Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Part 1 Composers
- 1 Beethoven's Game of Cat and Mouse
- 2 Schubert's Pendulum
- 3 Paganini, Mendelssohn and Turner in Scotland
- 4 Berlioz and Schumann
- 5 Alkan's Instruments
- 6 Liszt the Conductor
- 7 Wolf's Wagner
- 8 Massenet's Craftsmanship
- 9 Skryabin's Conquest of Time
- 10 Janáček's Narratives
- Part 2 Themes
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
9 - Skryabin's Conquest of Time
from Part 1 - Composers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Part 1 Composers
- 1 Beethoven's Game of Cat and Mouse
- 2 Schubert's Pendulum
- 3 Paganini, Mendelssohn and Turner in Scotland
- 4 Berlioz and Schumann
- 5 Alkan's Instruments
- 6 Liszt the Conductor
- 7 Wolf's Wagner
- 8 Massenet's Craftsmanship
- 9 Skryabin's Conquest of Time
- 10 Janáček's Narratives
- Part 2 Themes
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
There is an aspect of Skryabin's music that seems to pervade it at many levels—rhythmic, harmonic and theoretical. His sense of time, his use of the dimension of time in its many manifestations, is unique, and I believe that to isolate this aspect of his work is to find an understanding of its unusual and extraordinary quality. Time, as measured by the clock, played no part in Skryabin's consciousness and he did all he could to overcome its effects; his goal was the ultimate conquest of time in order to reach a world where the successive, forward-moving element ceased to appertain. This was, in a sense, contrary to one of music's most fundamental characteristics, but this bold denial of an elemental dimension in music was a characteristic achievement of a composer who was never afraid to be more modern and more progressive than his contemporaries. To claim that Skryabin ‘conquered’ time is perhaps inexact, but both in large and small matters we perceive that his music did not respond on the temporal level in a conventional way. Yet time is treated consistently throughout his music, even though his style developed more radically and rapidly than that of any composer of his generation. His treatment of rhythm in his early works has something in common with his treatment of form in his later works, and that common element is a resistance to the normal forward movement of time that amounts ultimately to a denial of time itself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beethoven's CenturyEssays on Composers and Themes, pp. 101 - 107Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008