I think that's what's so wonderful about Scriabin. He can bring you unexpected notes and harmonies, yet it only adds to the music.

Even in the Chopinesque Op. 1 waltz of this topic he isn't completely indebted to Chopin. He already has his own style at Op. 1, and I find it great that he can make you think, "Whoah, I didn't expect that note, but I love it!"

Exactly!!!

But only if it's played properly...

There are times when you're listening to somebody play, and it sounds like crap. Then they try saying: "It's not my fault! It's Scriabin's! He put a wierd note there..."

But that's just people being stupid...

And if you look even futher back than op. 1, to the sonata-fantasy, that I believe was written when he was either 12 or 13... you can still see that he had his own voice, right from the beginning.
I think that's the mark of a great composer. Every great composer always has his own style... they don't just rip it off from somebody else.

Too bad Scriabin died so young... He could have finished Mysterium...

Some of his stuff, like Mysterium, is too... weird for me (I don't know how else to put it). I like pretty much all of his tonal stuff, and the late sonatas are as strange as I'll listen.

I guess I can say that I like the unexpected things he does, but only to an extent. He got too weird toward the end of his life for most people, I think.

Would you believe that I actually used to feel the same way?

It took me a while to adjust myself to the later works... but after a lot of listening to them... it eventually just clicked. Now they're some of my favorites.

But I still adore the early works! He really brought new life into a fading style, which was being replaced by new modernist views...

Then he created his own modernist ideas... and I learned to love them!

But... the first time I heard his "Black Mass" Sonata... I remember being sooo freaked out, thinking it was the worst thing I'd ever listened to...
Now I listen to it all the time!
But... the White Mass sonata took me the longest to grow accustomed to, because at first, I couldn't quite understand it... now I do!

I believe Scriabin has a different (and in my opinion, much better) atonality than that of Schoenberg and the others. His music is almost a mix of Romantic, Impressionist, and Modernist; it is difficult to classify him.

We like him because he is like other composers, while at the same time he is completely unlike any others. I know that doesn't make sense .

Yes... Schoenberg is a very... wierd ... atonality.

The whole concept behind 12 tone technique is essentially that of randomnimity. He is purposely forgoing all standard musical thoughts, and using mathamatical formulae to become as random as possible. That's not music. That's just math. And bad math at that... It makes his music seem so detached and unemotional...

But Scriabin... his later music is still a romantic expression of the ecstacy that is life. Just in new terms that not everybody can understand. Sometimes you have to stop "listening" to the music, and you have to "feel" it.

Perfectly said.

I would do A natural and the A flat as written

Whoops! I just realized that I never actually checked my score to find out what it said...

Well, according to my copy of this piece, that A does have a natural sign in front of it. And all of my recordings I have of that piece have the pianist playing it with the natural... so I would assume whole-heartedly that it's supposed to be A-Natural all the way through.