Alexander Nikolaievich Scriabin was born in Moscow on December 25th, 1871 (January 6th, 1872 in the 'New Style' calendar). He was an only child without his mother from age one. His father entered the Foreign Service, leaving Scriabin to be raised by his aunt and her mother and sister.

    He developed musically without interference, growing extremely fond of the piano and demonstrating the same capacity for improvising as Chopin. At the age of twelve he began studying seriously. He attended the Moscow Conservatory in 1888. He won a pianist's diploma in the Spring of 1891, but never received a composer's diploma. After some years of touring as pianist and composer, Scriabin was offered the post of professor of the piano at his Alma Mater in 1898. He reluctantly accepted, resigning in 1903.

   Some of Scriabin's musical and spiritual influences included Chopin, Wagner, Nietzsche and Liszt. The artist as hero or superhero, the feelings of grandeur - social, religious, and philosophical, were beginning to dominate his mind. He began searching for new ways of expressing his feelings and thoughts. Theosophy provided many ideas for Scriabin to validate his own concepts.

    Marriage, children, touring, and composing became life for Scriabin after 1903. In 1909, Scriabin spoke frequently of 'the transforming role of art in the world'. Pieces began to lose their Italian markings such as Allegro and were replaced with ambiguous directions like 'Mysterious breath' or 'Caressing wave'. The piano pieces from 1910 (Opp. 58-59), marked the introduction of systematical harmonic procedures and overripe, rich music. Symbolism and philosophy became inextricable from art and the Universe. His music was now considered magical, transcendental - attempting to convey truths beyond man's material scope of comprehension. The endless play of creative spirit and the ecstasy that follows became a tremendous preoccupation for Scriabin along with Eastern Mysticism. Also of importance were the inter-relationships of the arts - particularly light and sound. Scriabin's music became increasingly more 'visual'. Gestures became more pronounced and had greater iconographical meaning. Dance was also gaining importance with its connection to ecstasy or nirvana.

    His symphonic works from the time include the Poem of Ecstasy and the Poem of Fire (Prometheus). Prometheus introduces the new 'stable' harmony - a chord based essentially on the first eleven partials of the overtone series. Voiced in fourths, this 'mystic' chord is spelled C-F#-B flat-E-A-D. All four chord qualities are possible from this collection. The interlocking tritones (the first four notes) become almost essential for the remainder of Scriabin's life. The scale possibilities include the 'acoustic' mode of Debussy, the whole-tone scale, and the octatonic scale. All harmonic motion and melodic material was derived from this harmony or subtle chromatic variants of it. In modern Jazz notation, this can be understood as a fully extended dominant-thirteenth chord. The tritone root motion also resembles the 'tritone substitution' common in Jazz harmonic procedures. In Classical terms, what is tonic for common practice becomes dominant in Scriabin; and what is dominant becomes 'departure dominant'. Non-chord tones are still treated as such and are 'resolved'. In addition to tritones, the root motion consists mainly of major and minor thirds, all of which divide the octave equally. His systematic approach and his treatment of all twelve notes as equal, as well as his apparent break from tonality as it was known, predates Schoenberg's serial dodecaphonicism by almost a decade.

    From 1908 until the end of his life in 1915, the cosmic, symbolic, and transcendent consumed him and his ego. He believed that he was coming ever closer to the Mystery (which is faintly audible in the last works). He also saw himself as a Prometheus of sorts - for he was the bringer of this new, unique, and seemingly vital music. The Mysterium, something like an opera for which he only left sketches behind, was to be a great cosmic event in which all the arts, together with all of mankind gathered in a great glass globe somewhere in the Himalayas, would come together in a great ecstatic frenzy of music, sights, smells, and dance - marking the next 'Manvantara' or 'life-cycle'. Mankind loses his material body and evolves to the next plane of existence as pure spirit. He envisioned his music as a prelude and catalyst.

    Whether or not one agrees with his concepts and visions, the transformation of his compositional voice that takes place is intriguing. Even in the early and middle works, the affinity with extended dominant harmonies in open voicings is apparent. The dissolution of the triad as tonic in a piece begins in the 5th Piano Sonata, Op.53, the last work to bear a key signature. The suspended, uplifting, and questioning affects of dominant sonorities are expanded and lengthened and heightened into a new world of their own. The languorous, the ecstatic, the diabolical, and the ephemeral - all interplay in a musico-symbolical representation of the creative forces of the universe in motion.