
Gavriel Lipkind, Ligeti: Sonata for Cello Solo
Irina Feokistova, Poems & Fairy Tales: Piano Music by Medtner & Scriabin
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones



Friday afternoon, I went down to New Orleans with colleagues and students for a meeting and some world famous fried chicken at Willie Mae's. The chicken is even better than you think it might be. To our credit, we managed to have a meaningful after-the-meeting meeting over such a bounty. I like these people.

Wednesday:
Grizzly Bear, Shields
Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise
Julia Rovinsky, Dark (This album is so good)

This group is working on a year-long project about the Times-Picayune and this little trip was about gaining perspective on a place with which we all believe we are familiar. Also, it was an elaborate scheme  to take a bunch of people to a chicken place I've always wanted to go to, to see if my perspective lines up with other people's. My whole career is such a scheme. It is like sighting a rifle; you keep shooting until your crosshairs lines up with where the bullet falls.

Thursday:
Dinosaur Jr., I Bet on Sky
Crimewave, "Useless"/"Disillusion"
edo., Raw



The Ogden was after the after-the-meeting meeting. By the way, Tav Falco is showing some of his films at the Ogden on Oct. 4, 2012 and then performing with the Unstoppable Panther Burns there on Oct. 5. You should go.

Friday:
WWOZ
Rammbock: Berlin Undead


The street outside Willie Mae's

And now I am in the writing-about-it phase of the trip, the project, the chicken and everything, and the perspective is skewed. The lines cross and the vanishing points are never where you think they should be. The bullets could hit anywhere. Those windows at the Ogden work like that, completing a museum's mission of framing a world in the context of a single thing so that something universal can emerge.

Saturday:
Fugazi, End Hits
Erik Satie, Musique D'Ameublement
Eric Satie, "L'Inconnu d'Arcueil"

Satie's Musique D'Ameublement (Furniture Music)

It's like Satie's world of familiar wonder in his Furniture Music; how the melody is subdued and repeated and processed so that life can go on above, whether in dissonance, in counterpoint or just by singing along.  Excessive platitude generation is the warning light for procrastination, so I'm going to get to work now. 

I love

Stereolab, Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements

I love Rhapsody + iPhone + 3G + car stereo aux input + my car + its sunroof + the crack of spring. I love Stereolab for still being around for nearly two decades, ever evolving and yet still kinda being the same band the ground out "Jenny Ondioline." I love their unabashed Frenchness, their icy Socialist flair. I love that they love Velvet Underground so much that they created themselves in their image. I love how indebted they are to that sound. I love how the hip hop booming from the cars around me at the car wash all owed Dr. Dre a wet 'n' sloppy. I love this letter someone supposedly found where Dr. Dre made a mental note to "make some loot off these fools" at Burning Man. I love the idea that he did it, even if he didn't.


I love this song. 

I love my wife, all the way. More than I love all these things. I don't talk about her all that much here because the things I talk about here are trivial, fleeting, butterflies-in-nets, and she is bigger and more than all of that.

I love the reproduction of "Sunflowers" sitting in a neighbor's driveway and the box of paperbacks upon which it was leaning. I love that Stereolab album again, and I love the Lou Reed they love. I love that  @JackPendarvis was driving away twitter followers with Rigoletto jokes.  I love this little passage from one of Lester Bangs' zillion interviews with Lou Reed that I happened to read this morning:

I got eight hundred albums in the can just in case. There's all sorts of stuff, like one is I rewrote my own version of Rigoletto, you know the opera by Scriabin, except it's set in this Puetro Rican leather bar where all the customers are amputated at the thigh and rolling around on these little carts on wheels. They keep trying to have punchouts, except the carts keep bumping and they can't reach each other. So they got very frustrated. I sang all the parts myself, and I stole all the lyrics off old "Lucas Tanner" dialogue, but nobody will notice the difference because I made the music salsa and it's so fucking loud you can't hear any of the words. I'm not gonna put that out just yet. They'll have to wait for that.

I love how things tie together.