When Rajan Lal (Music 2017) found his PhD viva delayed at short notice and for several months, he saw an opportunity.

Rajan wanted to use his time wisely before taking up his place as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and embarked on his first book project on tiny pieces of so-called ‘aphoristic music’, many premiered at a 1913 Skandalkonzert (‘scandal concert’), with his findings perhaps now likely to spark their very own – though musicological – spate of controversy.

Rajan’s PhD thesis was the culmination of his seven years as a student at Caius and focused on the Russian composer, amateur Theosophist, and wannabe Mystic Aleksandr Scriabin. Scriabin’s Late Works and the Holy Grail of Music Analysis (Open Book Publishers), his second book [forthcoming], is the result of that PhD project.

His first book, however, was prompted by a certain inertia over the completion of his doctorate. Webern’s Lost Cello Sonata and Music in the Aphoristic Style (Routledge 2026) is the result, with Rajan thankful to his PhD supervisor Professor Nicholas Marston and advisor, Dr Paul Wingfield, who had encouraged him to publish academic papers alongside his Scriabin research, ideally related to but a refreshing break from day-to-day doctoral study. 

“It's a weird tale of everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong,” says Rajan, whose final-year Viva was unexpectedly cancelled, prompting a protracted wait (and much associated paperwork) for the opportunity to defend his Scriabin research.

“It was stressful. I thought ‘argh, my life's being delayed by this cancellation’, but it turned out to be a real blessing in disguise!”

Rajan received reassurances that he would still able to move next door for his JRF, across Trinity Lane, despite the delay. During that time, he wrote his book, which offers a dual music-analytical and historical exploration of the ‘aphoristic style’; small yet strident modernist works written by the Second Viennese School between 1909 and 1914.

“Lots of people know about John Cage's 4' 33", which is where there is no ‘performed’ sound at all; you just listen to the ambient noise of the concert hall and, in a sort of ‘conceptual art’ manner, speculate how this relates to performance (or lack thereof…).” Rajan says.

“Some would say the predecessor to that about 40 years earlier is this music by three composers in the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Some of their pieces last about 10 seconds. You could sometimes be forgiven for thinking that they are an error on the part of performers, almost like instrumentalists just tuning up prior to a more substantial musical item. Are they significant enough to be considered truly on the ‘music’ side of the boundary between random sound and well-organised sonic discourse?”

“And the first time these pieces were performed, most notably of all in 1913, they initiated little short of a Skandalkonzert phenomenon; the audience would boo or walk out so challenging was this material to their artistic sensibilities!

“People have struggled to theorise the importance of the idea that music might be compressed almost to nothing, and indeed what to do with such miniaturist enterprises about the broader currents of music history.”

The prevailing trend has been to dismiss the works as “a dead end in composition”, Rajan adds, but his analysis is quite different.

“I argue that you can take these tiny pieces and you absolutely can subject them to something that looks like traditional music analysis,” he says.

“And you can get – in microcosm, though quite convincingly visible on the page and even sometimes audible to the trained ear – the same sort of formal shapes and tension and release patterns that you find in much larger symphonic or operatic composition. I argue that yes, this is music and its actually very interesting music in and of itself.”

There are occasions when the score for the music displays an inherently visual appeal, as the composers of the time played with all sorts of symmetrical harmonic shapes extremely novel even for fin-de-siècle Vienna. And there may also be untapped parallels to visual art, such as by Wassily Kandinsky, who shared considerable personal and scholarly contact with the Second Viennese School in the years in question.

“You might compare these pieces even to Kandinsky’s Landscape with Red Spots (1913), but musical, and certainly drastically miniaturised,” Rajan adds.