Pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin, according to one calendar, was born on Christmas Day, 1972. His highly idiosyncratic figure as both man and musician endeared him to the poets of his time, who were able to understand him, but made him unpopular with contemporary composers, who were too different from him. He was a small man, with genteel and affected mannerisms. He studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1892 with perfect marks and a medal for merit. He was often struck by nervous fits and tormented by dark thoughts. He was a strange man, who walked with an unusual skip. His early musical production reflects his great skill as a pianist (which was universally acknowledged.) His writing builds on the tradition of Chopin and Liszt. In Scriabin’s vision there is a creator Spirit that permeates matter with light and the matter brought to life becomes “waves” (A in Russian, a word that evokes a cadenced flow). Sound, which exists because it propogates through spherical waves, and color, both constituitive elements of matter, are defined by their vibrations. Sound and color fill up the cosmos, a cosmos made of time and space.