Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian Symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age.

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, painter, teacher, and writer. Among the first modernist composers to write music of dense motivic relations saturating the musical texture, he propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".