I-1　Cheong, Wai-Ling（東日本支部）

Metric and Rhythmic Novelty in Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas

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Questions of metre and rhythm in Scriabin’s music have drawn far less critical attention when compared to pitch organisation. Lincoln Ballard and Matthew Bengtson helped fill this gap by devoting a chapter to rhythm in The Alexander Scriabin Companion (2017). Their inquiry is, however, primarily about practical performance issues. While Scriabin was constrained by the staff notation to convey what he envisioned, his music is exceptionally rich in rhythmic novelty. A deliberate distortion of what the metric notation system prescribes is evidently at work in tandem with the paradox of motion within non-motion invoked by what Carl Dahlhaus (1987) refers to as Scriabin’s chord-centre technique, which rhythmically activates the constituent notes of his “mystic” and a host of other fascinating chords over prolonged time-spans.

An abrupt change from the exclusive use of one time signature to frequent changes within a movement or a complete sonata characterizes Scriabin’s ten Piano Sonatas. It happened almost overnight from the Fifth Sonata onward. Concomitantly, quintuple time, together with the superimposition of conflicting time signatures, appears in the Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Sonatas. Scriabin never gave up on the time signatures, and yet much of his late works strike us as anything but metrical. This prompts the question of how metre is realized or frustrated in Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, and whether the levels of realization or frustration evolve alongside changes in pitch organisation. This paper brings current theoretical studies of metre and rhythm, including such important distinctions as “notated” versus “aural” metre and “divisive” versus “additive” rhythm, to bear on an unprecedented critical inquiry into the metric and rhythmic novelty in Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas.