PHD, Kent State University, 2019, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Part I of this dissertation is a large-scale composition for orchestra and mixed choir entitled The Forgotten Child of Zeal. This is a programmatic work inspired by the classic 1995 role-playing game Chrono Trigger. The piece chronicles the story of an enigmatic young boy named Janus, who possesses innate magical powers, and his terrifying transformation into Magus, the dark sorcerer who terrorizes the world. The composition is organized into two contrasting movements, Premonition and Degeneration, which vary greatly in style, but are unified through a recurring 4-note “mystic motive.” There are also key quotations of Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and Prefatory Action within the piece, creating a bridge between the musical and programmatic content of all three works. The Forgotten Child of Zeal lasts approximately 22 minutes in performance. Part II of this dissertation is a theoretical paper that analyzes the pitch organization of the first movement of Alexander Nemtin's realization of Scriabin's unfinished masterpiece, Prefatory Action. Prefatory Action is a programmatic work written for orchestra, mixed choir, vocal soloists, and tastiera per luce (light keyboard), lasting roughly two and a half hours in length. The piece is divided into three massive movements entitled Universe, Humanity, and Transfiguration. Scriabin originally began writing Prefatory Action as a prelude to the Mysterium, which he envisioned as a divine musical ceremony that would transfigure the human race and end the universe. More than half a century later, Nemtin spent 26 years of his life completing the piece, using the literary text and musical sketches that Scriabin left behind as a guide. This paper is organized into six chapters – the first two chapters discuss the genesis of Prefatory Action and its subsequent realization, the middle two chapters explore Scriabin's post-tonal style, and the final two chapters offer an in-depth analysis of Universe.

Committee: Richard Devore Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Frank Wiley D.M.A. (Committee Co-Chair); Adam Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Hricko Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gustav Medicus Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, Music

The late œuvre of Alexander N. Scriabin (Op. 60–Op. 74, 1910–1914) constitutes one of the most intriguing and perplexing bodies of early twentieth-century music, with analytic and theoretic approaches toward this body of work ranging from the extendedly tonal to set-theoretic approaches that place this music as atonal or post-tonal. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate Scriabin's late works as exemplifying an extendedly tonal idiom by constructing a fundamental bass theory that takes into account both transpositional symmetry and common-tone retention, and Scriabin's idiosyncratic orthographic preferences. Chapter 2 surveys the literature of prominent theorists commenting on the preferential sonorities and collections of Scriabin's late works, and examines various tonal and transformational relationships that obtain among these sonorities. Transpositional symmetry and common-tone retention is posited as the primary logic governing harmonic root motion. By invoking Rameau's principle of root progression via the constituent intervals of a klang, Chapter 5 synthesizes these results with those of Chapter 3 to form a fundamental bass theory for the works of the late œuvre. By extending Cheong Wai Ling's concept of the octatonic referent, Chapter 3 of this dissertation presents an idealized super-space summarizing Scriabin's spelling practices: the chromatic referent, which subsumes spelling practices adopted on both surface level chord structures and deeper levels of chord-to-chord progression. Chapter 4 offers a mathematically formalized look into the properties of this chromatic referent, demonstrating its unique status within the space of over 354,294 distinct ways of notating a chromatic scale within our conventional notational system of thirty-five orthographically distinct notes. Chapter 5 outlines the fundamental bass theory, which elevates root motions by tritone, followed by motion by minor and major third, to the status of structural progressions (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Clampitt Dr. (Advisor); Thomas Wells Dr. (Committee Member); Anna Gawboy Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music