Scriabin's Prelude Op. 67 No. 1: Pitch Orthography, Musical Climax and Form

In tonal music, the way in which pitches are spelled reflects their meaning in various contextual and textural settings such as harmony, melody and voice leading. At the turn of the twentieth century, many composers attempted to progress beyond the confines of traditional tonality; and their works, as generally perceived by most analysts nowadays, treated the twelve chromatic pitches as twelve enharmonically equivalent pitch classes. No matter what musical context is encountered, we perceive F♯ and G♭ syntactically and structurally as the same pitch class, paying little attention to the composer's choice of notation. The present article brings the significance of pitch notation into sharper focus by investigating its crucial role in the structure and form of Scriabin's Prelude Op. 67 No. 1 (1912–13). I will demonstrate how Scriabin utilises orthography to create a concealed musical climax that reinforces the narrative design of the form, helping the analyst to regard notation as a core element when examining the pitch structure in music after 1900.