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alexander | obsidian song(s) takes the figure of composer Alexander Scriabin as its subject, and is one of an intended set of ‘portrait’ pieces of Russian artists – the first of this set, a portrait of Prokofiev titled Sergey, was commissioned and recorded by Irish pianist Máire Carroll in 2022. It continues an ongoing preoccupation with the concept of portraiture – an act which, as John Berger set forth, reveals as much (if not more) of the sensual, aesthetic, social, and political perspectives of the portraitist as it does the subject of the portrait – and the idea that through the exploration of others, we might reveal something of ourselves.

The specific ideas for this piece come first from the description of Scriabin given by Horowitz in Bruno Monsaingeon’s film Horowitz, The Last Romantic, wherein the pianist details the later-life mysticism of the composer and his vision that the world would one day be consumed by an immense heat or fire (a vision, its worth noting, that predated the discovery/weaponization of nuclear power). I love this aspect of Scriabin: a theosophist interested in the transcendent truth behind the truth, the fixity behind the flux, he expresses it with a musical language of constant tension and change which defers resolution to the point that it is only ever a momentary pleasure rather than a structural point. The second was the idea of obsidian – a volcanic glass formed by the rapid cooling of molten hot rock – as it’s understood within mystic occultism, as ‘black glass’ or the ‘black mirror’, for its powers of divination. Mirroring the paradox of Scriabin’s theosophy, obsidian is a cold solidity born of formless heat, a consistency made of constant change.

The piece consists of four simple types of non-developed material – at times crystal-like, at others dark-edged, bell-like, clustered, and resonantly percussive, all solidified through a unity of consistent semiquaver pulses and a restricted registral bandwidth – which are set against each other within a mathematical fractal structure. Crystals are repeating structures on a molecular level, and bells don’t develop; even if you ring the changes on them, you’re simply unfolding a static field of possibilities. Here, the musical logic is iterative, not cumulative: sections unfold like lattices of a crystal, or like ringing the changes of bells.

However, crystals don’t shine until they are cut – the cut is what gives them their characteristic allure. Following a similar logic, the different processes in this piece don’t simply iterate mindlessly but are montaged provocatively. Fixity of register and rhythm attunes us to subtleties of texture, profile, colour, and colour-shifts. Like sights within the cut crystal of an obsidian mirror, alexander | obsidian song(s) should be sounded as sorrowful songs frozen within a dream of a future world – one atomized by the fire of Scriabin’s vision.

David Coonan, August 2024

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