In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (review)

There are a number of different types of forgotten stories that deserve to be retold. Sylvia Kahan's In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer tells a history-altering story about the composer and theorist Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901), who began (but did not publish) a treatise on the octatonic scale in 1879, later published octatonic works with analytic commentary, and would enter into a literary battle with the Hungarian theorist de Bertha to claim discovery of this scale. It is tantalizing to consider the impact Polignac's work could have had on research into this scale. Although Rimsky-Korsakov had referred, in a letter from 1867 to Balakirev, to his use of the scale in the symphonic poem Sadko, which he had composed earlier that year, Polignac's treatise predates other scholarship on this topic, likely including even Rimsky's harmony text, which was published in 1884–85. Even more intriguing is the possibility raised by Kahan regarding the potential influence Polignac may have had on both Debussy and Ravel, both of whom used this scale.

Kahan's study is organized into two main sections: the first consists of a biography of the Prince, one that includes extensive analysis of his works; and the second presents Polignac's treatise (in both English and the original French) complete with commentary. Kahan's biography of Polignac might at first seem superfluous to the main thrust of her study, the Prince's discovery and exploration of the octatonic. Nevertheless, the biographical, historical, and musico-theoretical information presented here combine to paint a vivid portrait of Polignac as well as of the final quarter of nineteenth-century France. Without context, it is difficult to understand how her research on Polignac's classical education and his family's talent for mathematics, a French treatise on Greek folk melodies, or France's knowledge of Russian music in 1878, could explicate and inform the Prince's octatonic discovery, yet Kahan makes one side of this coin seem impossible without the other. Given this inseparability between history and theory, it is not surprising to see that the author thanks Richard Taruskin in the study's acknowledgements; his Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) is perhaps the most famous example of this scholarly philosophy.

Kahan does not attempt to claim Polignac as an "unjustly neglected composer" (p. 3). The reader is nevertheless allowed to witness the Prince's compositional development through excerpts from works published throughout his career as well as those used as examples in his treatise. His early works contain mediant and tritonic key relations as well as the exploration of other scales (more on this below), all of which lays the groundwork for his discovery of the octatonic. In the end, in spite of Kahan's meticulous and thorough research, she is unable to pinpoint the cause behind Polignac's discovery; his adventurous nature combined with a thorough mathematical training and exposure to Greek tetrachordal theory are cited as the most likely catalysts.

The biography becomes more analytical once the Prince makes his discovery, and this trend culminates in the final chapter devoted to lengthy analyses of five selected octatonic works from between 1878–79 and 1900. Kahan's analysis and commentary gradually introduce the reader to the material from the treatise that forms the second half of her study. This organization not only allows the reader to absorb the Prince's ideas before reading them in his own words, but serves to make those ideas more comprehensible as well. The chaotic and incomplete state of the treatise as Kahan discovered it necessitated serious editing on her part, and raises unanswerable questions as well: Did the Prince intend to publish the document, and if so, for what audience? It is for these reasons that the treatise itself is...