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Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (born Leon Dudley Sorabji; 14 August 1892 – 15 October 1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Leon Dudley Sorabji

(1892-08-14)14 August 1892
Chingford, Essex, England

15 October 1988(1988-10-15) (aged 96)

Winfrith Newburgh, Dorset, England
  • Composer
  • music critic
  • pianist
  • writer

Sorabji was educated privately. His mother was English and his father a Parsi businessman and industrialist from India, who set up a trust fund that freed his family from the need to work. Although Sorabji was a reluctant performer and not a virtuoso, he played some of his music publicly between 1920 and 1936. In the late 1930s, his attitude shifted and he imposed restrictions on performance of his works, which he lifted in 1976. His compositions received little exposure in those years and he remained in public view mainly through his writings, which include the books Around Music and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician. During this time, he also left London and eventually settled in the village of Corfe Castle, Dorset. Information on Sorabji's life, especially his later years, is scarce, with most of it coming from the letters he exchanged with his friends.


As a composer, Sorabji was largely self-taught. Although he was attracted to modernist aesthetics at first, he later dismissed much of the established and contemporary repertoire. He drew on such diverse influences as Ferruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski and developed a style blending baroque forms with frequent polyrhythms, interplay of tonal and atonal elements and lavish ornamentation. Though he composed mostly for the piano and has been likened to the composer-pianists he admired, including Franz Liszt and Charles-Valentin Alkan, he also wrote orchestral, chamber and organ pieces. His harmonic language and complex rhythms anticipated works from the mid-20th century onwards, and while his music remained largely unpublished until the early 2000s, interest in it has grown since then.

An opening movement;

polythematic

An slow movement (labelled as a nocturne);

ornamental

A multi-sectional , which includes a fugue.[176]

finale

Legacy[edit]

Reception[edit]

Sorabji's music and personality have inspired both praise and condemnation, the latter of which has been often attributed to the length of some of his works.[342][343] Hugh MacDiarmid ranked him as one of the four greatest minds Great Britain had produced in his lifetime, eclipsed only by T. S. Eliot,[344] and the composer and conductor Mervyn Vicars put Sorabji next to Richard Wagner, who he believed "had one of the finest brains since Da Vinci".[345] By contrast, several major books on music history, including Richard Taruskin's 2005 Oxford History of Western Music, do not mention Sorabji, and he has never received official recognition from his country of birth.[346] A 1994 review of Le jardin parfumé (1923) suggested that "the unsympathetic might say that besides not belonging in our time it equally belongs in no other place",[347] and in 1937, one critic wrote that "one could listen to many more performances without really understanding the unique complexity of Sorabji's mind and music".[348]


In recent times, this divided reception has persisted to an extent. While some compare Sorabji to composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Messiaen,[189][349][350][351] others dismiss him altogether.[342][343][352][353] The pianist and composer Jonathan Powell writes of Sorabji's "unusual ability to combine the disparate and create surprising coherence".[354] Abrahams finds that Sorabji's musical production exhibits enormous "variety and imagination" and calls him "one of the few composers of the time to be able to develop a unique personal style and employ it freely at any scale he chose".[355] The organist Kevin Bowyer counts Sorabji's organ works, together with those of Messiaen, among the "Twentieth-Century Works of Genius".[356] Others have expressed more negative sentiments. The music critic Andrew Clements calls Sorabji "just another 20th-century English eccentric ... whose talent never matched [his] musical ambition".[357] The pianist John Bell Young described Sorabji's music as "glib repertoire" for "glib" performers.[358] The musicologist and critic Max Harrison, in his review of Rapoport's book Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, wrote unfavourably about Sorabji's compositions, piano playing, writings and personal conduct and implied that "nobody cared except a few close friends".[359] Another assessment was offered by the music critic Peter J. Rabinowitz, who, reviewing the 2015 reissue of Habermann's early Sorabji recordings, wrote that they "may provide a clue about why—even with the advocacy of some of the most ferociously talented pianists of the age—Sorabji's music has remained arcane". While saying that "it's hard not to be captivated, even hypnotized, by the sheer luxury of [his] nocturnes" and praising the "angular, dramatic, electrically crackling gestures" of some of his works, he claims that their tendency to "ostentatiously avoid the traditional Western rhetoric ... that marks out beginning, middle, and end or that sets up strong patterns of expectation and resolution" makes them hard to approach.[360]


Roberge says that Sorabji "failed to realize ... that negative criticism is part of the game, and that people who can be sympathetic to one's music do exist, though they may sometimes be hard to find",[361] and Sorabji's lack of interaction with the music world has been criticised even by his admirers.[359][362][363] In September 1988, following lengthy conversations with the composer, Hinton founded The Sorabji Archive to disseminate knowledge of Sorabji's legacy.[364][365] His musical autographs are located in various places across the world, with the largest collection of them residing in the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland).[366][n 23] While much of his music remained in manuscript form until the early 2000s, interest in it has grown since then, with his piano works being the best represented by recordings and modern editions.[368][369] Landmark events in the discovery of Sorabji's music include performances of Opus clavicembalisticum by Madge and John Ogdon, and Powell's recording of Sequentia cyclica.[364][370] First editions of many of Sorabji's piano works have been made by Powell and the pianist Alexander Abercrombie, among others, and the three organ symphonies have been edited by Bowyer.[371]

Innovation[edit]

Sorabji has been described as a conservative composer who developed an idiosyncratic style fusing diverse influences.[372][373][374] However, the perception of and responses to his music have evolved over the years. His early, often modernist works were greeted largely with incomprehension:[375] a 1922 review stated, "compared to Mr. Sorabji, Arnold Schönberg must be a tame reactionary",[376] and the composer Louis Saguer, speaking at Darmstadt in 1949, mentioned Sorabji as a member of the musical avant-garde that few will have the means to understand.[377] Abrahams writes that Sorabji "had begun his compositional career at the forefront of compositional thought and ended it seeming decidedly old-fashioned", yet adds that "even now Sorabji's 'old-fashioned' outlook sometimes remains somewhat cryptic".[378]


Various parallels have been identified between Sorabji and later composers. Ullén suggests that Sorabji's 100 Transcendental Studies (1940–44) can be seen as presaging the piano music of Ligeti, Michael Finnissy and Brian Ferneyhough, although he cautions against overstating this.[372] Roberge compares the opening of Sorabji's orchestral piece Chaleur—Poème (1916–17) to the micropolyphonic texture of Ligeti's Atmosphères (1961) and Powell has noted the use of metric modulation in Sequentia cyclica (1948–49), which was composed around the same time as (and independently from) Elliott Carter's 1948 Cello Sonata, the first work in which Carter employed the technique.[379][380][n 24] The mixing of chords with different root notes and the use of nested tuplets, both present throughout Sorabji's works, have been described as anticipating Messiaen's music and Stockhausen's Klavierstücke (1952–2004) respectively by several decades.[384] Sorabji's fusion of tonality and atonality into a new approach to relationships between harmonies, too, has been called an important innovation.[385]

contains up-to-date information on scores, performances, recordings and broadcasts of Sorabji's music.

The website of The Sorabji Archive

The , by Marc-André Roberge, is an extensive repository of lists, compilations, tables, analytical charts and links about many aspects of Sorabji's life and works. One of its menu entries is devoted to the author's Opus sorabjianum: The Life and Works of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, with a link to the complete file in PDF format (available as a free download).

Sorabji Resource Site

at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)

Free scores by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji