In the early years of our century, when vital new forces were revolutionising the arts, Russian-born Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was one of the visionary pioneers who sought a new musical language. At least a fulldecade before the advances of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Scriabin had begun the process of a complete break with all musical conventions. By 1905 he was immersed in a search for a way to express, in sound, the mysticaland theosophical ideas obsessed him.

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