page_title: Alexander Scriabin
section_title: Third period (1907–15)
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Scriabin / Music / Third period (1907–15)
caption_attribution_description: English: Acoustic and octatonic scales in Scriabin's 3rd period
context_page_description: Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin, who was influenced early in his life by the works of Frédéric Chopin, composed works that are characterised by a highly tonal idiom. Later in his career, independently of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical system, which accorded with his personal brand of mysticism. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer.
  Scriabin was one of the most innovative and most controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin had a major impact on the music world over time, and influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol Szymanowski.
context_section_description: According to Samson, while the sonata-form of Scriabin's Sonata No. 5 has some meaning to the work's tonal structure, in his Sonata No. 6 and Sonata No. 7 formal tensions are created by the absence of harmonic contrast and "between the cumulative momentum of the music, usually achieved by textural rather than harmonic means, and the formal constraints of the tripartite mould". He also argues that the Poem of Ecstasy and Vers la flamme "find a much happier co-operation of 'form' and 'content'" and that later sonatas, such as No. 9, employ a more flexible sonata-form.
  According to Claude Herdon, in Scriabin's late music "tonality has been attenuated to the point of virtual extinction, although dominant sevenths, which are among the strongest indicators of tonality, preponderate. The progression of their roots in minor thirds or diminished fifths [...] dissipate the suggested tonality."
  Varvara Dernova argues that "The tonic continued to exist, and, if necessary, the composer could employ it [...] but in the great majority of cases, he preferred the concept of a tonic in distant perspective, so to speak, rather than the actually sounding tonic [...] The relationship of the tonic and dominant functions in Scriabin's work is changed radically; for the dominant actually appears and has a varied structure, while the tonic exists only as if in the imagination of the composer, the performer, and the listener."
  Most of the music of this period is built on the acoustic and octatonic scales, as well as the nine-note scale resulting from their combination.
caption: The acoustic and octatonic scales, and their combination[31]
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