[1] Scriabin himself called it the "chord of the pleroma" (аккорд плеромы akkord pleromy),[1] which "was designed to afford instant apprehension of -that is, to reveal- what was in essence beyond the mind of man to conceptualize.
This tritone relationship between possible resolutions is important to Scriabin's harmonic language, and it is a property shared by the French sixth (also prominent in his work) of which the synthetic chord can be seen as an extension.
[4] For example, the chord is a whole tone scale with one note raised a semitone (the "almost whole-tone" hexachord, sometimes identified as "whole tone-plus"), and this alteration allows for a greater variety of resources through transposition.
[7] Playⓘ The notes of the chord also conform to a Lydian dominant quality, the fourth mode of the melodic minor scale.
Reise further points out (as have others) that in many of the late pieces, Scriabin extends the synthetic harmony by adding the note G - the next ascending P4.
Reise posits that this expanded harmony, which contains all the notes of the acoustic scale, might be reasonably called the synthetic harmony+.
Matthew Bengtson writes, “...the mystic chord acts as a kind of mediator, a convenient means of transit, hovering, as in mid-air, between the whole-tone and octatonic harmonic worlds.
[11] Contrary to many textbook descriptions of the chord, which present the sonority as a series of superposed fourths, Scriabin most often manipulated the voicings to produce a variety of melodic and harmonic intervals.
Incomplete versions of the chord spaced entirely in fourths are considerably more common, for example, in Deux Morceaux, Op.
In the score to the right is an example of a Duke Ellington composition that uses a different voicing of this chord at the end of the second bar, played on E (E13♯11).