Book cover placeholder

Copyright

Rajan Lal

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-862-6
Hardback978-1-80511-863-3
PDF978-1-80511-864-0
HTML978-1-80511-866-4
EPUB978-1-80511-865-7

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • AV
  • AVA
  • AVN
  • 3MN
  • 3MP

BISAC

  • MUS000000
  • MUS007000
  • MUS006000
  • MUS020000

Keywords

  • Alexander Scriabin
  • Music Analysis
  • Musical Set-Theory

    Scriabin’s Late Works and the Holy Grail of Music Analysis

    FORTHCOMING
    This book offers a bold and original music-analytical and music-theoretical account of the late works of Alexander Scriabin, a composer whose harmonic language has long been regarded as one of the most elusive problems in music theory. Often described as a ‘Holy Grail’ of analysis, Scriabin’s late style has resisted clear explanation across generations of scholars. Rajan Lal confronts this challenge directly, proposing an integrated analytical framework that bridges the long-standing divide between the field’s tonal and post-tonal theoretical pillars.

    At the heart of the study is the concept of Scalar Quality, introduced here as a foundational property of Scriabin’s late musical vernacular. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary analytical systems, the book synthesizes diverse theoretical tools into a coherent approach that is both technically rigorous and musically grounded. Through detailed close readings of major late works—many of which have proven especially difficult to analyze—the book demonstrates how this new framework can clarify harmonic structures while remaining attentive to musical surface, historical context, and aural experience.

    While profoundly theoretical, the text is notable for its lucid, engaging prose and its sensitivity to the listener’s perspective. Analytical precision is balanced with interpretive insight, and hermeneutic considerations enrich the technical discussions throughout. Beyond Scriabin studies, the theory of Scalar Quality developed herein opens broader possibilities for understanding harmony across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering tools relevant to composers practicing highly diverse musical languages.

    Aimed at advanced students, professional music theorists, and dedicated Scriabin scholars and performers, this book represents a significant contribution to contemporary music theory and promises to become a frequently cited reference in future scholarship.

    Endorsements

    Rajan Lal has proposed a compelling new theoretical framework for understanding Scriabin's mature musical language, one that aligns with a listener's intuitions and promises fruitful new avenues for the analysis of other post-tonal musical styles.

    Matthew Bengtson

    University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance

    Contributors

    Rajan Lal

    (author)
    Title A Fellow at Trinity College at University of Cambridge
    https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9862-3824

    Rajan Lal is a Title A Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed all his degrees at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, before winning his current fellowship with a Ph.D. thesis on Scriabin, supervised by Nicholas Marston and advised by Paul Wingfield. Rajan’s research is published/forthcoming in Music Analysis (twice), the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music Theory Online, and in OUP’s Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, Vol. 4. He is the author of Webern's Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style (forthcoming as an RMA monograph), and is presently writing Aggregating Modernism: Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, 1907–1915. Rajan has taught across all year groups on the Cambridge Music Tripos, and is an elected trustee of the Society for Music Analysis.