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The New Non-Fiction: Performance of the Written Word

In “A Little Devil In America,” Hanif Abdurraqib compiles a wealth of intimately told and sporadically selected stories. 

The book’s cover, featuring Willa Mae Ricker & Leon James performing the Lindy Hop in 1943.

A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black Performance

Performance isn’t only a spectacle to critique at the theater. It doesn’t only reside in the spaces where we intend to tell stories or create meaning. Performance is everywhere: the way we listen to music, the way we clench our fists at bigotry, the way we laugh at movies next to the friends we love on the couch—it’s the experience of being alive itself. Indeed, spectatorship is a performative occupation. Shakespeare brought this idea to life in his play As You Like It; the famous speech goes “all the worlds a stage, all the men and women merely players.” For Hanif Abdurraqib, the stage is a book, the interpretation of media is his flourish.

The sprawled time range of Black American performances discussed in his latest book A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black Performance emphasizes the agency that Black Americans have taken through their ability to create and use their bodies. Over the past 175 years, they’ve monumentalized their personae. The cultural analysis applauds acts from William Henry Lane, an 1840s Black minstrel dancer by the stage name of Master Juba, to Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl appearance, and far beyond. Oftentimes Black performance is situated in relation to dominant white society as a comparative method, and to surge the sentiment of  Black beauty and capacity in spite of continued subjugation by their oppressors. Charles Dickens’ review of Lane is included, and Abdurraqib subsequently dives into the famed and unmatched dancer’s in a cross-race rivalry with Irish Clog dancer John Diamond. Lane’s moves are far superior to Diamond’s, Beyonce nabs headlines from Coldplay’s headlining super bowl performance. Black performance isn’t only praised; it’s raised above all others. 

Tending towards the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the book sprinkles a few historical anecdotes, helping it to completely derail any dedication to chronology. Time is liquid in A Little Devil In America: Abdurraqib takes joy in his own temporal twists, spins and cross-steps. His sections move through groupings of semi-related topics; the book synchronously breathes and moves as a performative story of African Americans. This decade-hopping is most clearly outlined in the section entitled “On the Performance of Softness,” which begins with a crushing reflection on the death of his mother, simultaneously detailing members of Wu-Tang Clan intimacy. It’s the only part of the book that breaks up subsections with yearstamps hopscotching back and forth along a ridge spanning from the early 90s to the late 2010s. Multiple narratives blend together. Threads like Wu-Tang’s suffering from fame, autobiographical struggle with the death of his mother and relationship with his brother, and a dive bar in 2017 woven together to form one cloth, a collage of stories elucidating the poet-author’s vision of softness. 

The entire book could be outlined by varying dates – the book moves from story to story irrespective of the timeframe. This style of writing challenges non-fiction habits as a genre, and while it takes time to get used to, it’s a valuable exercise in challenging our conventional ways of knowing. As readers and thinkers, we can take in an array of a timeline’s information at once, holding them together. Emboldening performances from different times ties together the continuity of the Black American experience.

A chronic resident of Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib firmly grounds his worldview in his Black subjectivity. What does it mean to be a Black person in America, and what has it meant? The roots of identity allow him to cover ground on Black American history, exploring healing and reckoning with oppression through performance. One particularly striking moment in this elucidation is a description of  the experience at his second Fuck U Pay Us concert in Los Angeles. They are a Black band, wearing their politics and identities with their faces, words and performances, that he wishes he could have had when he grew up in too-white punk scenes of the midwest. He tiles rage with release in the sweat-screamscape of Punk Rock: describing a chant that breaks out in the song “Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy,” he emotionally details the experience as “all at once mesmerizing, rage inducing, and empowering.” He continues, illuminating the performative acts of the concert ticket holders turned participants, “The people around me, in different tones and timings, all shouting ‘burn,’ intoxicated by the understanding that this is a kind of space where one could call for such a burning and remain unscathed.” The Black experience of Black performance is an act of performance too—Abdurraqib further expands the universe of this type of expression through his careful eye towards the perception of performance.

The release from the problem of myriad societal and systematic problems at a concert is one thing, but where do we go from there? Abdurraqib offers a few tenuous answers on how we might grow, relating that he feels that a government based on holding power over others can never succeed, but ultimately admits that he doesn’t know, and he’s scared, too. This is something that most writers would refuse, and I must commend the act. His poet instincts magnetize him towards love and understanding, finding hope through pain. His voice sears through the words towards the reader, his style unelegant and unique.

Abdurraqib wields moments, intimate and cultural, individuals, monolithic and personal to their most tangible display. He is a Black muslim renaissance painter: the portraits he spins are hilarious and cunning, lamenting and shattering. For example, Josephine Baker, whose 1963 homecoming performance and speech is the book’s namesake, is described as a captivating singer and songwriter who was able to find solace in her new home country of France. Abdurraqib underscores how this is an impressive performance of Blackness, venturing to an unknown place that “treated [her] in a manner that [her] home country never could.” He grounds this in further historical details like her participation in World War II espionage on behalf of France and her marriage to a French Jew. He brings Don Cornelius, the host of the Black dance show Soul Train, to palpable intimacy along with the platform for performance he allowed. The TV personality’s introductions are included in full, “Cornelius was a poet speaker,” Abdurraqib writes, he “saw promise in Black people beyond their pain.” The story of a man who gave agency for thousands to dance and express in a way that felt right to them ends in his 2012 suicide. The words he gives about Aretha Franklin are a post-mortem temperature of Black memory. The section “An Epilogue for Aretha” cover’s Abdurraqib’s experience viewing and thoughts on the documentary Amazing Grace, featuring a never before seen live recording of the album. He details how Aretha’s voice and recordings have the ability to bring a whole theater of “skinfolk” to tears, touching them with joy. Simple truths hit like a train: “It is good for a person to be remembered for the songs they chose to sing when they could’ve sung anything else.” All the book’s rich textures of people are an enlivened formulation of the Black American experience; they’re an understanding of the self through the ability to perform, and to witness that performance.

The poet-essayist boasts a varied and original craft. The 283 page book is structured in five “Movements”—Performing Miracles, Suspending Disbelief, On Matters of Country / Provenance, Anatomy of Closeness / / Chasing Blood, and Callings to Remember. The book’s transcendence of time calls for a rough thematic organization; the whiplash of time-hopping is cushioned by the strands of content that bind the sections together. Each section starts with a chapter called “On Times I Have Forced Myself To Dance,” the first three are courageous run-on sentences in which you can absolutely channel his vivacious voice, thousands of butterflies bursting with energy. The final Section departs with its complete sentences and periods, “On Times I Have Forced Myself Not To Dance,” displaying the calm possibility that stillness is growth with its healthy companion of regular movement. Abdurraqib’s performance is packed tight in the book, but it’s not vacuum sealed: he takes all liberties with language, boosting his supplementation of creative writership in the work. Like myself, Abdurraqib is a poet; his language ventures into the surreal at times, chasing one chapter through a fearful examination of bees, a common poetic image, he fingers with run on sentences to sharpen his voice towards the approachable. Like us here at Ezra’s Ear, he’s wildly playful: an entire section uses the exquisite corpse technique, a prosaic steering method akin to Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” form. He sprinkles in African American Vernacular, serving to further the textuality of the lived Black experience, providing an elevated and altered state of emotional voice. Of course, Abdurraqib is a king of repetitions. A many faced accomplishment, he deals anaphora, loops back to words and phrases paralleling two moments far apart in the text. Repetition is his bridge across time and page.

Yes, the text is inexorably powerful in its language. However, it has some key weaknesses. The lyrical pirouettes and theoretical backflips Abdurraqib performs with the English language are sometimes lost on the reader. The poet mistakenly writes in a way that might not be understood by readers without his experience: his sentimental ventures into the abstract sometimes don’t come back down to earth, his poetic fun can come at the expense of the reader’s comprehension or the text’s scrutability. Despite this, it feels that the indecipherable is a vital facet of this book. The thought formatting and variance in style are a challenge to Western non-fiction writership at large; the book’s vigorous sense of self is a challenge to our conventional modes of thinking. I love this engagement with style and edging into a new way of processing facts, but it frightens me little. Part of it is a challenge to whole, logical thoughts. Indeed it is poetic, far reaching. But can these bits really be called nonfiction?

When I turned the first supple page of A Little Devil In America, I was in Sacred Root Kava Bar, downtown Ithaca New York. I was there to see a show that would feature Black performance itself. Sitting on an embroidered cushion in the gaga hippie dim lit basement of The Cornell Daily Sun, I struggled in awe to get past the first “On Times I Have Forced Myself To Dance.” Its immense voice, use of African American Vernacular, stylization of and as “&” to shuffle together the run-on sentence were striking to me; it was tough but exciting to crack it open. Once I gave myself over to the text I was giddy. The book forces a reader to get to know it in its difficult singularity, by the end, it’s like eating with a refined palette.

And that’s what Abdurraqib, and this book are best at. His most opulent strength, and what I think is of utmost importance about any work: the endings. Abdurraqib presses into the feelings he has been massaging over the course of the book, reaching their most effective coalescence once he has taught the reader to appreciate his new, alternative style. Each section ending digs into the reader, coercing the book closed for a moment of reflection.

Hanif Abdurraqib awakens the stories of Black American performers alongside his own daily-life, devastating and endearing readers. Worldview is his plot, conjuring demands for a new future through music. Some people think that poetry is necessarily spoken, an aural and verbal art, that it must penetrate through the ears. Abdurraqib’s grounding as a poet vitalizes the reading aloud of some of his sentences, paragraphs even. A commentary on the Black positioning in America throughout its history through the lens of performance, this continues a long tradition of Black performance, and furthers the new and changing one.

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Steve Reich’s Conversations: A Humanist’s Guide to Minimalism

The avant-garde composer’s book of conversations shares ruminations on life, spirituality, and music

Reich, recently turned 87

Conversations by Steve Reich (2022)

When worshiping the transcendent and euphoric pedagogy of music, time is ever-present. Off-beat clave rhythms contort bodies in expected intervals; canonic textures layer pieces with feverish counterpoints; prayers float freely in time, bouncing off intricately stained windows. Impactful music—music overflowing with humanity—changes time’s objective qualities to subjective ones. It’s with this knowledge and conviction about the elements of spiritually awakened music that New York native (and Cornell alum!) Steve Reich entered the ‘60s classical music scene. Now a veteran composer, Reich’s six decades of fostering and pushing classical minimalism’s development forward has left him with a legacy of his commitment to musical exploration. Marked by precise and hypnotically repetitive canons, his compositions stand as a modern-day landmark to the fact that music is a tool for us to explore both ourselves and our perceptions of the world. In a celebration of this, Reich wrote Conversations in 2022: a biography of his career which is explored and dissected through 19 chapters neatly divided by conversations conducted with 19 fellow luminaries.

The conversationalists span from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood to Reich’s own wife, video artist Beryl Korot. Though the range of people brought into the book is staggering, Reich’s candor in talking with these figures helps makes chapters cogent and incredibly approachable for those less acquainted with his compositions. However, despite this general approachability, the book is clearly designed for Reich superfans. Nearly all of his works are explored (spanning from 1965 to 2019) and at times musical jargon can obfuscate themes and ideas that rear their philosophical roots. Luckily, these moments are few and far between. For those interested in learning more about his works or wanting to gain further insight into the broad field of minimalism and its implications, this is an important read.

In discussing Reich’s transformative contributions to the world of music, it’s inevitable to draw comparisons to other classical music trailblazers. The most prominent one being Stravinsky, which Reich himself notes in the forward of Conversations. Both of their most enduring compositions were perturbing enough to induce actual riots at performances (which renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s comments in Conversations delightfully underscored), and there’s the obvious comparison between Conversations and Stravinsky’s 1959 book of conversations. Fortunately, it’s the paradigm-shifting parts of Stravinsky that manifest in Reich through Conversations. Compared to Stravinsky’s cluttered narrative in his book of conversations, Reich’s discussions are at their best illuminating and help to create an easily accessible roadmap of his career. And it’s through inroads in this map, like with Kronos Quartet’s director David Harrington, that we glean bits of knowledge into Reich’s inspirations, whether that be waitresses clapping as an inspiration for his aptly named Clapping Music (1972) or Stravinsky’s tonal serial technique rearing its head in Traveler’s Prayer’s (2019) baroque melodic structure.

The first half of the book focuses on Reich’s coming of age as a composer and 1965 seminal pieces (Come Out and It’s Going to Rain) but does so in a way that elucidates more than just these composition’s experimental phasing technique (though artist Richard Serra’s cross-discipline discussion on these techniques is fascinating). We learn through a question on the nature of language in music from the late domineering composer Stephen Soundheim that Reich was drawn to Come Out’s C minor speech melody because of the simple humanist observation that “when we speak, we sometimes sing.” Considering the political implications of Come Out’s sample—a looping vocal clip of a black man who was wrongfully imprisoned and beaten—layers are added onto how to perceive this piece and Reich’s later works which rely heavily on spliced vocal samples as canons.

Observations like these do more than just inform the content of the compositions Reich created. For Thomas, Reich’s minimalist harmonically grounded works were a “spiritual antidote” that countered the complicated hyper intellectual compositions that were common in the ‘80s avant-garde classical scene. Elizabeth Lim-Dutton, violin player for the Steve Reich Ensemble, later echoes this same sentiment in how the contemporary difference in violin performance for Different Trains—a piece where the violin matches both figuratively and literally spoken words of Holocaust survivors—added a level of emotional resonance not previously achievable.

If sections like these sound like a Reich pander-fest, it’s because they kind of are. However, Reich generally does a good job of steering the conversations away from these moments and towards the unique insight’s conversationalists offer into Reich’s works. Dutton’s thoughtful takeaways on Reich’s pieces—which come from a career’s worth of avant-garde performances—are their conversation’s bread and butter. Personally noteworthy, was her cultural detachment from the biblical story of Abraham which is explored through interviews with Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews in Reich and Korot’s opera The Cave (1993). This detachment helped to stress and add to the innovative beauty in the ending melody which highlights the shared beliefs between both groups despite the West’s growing secularization.

Reich doesn’t typically write political pieces so when he does, there’s an incredibly precision and delicateness he approaches these works with. Dutton hits it on the nose here. What makes The Cave so special is the beauty and exactness that it uses when approaching such a sensitive topic. Made (in my eyes) somewhat in response to post-minimalist composer John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), an opera about Palestinian terrorists murdering a disabled Jewish man, Reich chose to design an opera highlighting both group’s similarities in cultural/religious thought through three movements. Reich’s most political work, Daniel Variations (2016), takes it a step further in a commemoration of journalist Daniel Pearl’s life who was killed by Pakistani Islamic fundamentalists. What Reich calls his strongest writing for strings in Conversations is a truly transcendent piece that celebrates the life and Judaic implications behind the name Daniel, rather than the uproar that was left in the wake of Pearl’s stolen life.

One thing undoubtably missing in Conversations, however, is any evaluative discussion about Reich’s works. Concerns about cultural appropriation in Drumming (1970) aren’t present and considering the growing academic discussion on the removal of people of color, women, and queer voices in the field of minimalism (coming to a spearhead in the recently published On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement) a conversation on this by one of the “founding fathers” of the movement would especially be welcomed. Certainly, the influence studying drumming in Ghana and Balinese gamelan in Seattle had on Reich is worth more than just a passing mention!

What is discussed luckily, is Reich’s take on modern music and how he interprets popular music that his works have by and large influenced. As a Radiohead aficionado, I was floored to read that Reich was inspired by Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling into Place to compose Radio Rewrite (2012). A composer in touch with players so far out of their own niche—and generation—is rare. During Reich’s talk with Greenwood, they briefly discuss Reich’s direct inspirations for the work and what spurred their friendship (both are Jewish and share the same love for romantic classical music). Unique connections like these help make conversations feel even more personal; it’s easy for the reader to feel physically in the room with the speakers (though this did make awkward moments a little more painful, there were a few with Greenwood!).

Two thirds through Conversations, dance choreographer Anne Keersmaeker introduces the term “cold school” to describe minimalism’s use of formal mechanics to reject the ego and intimate expression. Indeed, Reich makes it clear that a part of minimalism’s appeal for him is in the loss of the individual during performance. Music for 18 Musicians (1976) has performers set the tempo themselves and decide when to move through the piece in an intuitive way—like a chamber ensemble—allowing it to become a living composition that’s deeply in-touch with not only performers but also the audience. Making this composition bigger than one life (one performer) allows for the expression of ambient intimacy. Joy and passion that’s present around us every day but needs to be intensely focused on to reveal itself. In the development of mathematically precise compositions that are rigidly supported by fundamental beliefs on human expression, Reich’s works reject the term “cold school.”

There is nothing warmer than listening to a composition so entrancing it makes your head spin; the camaraderie in moving and listening as a practiced ensemble; a conversation shared with a close friend. Reich’s career is fueled by a passion for discovering and exploring humanist touchstones in uncanny places. Conversations is a well-worth salute to this ideal. L’Chaim!

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In Memory of Wayne Shorter

The enigmatic jazz titan passed away at 89 years in March 2023

The cover of Shorter’s youthful and sci-fi infused comic book, included with the purchase of his quartet’s final album Emanon

Wayne Shorter always talked in terms that were bigger than life. Everything was a lesson for Shorter, and he made everything a lesson for those around him. A practicing Buddhist, he described the tragic death of his late wife Ana Maria Patricio in a plane crash as an opportunity to learn to be happier. Shorter spoke of the same lesson after the passing of his daughter. Despite these and many other losses, Shorter’s outlook on life was of stark optimism. Friends and colleagues describe him as an uplifting soul, whose indirect yet poetically clear “Wayne-isms” were avenues of introspection. “You can’t rehearse the unknown,” Shorter famously replied after being simply asked what they were going to rehearse. Michelle Mercer—author of Shorter’s biography Footprints—asserts that Wayne chose to speak in this unconventional way because it’s truest to his imagination, to his mind, and to the Buddhist tradition. Whether it was in his virtuosic playing or his philosophical ruminations, his whole spirit bent towards this self-identifying truth. The forward-thinking musician passed away at the age of 89 in the city of angels.

Shorter was born in the industrial district of Newark, New Jersey in 1933. Growing up, his father worked as a welder while his mother was a seamstress. Wayne discovered his passion for the arts early on: both Wayne and his older brother Alan would consume comic books, science fiction stories, and music at extreme rates. Having picked up the clarinet at the age of 16, he encountered many teachers at the Newark Arts High School who helped to cultivate a passion for the performing arts. A year after the clarinet, he picked up the tenor saxophone in reaction to the bebop greats who were flourishing. Wasting no time, both Wayne and Alan formed a bebop combo with Wayne on tenor saxophone and Alan on trumpet. Respectively nicknamed “Doc Strange” and “Mr. Weird,” they quickly made a name for themselves–dressing in colorful, flamboyant outfits at their gigs. At the end of his high school career, bebop behemoth Sonny Sitt famously asked Wayne to join him on tour, to which Shorter declined instead pursuing studying composition at NYU. Even at a young age, Shorter’s spirit was inclined to the academic.

During his time at NYU, Wayne entrenched himself in bebop, turning heads in the New York scene. Following his graduation, Shorter joined the army, where he made the weekend 60-mile trip to NYC to gig, still managing to practice relentlessly. After two years in the army, Shorter was discharged and promptly recruited by both trumpet behemoth Maynard Ferguson (whose later rendition of Weather Report’s Birdland is just about as euphorically funky jazz can get) and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Making the unsurprising call, Shorter joined the Jazz Messengers in 1959, where he gained international acclaim through his virtuosic playing and compositional style. Children of the Night, one of Shorter’s earlier compositions with the Messengers, stands out with its prominent tenor-heavy melody that playfully dances around bop-infused chords.  

After four years with the Messengers, Shorter was poached again. Now joining the ranks of jazz nobility, Shorter was welcomed to Miles Davis’s Quintet, putting a stop in the revolving tenor saxophone seat. With the Second Great Quintet complete, the group’s sound and compositions, as Miles put it, was “time, no changes.” Though this style of free jazz fell under bop, it leaned on the more cosmic and avant-garde side of jazz.  Shorter’s first contribution to the Quintet was with the early 1965 E.S.P (Extra Sensory Perception), whose title track was one of his compositions. A frenetic track, the Quintet soars over Shorter’s disjointed chords, exploding and receding appropriately to let the soloists shine. Critical reception was high, with cultural critic Stanley Crouch’s infamous lens praising the album. Shorter later became the band’s primary composer.

Shorter stayed with the Quintet from 1964-1970 while he recorded his compositions for the Blue Note Records as well. In 1969 Shorter notably recorded In a Silent Way with Davis and Super Nova, his album, on the soprano saxophone. Shorter’s playing is nothing short of self-prescribed elusiveness, but with the soprano saxophone, his tenor’s dark timbre transforms into a brighter and more euphoric tone. This transformation of sound fit In a Silent Way’s electronic sonic soundscape beautifully. Grand pianos were replaced by electric pianos, and bright guitars entered the composition, creating a forward-thinking melding of rock and jazz. Its free-flowing sound and minimalist texture gave clear roots for the beginning of post-rock (which Talk Talk pocketed and revisited almost 18 years later). Music critic Lester Bangs wrote as much in his rave review for the album as well: “It is part of a transcendental new music which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality.” Shorter’s intro solo on the title track is content with floating between space and time, letting the piano and guitar outline the composition’s formless structure.

Following 1970, Shorter helped form the jazz fusion band Weather Report as a response to the public’s growing desire for rock-influenced music. Helmed by keyboardist Joe Zawinul and Shorter initially, the band began as a free-improvising jazz group that freely incorporated elements of funk and R&B. Their first album Weather Report (1971) took what made In a Silent Way so enigmatic and ran with it. Redefining the boundary between rock and jazz, Weather Report pushed works at this intersection forward. In Shorter’s 15 years with the band, he acted as the primary instrumental voice and helped to compose many of the group’s genre bending tracks, from eclectic funk to smooth Latin jazz.

Shorter also continued to expand his own solo career. His worldly album Native Dancer (1975) liberally featured Herbie Hancock (the two of whom met playing in Davis’ Quintet) and blended Brazilian rhythms with jazz and funk’s freewheeling intensity. Shorter and Hancock’s friendship continued to flourish later in their careers with the creation of their Grammy winning 1+1 album in 1997. Both Wayne and Hancock were fervent Nichiren Buddhists which arguably helped enable them to channel their own spirituality through the music they were playing. The religion calls for the repeated chanting of the phrase Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, a commitment to nurturing Buddha inside of yourself.

Spiritually fitting, Shorter’s final musical group he piloted was one that prioritized exploring humanity over accessibility. The Wayne Shorter Quartet formed in 2000 with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade. Though the group made countless recordings (primarily of new and old Shorter compositions), one stands out in particular. Emanon is a monster project, giving the undertaker a small glimpse into Shorter’s “artistic multiverse.” A triple album, accompanied by an 84-paged graphic novel (developed by the futuristic loving Shorter), it truly puts Shorter’s spry spirit on full display. At the age of 85, nothing could stifle his enchanting musical outlook.

In his last years of life, Shorter returned to an opera he began designing at the age of 19. “Buddhism taught me that anything we promise to do, we must follow through with,” he declared when asked why it was that project he decided to pursue. The jazz opera, titled, Ipheigenia, tells the epic story of Greek figure who’s sacrificed to help mobilize an army for war. Working closely with Esperanza Spalding, a vocalist he played with in Weather Report, the two of them helmed the creation of this mammoth project. Fielding health crises after health crises, it was unclear whether Shorter would live to see the end of this project. Spalding worked full-time with Shorter to make the opera happen, and after eight years in the making it was complete. Not a culmination of Shorter’s work, but rather a continuation of his pursuit of impenetrable knowledge, the opera was at war with itself in its first performances. Both Shorter and Spalding described the work as being a “work in progress,” but perhaps it is fitting for Shorter’s immediate legacy to be that of a still-evolving performance. His pursuit of knowledge was so insatiable that even the turning of time couldn’t stop it.

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Demystifying Scriabin

Over 100 years since his death, the world still struggles to understand Scriabin.

Alexander Scriabin Songs, Albums, Reviews, Bio & More | AllMusic

The Russian composer poses at his desk. 

Demystifying Scriabin

Mystery and mysticism shroud Alexander Scriabin’s life, acting as both an impenetrable veil and all-encompassing motif. Barely five feet tall, effeminate, and with a mustache to rival that of Nietschze, the Russian composer’s unassuming appearance cloaked an obsession with art that surpassed the boundaries of sanity. His beliefs and music were unparalleled in every aspect. Composition was more than a career, more than a passion, more than the results of artistic mania; it was the means through which he could bring salvation to the planet.

His followers’ cult-like fanaticism impose even more obscurity onto his life. “Cult-like” is perhaps too generous of a term; “cultic” is more fitting. After all, what other composers dubbed themselves “God?” Who else attempted to end the world through their music? Even his death is interpreted as an act of God, who struck the artist down to prevent fulfillment of his musical vision. His followers view him not just as a lover of art, but as its martyr.

In honor of his 150th birthday, Demystifying Scriabin attempts to shed light on the all-too-enigmatic composer’s life, beliefs, and music. Edited by music theorists Kenneth Smith and Vasilis Kallis and published by Boydell Press in 2022, the book is a collection of essays by musicologists and musicians who have dedicated their careers to Scriabin. Smith and Kallis open the introduction by posing the question, “How do you solve a problem like Scriabin?” In between inconsistent spellings of his name, they assert that doing so is a lost cause: he didn’t understand himself and was hell-bent on making sure no one else did either. His writings and beliefs are riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, and making sense of the senseless is a pointless endeavor. However, investigating his music, philosophy, mysticism, performance, religion, synaesthesia, and cultural legacy can, at the very least, blow away a portion of the haze obscuring his life.

The essays are divided into three sections: Shaping Creativity, The Music as Prism, and Reception and Tradition. Shaping Creativity attempts to demystify by exploring Russia’s impact on Scriabin’s music, a force “represented by the frontiers of disparate musical and cultural trends.” The Music as Prism “offers us a musical way of working through the metaphysical ideas about identity, philosophy, time, and space.” It analyzes his music in relation to his beliefs and life, offering us new perspectives on both specific compositions and his overall body of work. Lastly, Reception and Tradition outlines Scriabin’s influence and “the waves of tradition that passed through him.” Written by a diverse group of Scriabinists, each section aims to both explain the composer and initiate new discussions for this end.

Unfortunately, Demystifying Scriabin is riddled with almost as many issues as the man himself. The book’s divisions appear arbitrary, as the first and third sections both focus on historical influences. Beyond this, the organization of chapters within sections seems random. The first chapter discusses Scriabin’s mystic chord, a recurring device most famously used in Prometheus, and its connection to the Russian Silver Age – yet it’s not until the second chapter, “Scriabin and the Russian Silver Age,” that an adequate description of the era is provided.

While occupying an odd place structurally, the first chapter serves as an intriguing opening. Author Simon Morrison argues that the mystic chord represents the Silver Age through its symbolism. The chord is theorized to represent Satan, and a pentagram can be found through analyzing the relationships between the notes, thereby “becoming the equivalent of a Ouija board.” While this chapter would be better served as an immediate sequel to “Scriabin and the Russian Silver Age,” or perhaps in The Music as Prism, it effectively introduces readers to the mysticism surrounding the composer.

After outlining his writing and compositional influences in the third and fourth chapters, the section concludes with “Studying Scriabin’s Autographs: Reflections of the Creative Process.” The chapter uses the Alexander Scriabin Collected Works to “glimpse a deeper understanding of Scriabin’s creative process.” In the first half, its author, Pavel Shatskiy, thoroughly analyzes the history of the composer’s publishers and the potential errors in original printings and manuscripts. The chapter’s second half uses this information to establish a chronology of when his pieces were written, as opposed to when they were published. This chapter is both out-of-place in the section and unnecessary to the larger goal of the book. There’s no discussion of historical influences, and whether or not Scriabin’s publishers omitted an accent here or there is superfluous to the act of demystifying him. While this is important in other discussions regarding the composer, it brings little to the table in Demystifying Scriabin.

The structure of The Music as Prism is more cohesive. The first chapter, “Scriabin’s Miniaturism,” describes his love for miniaturism, a love influenced by Chopin. This is followed by “The Scriabin Tremor and Its Role in His Oeuvre.” The music theorist Inessa Bazayev argues that analyzing him through the lens of disability studies allows listeners to understand a musical sigh that acts as a motif throughout several of his pieces. She claims that this tremor represents a hand injury Scriabin suffered in his early twenties. While an interesting argument, the essay is purely speculative as she fails to provide evidence that he intentionally based the tremor off of his injury. However, it does bring attention to an under-discussed, widely-used motif in his music.

Editor Kallis reintroduces the mystic chord, this time expanding on the analysis started by Morrison. He argues that the chord is influenced by counterpoint and reflects Scriabin’s reverence for classical traditions of composition. Antonio Grande moves away from pitch analysis in “Temporal Perspectives in Scriabin’s Late Music,” instead opting to approach the body of work from a temporal angle. He defends Scriabin’s surprisingly conventional sonatas, arguing that under a closer investigation, their temporal evolution is avant-garde. Kenneth Smith continues these sonata analyses in “Scriabin’s Multi-Dimensional Accelerative Sonata Forms.” He explains Scriabin’s two-dimensional (and sometimes three-dimensional) sonata form was a trail-blazing innovation, one misunderstood and overlooked by theorists for decades. Ross Edwards wraps up part two in “Setting Mystical Forces in Motion: The Dialectics of Scale-Type Integration in Three Late Works.” He argues that Scriabin’s reliance on the conservative sonata form “set Scriabin’s most radical and ‘mystical’ forces in motion.” While it would have been interesting to read about a wider array of Scriabin’s compositions, the section does a wonderful job of resolving the conservative features of his music with the radical, demystifying him with one analysis at a time.

The third and final section, Reception and Tradition, opens with “Scriabin’s Synaesthesia: The Legend, the Evidence, and Its Implications for Multimedia Counterpoint.” Anna Gawboy does away with the myth of Scriabin’s synaesthesia by examining sources claiming his color system was thoroughly designed and thought out, rather than a psychological condition. The color system was an attempt to access the Theosophical astral plane, “a transcendent realm of spiritual existence that generated life, energy, creativity, and metaphysical knowledge.” He believed it could only be achieved through “clairvoyance, which was characterized by multisensory perception.” Gawboy concludes by stating discussions of Scriabin are unproductive when his music is viewed in isolation from his beliefs – an argument that calls out many of the essays in the book’s second part. However, after reading Kallis and Smith’s introduction, one can’t help but wonder if this goes against the earlier assertion that his beliefs were intentionally designed as meaningless and contradictory. 

Marina Frolova-Walker pivots in “Playing Scriabin: Reality and Enchantment” by treating him not as a composer, but as a pianist. The essay begins by compiling accounts of Scriabin’s playing, accounts partially disproven by his existing piano rolls. She then compares these renditions of his playing and argues that none capture what he intended – even those performed by himself. 

Kallis and Smith return to provide a general overview of scholarship regarding Scriabin’s music system. Like the concluding chapter of section one, this essay establishes an important timeline, but one that’s generally unnecessary for the purposes of the book. Perhaps it would make sense as a preface to the second section. But as a stand-alone chapter, it doesn’t bolster other information or contribute to the demystification of Scriabin.

The penultimate chapter, Ildar Khannanov’s “Scriabin and the Classical Tradition,” similarly deviates from the book’s theme. He analyzes Scriabin’s compositions in order to determine just how revolutionary he truly was. While Reception and Tradition aims to discuss tradition, Khannanov is the only author to tackle this concept. The chapter feels out of place in relation to its neighbors, all of which discuss his reception. The section seems to have “Tradition” in its title for this chapter alone, a chapter that would belong in either of the previous sections.

James Kreiling ends the book with “Scriabin’s Critical Reception: Genius or Madman?” Kreiling compiles first-hand accounts of Scriabin’s playing, compositions, and personality, contradictory accounts that are unable to answer this question of his sanity. He concludes by speculating that “Scriabin will most likely always be a composer who divides opinions” (319). Only by performing his work with the utmost imagination can his works be understood, and only through approaching him with the greatest openness can his music be loved.

Demystifying Scriabin doesn’t claim to solve or explain the composer – just to demystify and create new dialogue among Scriabinists. Unfortunately, few of its chapters make headway on these fronts. Several, most of which are found within The Music as Prism, are original, interesting, and provide new valuable insights. The remaining majority only contains rehashed information. The world doesn’t need another essay about the dubiousness of his synaesthesia, the influences of the era on his music, or a timeline of his music. Structural issues aside, these remaining problems would evaporate had the book been marketed as a general crash course on Scriabin – but this was not the goal put forth by its editors. However, its failure to demystify speaks volumes of Scriabin. If he truly didn’t want to be understood, this book serves as a monument to his success in that mission.