The purpose of this study is to analyze the compositional style of Alexander Scriabin’s (1872-1915) nocturnes from different periods, discuss musical interpretation, and also compare his nocturnes’ characteristics between the his early and late periods.

The first chapter explains the motivation, purpose, methods, and references of this thesis. The second chapter outlines Scriabin's life and music style into three periods according to Scriabin: artist and mystic (1987) and also explains the characteristics of his nocturnes. The third chapter explores the background, form structure, melody, harmony, and rhythmic motive…etc of three Scriabin pieces. Furthermore, “Pitch-Class Sets Theory” theorized by Allen Forte (1926-2014) was utilized as a research resource for “Poème-Nocturne, Op. 61”. The fourth chapter expounds the author’s insight on interpretation and playing technique by using the “dynamic-graph” for performers to easily understand the texture changes of music. Finally, the fifth chapter concludes the thesis.

Scriabin’s early period follows the late Romantic Period’s music style. Take “2 Nocturnes, Op. 5” (1893) and “Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9-2” (1894) for example. These two pieces contain melodies which are influenced by Chopin. Scriabin’s late period piece “Poème-Nocturne, Op. 61” was composed in 1911 and finished in 1912. This late period piece removed the key signature and used mystic chords with a variety of scales as creative musical elements. Scriabin combined poeme with nocturne and added many symbolic terms, such as rest and fermata, to create a sense of mystery.

Nowadays, most studies focus on Scriabin’s sonatas, poemes, and etudes more than his nocturnes. Hopefully in the future more specialists will provide an abundance of written and video information to complete the analysis of Scriabin’s nocturne works.