Vladimir Sofronitsky plays Scriabin Poème-nocturne Op. 61

[Starwalker6978]

Thanks for posting this. I didn't know he recorded the Poeme-Nocturne; when I played this piece and looked for recordings, all I could find was a much too slow Richter recording (not the one you posted on YT). This recording gives me a better understanding of the Poeme-Nocturne. Sofronitsky grasps the structure of the piece and has those necesary strident sonorities, yet I miss a little the secret surprises that we hear with Richter a lot.

[fisherroastedpeanut]

it's strange(and sad)that not all people understand this beautiful music.

[pjioayncoe]

Can you share your understanding?

[clipwip]

Is it any different than understanding a Chopin Nocturne? It speaks to one's poetic sensibilities. The lines are quite clear in this piece and in Sofronitsky's playing. Try picturing columns of incense wafting or something. It's very sensual music.

[pjioayncoe]

Again with your incenses? I hope you don't mind telling me this time what you saw from smelling them. Many people claim that they themselves understand Scriabin and his "spirituality", but whenever they are asked to explain themselves, they either avoid answering it or assert that music needs no reasons behind it. I really wish Sofronitsky is alive to tell us what he sees Scriabin's music...

[jkpiano]

This is hard music to understand, especially if you are not used to the sound-world of late Scriabin. I know most and have played a lot of Scriabin's late (and early) works and can tell you that this music is as skillfully put together as any of the great composers. It is hard to understand because it is a different language - in the same way we cannot understand a word of French if we have never heard it before.

[jkpiano]

This music takes listening and patience to fully understand. Structurally his music is clear and concise it is often his musical ideas - whether they be melodic or harmonic - that are strange to us. To understand his music you need to understand that his music is at once improvisatory and strictly structured. Above all of this you must be able to hear the subtleness of his harmonies and the great originality and sensuousness of his melodic lines.

[jkpiano]

If I can add that "understanding" is not quite the right word - to understand you must ENJOY the sound of his music. Which comes first though is difficult!

[clipwip]

I think this exactly what it comes down to. For me, I have always loved every period of his music, especially the late. If you don't enjoy the sound, you probably are wasting your time trying to "understand" it. But compositionally, it is crystal clear. If you can "understand" a Bach fugue, you should be able to "understand" late Scriabin.

[pjioayncoe]

Let me clarify what I meant. For example, if you see a stranger on the street, you can get a rough idea of who he is from the way he dresses, the way he talks, and how others treat him. However, do you truly "understand" him?

When listening or studying a piece, can you merely look at the structure , the harmonies, and the melodies? To fully appreciate it, you have to know the purpose of the piece. What is the purpose of this piece?

[clipwip]

Scriabin indeed saw his music as "enlightening" and himself as a musical messiah. The purpose, I would guess, is to give you a glimpse of his imagination which for some reason I find perfectly coherent.

[pjioayncoe]

I'm sure you can comprehend it since you are almost a mystic yourself. However, most people are not mystics. They do not work with illusions or hallucinations. How can you expect or believe a person who knows nothing about mystics and Scriabin's ideas to understand his music? I do believe you to be a true believer (even though I totally disagree with your ideas), but what about the rest who extol Scriabin because his music is "deep" and "different" to their ears?

[clipwip]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by me being a "true believer." I have to say that, yes, I am a bit of a mystic myself but I always try to temper it with analysis. Re. hallucinations & illusions: that is the very fabric of our 5-sense reality. It is all a "distortion" of the "Unified Field," or whatever you wish to call it, which makes things appear separate when they really aren't. Read "The Law of One" by Ruckert, McCarty, and Evans. I don't care about why others extol Scriabin.

[pjioayncoe]

You typify Ayn Rand's description of a mind with "a junk heap of unwarrented conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans...(all) intergrated into a kind of mongrel philosophy." You mentioned "unification". I think that's what you need to do with your thoughts. I hope you check your premise before doing any analysis since if you start at the wrong point, you'll end at a wrong point. And no matter what you may want to believe, you'll never escape reality.

[clipwip]

The problem is, you clearly have an axe to grind which will inhibit you from ever improving your dim perceptual abilities. If you really took the time (or had the ability) to think for yourself instead of quoting fellow half-wits, you would be better off. You clearly don't understand me or anything I've said which is fine, but I can assure you I have the ability to go into very fine detail regarding my beliefs, disbeliefs, and uncertainties, and their reasons.

[pjioayncoe]

Let's start with the premise of your beliefs. At the perception level, you take in your surrounding with your eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and your body. They create stimulus that can trigger your brain(mind) to respond. You said that illusions are "the fabric of our five-sense reality" but they are only the work of our mind, which has nothing to do with the five-senses and the reality. Reality is separate from our mind, which means it is the way it is no matter how we think of it.

[pjioayncoe]

You might ask what if each of us percieve reality differently or what if reality is an illusion. My suggestion to the first question is to get several people to list things you see around you and compare the lists. My answer to the second question is to accept whatever you see. If you insist that reality is not real, then accept whatever you see that you consider unreal. Once you accept what you percieve, you can move to the next level, conception.

[clipwip]

This is of course not the area to be having this discussion. I'm not even sure what your point is. Reality appears to us in the 5-sense realm the way it does precisely b/c of the way we decode the sensory input with our mind. Otherwise, it is just vibratory forms of energy.

[pjioayncoe]

My point is: we have to agree on perception before we can go to conception. What if you tell me that we can't believe what we see or reality is not what it really is? I'll assume you agree with me that the reality and our sensory organs do not decieve, only our mind does. I think you called yourself somewhat a mystic, one who accepts his/her fallable intuition, dreams, or revelations as a source of knowledge. Why would you rather live on deceptions than on truth in reality?

[clipwip]

Well, perception itself is a rather difficult subject. What if you could perceive radio, cell phone signals, tv, etc? In the same way, there are people who are telepathic. There are other organisms which can perceive magnetic fields. There are people whose visions come to pass in the future. There is the subconscious, the conscious, the unconscious, and perhaps something akin to a "superconscious" (intuition?). Do you doubt the existence of ESP (extra-sensory perception)?

[clipwip]

There is also the whole shamanic tradition which has been highly successful at even diagnosing and curing illness through techniques of ecstasy, hallucinogens, and access to some field of consciousness which would have to exist for them to gain this knowledge.

[pjioayncoe]

Soul-healers? It's all human psycholoy. Tell a man that he has a disease even it's a lie, he is going to develope hypochondria. Tell him that there is a cure even it's also a lie, he has a higher chance of recovery due to his changed mindset. It's not magical at all. Sometimes all you have to do is to heal the soul. Consider all those who claim to heal without any scientific knowledge, like the shamanists and the priests, groups of untrained psychiatrists.

[clipwip]

"Sometimes all you have to do is to heal the soul." That sounds like a pretty "mystical" concept. This dialog is getting increasingly convoluted. Earlier you said your point was that "we have to agree on perception before we can go to conception." Now you are saying that someone's subjective perception of their health has a lot to do with the physical manifestation of an illness or its convalescence. So a subjective experience can indeed affect "reality." How far could this be extended?

[pjioayncoe]

You misunderstood me. It's not "someone's subjective perception" that heals, but his/her "subjective conception." I think we all can "feel bad" physically, but how we let it affect us depends on how we conceptualize it. Therefore, a "subjective conception" does not alter a perception. Also, to heal a mind/soul means to change how a person thinks, not how he actually senses. The former is the conceptualized form of the latter. So a "subjective experience" is only our processed form of reality.

[clipwip]

At any rate, your idea includes something patently "mystical" (i.e.- soul). Even mind is a nebulous concept with no consensus on it's objective constitution. For the purpose of this discussion, you seem to be trying to defend an "objectivist" viewpoint and have disdain for Scriabin's (and others') "mystical" inclinations. I never subscribe to any "-ism" as it is a mold which will restrict independent thought. Not that you do either.

[clipwip]

As far as "reality" is concerned (which is where I think this discussion started), there is nothing inherent about anything that makes it one thing. I.e.- A does not equal A. This is firstly b/c everything is always in flux and never completely discrete. Secondly, b/c we are not capable of perceiving anything but the smallest fraction of "reality," so what we perceive is only one version. I return to my belief that everything in reality is really one creation with differentiated aspects.

[pjioayncoe]

If you're a theoretical physicist who deals with parallel universes and the quantum world, A indeed does not equal A. And yes, our perception of three-dimensions is only a small fraction of a possible 11-dimensional universe. However, in the reality we are able to percieve, A is always A. An apple may turn blue in quantum world, but it will never do so in our percieved reality. If I got lost on an island, should I accept this fact or ignore it since possibly in another universe, I'm not lost?

[clipwip]

This is not true regarding the blue apple. Hypnotists have been able to convince people of as radical a thing as someone who is directly in front of them is not actually there and the person hypnotized comes out of trance and is able to see directly through the person they have been made to believe is not there. Likewise people can be made to taste beef when they are eating fruit through hypnotism. There is a very complex relationship between "reality" and perception/conception.

[clipwip]

And what is the ultimate tool of hypnosis? TV.

[pjioayncoe]

Not true. We are.

[pjioayncoe]

I agree that it's easy to hypnotize people since many of us have abandoned reason and rely on others' judgement instead. We are tools to each other and victims of each other. Unfortunately , most of us are even slaves to each other. The relationship between reality and perception is rather simple, since we have no choice over it. If we can think logically on ourselves, conception is also very "straightforward". Only contradictions add to the "complexity".

[clipwip]

You seem to have missed the point. Hypnotism of course takes quite a bit of training. In the same way, one can train the mind through meditation to perceive things more subtly and in-depth. Reason and logic are also a result of conditioning and not some innate set of rules in the human mind. When you examine things closer and closer, the parameters of course change as in quantum mechanics and relativity. This conversation is becoming rather pointless and redundant. Farewell pjioayncoe..

[pjioayncoe]

I'm glad that you agreed to use reason and logic to examine and analyze. Like Ayn Rand said, have an active mind that questions and decides, not an open mind that absorbs blindly and doubts. Only through rational reasoning can the truth be found. Thanks for this discussion. Bye.

[LiradeTerpsichore]

Pjioayncoe

Really, did Ayn Rand say that?

That's very special.

Extraordinary. All the great classics missed her and would have been happy to have such an idea before her.

[LiradeTerpsichore]

"to have had"

[pjioayncoe]

I think Truecrypt won't mind our discussion here as long as it's carried on a respectful level and pertains somewhat to this piece. But maybe we should ask first.

Dear Truecrypt,

Do you mind? :)

[truecrypt]

Not at all! ;)

Scriabin himself would be fascinated with this discussion!

[pjioayncoe]

I think it's necessary to connect a composer's beliefs with his music, since the former leads to the latter. The music reflects that person.

[pjioayncoe]

Scriabin did not write in a different language. He merely wrote on a different topic or chose to present his ideas differently. Are you familiar with James Joyce's writings and his use of stream of consciousness?

I do not enjoy late Scriabin's works because I cannot understand their mystical substances.

[clipwip]

Personally, I just find his music to be beautiful and that is really all that concerns me about Scriabin. I do actually understand his philosophy for the most part, but I don't think it is necessary to understand or appreciate his music. If you need an explanation of this aspect, I recommend the Faubion Bowers biography. His philosophies are very similar to Indian Tantra and fire worship.

[zhangensprachen]

I don't know about understand but at least appreciation is something lacking. But to me, it's hardly surprising...

[georgecziffra]

That piano sounds way out of tune.

[truecrypt]

and it is! Many of Sofronitsky's recordings were made in poor conditions with cheap equipment...

I remember those pianos ;)

Probably digital tricks could fix some problems, but I'm afraid it can kill something very important... I think our imagination can *filter* through these obstacles.

[georgecziffra]

Indeed; it's still a breathtaking performance.

[FliegendeHollaender]

@truecrypt

I love the effect, but what do you mean you remember them? :)

[truecrypt]

@FliegendeHollaender

Oh, I've known those old pianos so well! ;)

I also remember old (and beaten up) Bechstein in Scriabin museum.

Many Sofronitsky's recordings were made on that particular piano.

[pkarkivist]

that piece was played on scriabin's piano...!!!

[guirlandes3]

@pkarkivist Actually, no, it was not recorded on Scriabin's Bechstein.. It was in fact recorded on another Bechsteitn at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, that belonged to Sofronitsky himself.

[paulostroff99]

Superb! Bravo! TY.