Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (14 August 1892 – 15 October 1988) (born Leon Dudley Sorabji) was an English composer, music critic, pianist, and writer.

Largely self-taught as a composer, Sorabji distanced himself from the main currents of contemporary musical life early on in his career. He developed a highly idiosyncratic musical language with roots in composers as diverse as Busoni, Debussy, and Szymanowski, and dismissed large portions of the established and contemporary repertoire.

A reluctant performer, Sorabji played a few of his works in public up until 1936, and subsequently "banned" public performances of his music, maintaining this "ban" until 1976. Since his compositions were not published during those years, he remained in the public's sight mainly by writing essays and musical criticism, at the center of which are the books Around Music and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician.

Biography

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born Leon Dudley Sorabji in Chingford, Essex (now Greater London). His father was a civil engineer of Parsi parentage from Bombay. His mother, Madeline, according to the census for the night of 2 April 1911, contrary to other reports, was born a "British subject by parentage" in Devonshire and was 37 years old on that day, living at 4 Hill Road, London NW8 9QG, a house of eight rooms in the St. Johns Wood district of London. On the night of the census, the head of the household (Sorabji's father) was absent and possibly abroad, since he does not appear in the complete census. Madeline declares herself a person of private means. A maid, Emily Mildred King, aged 22 is also included in the household. Sorabji is said to be 17 years old and a student.

Sorabji never visited India during his youth. He later changed his name to demonstrate his strong identification with his Parsi heritage. He explained why he did this:

"It is also stated that my name, my real name, that is the one I am known by, is not my real name. Now one is given one's name—one's authentic ones—at some such ceremony as baptism, Christening, or the like, on the occasion of one's formal reception into a certain religious Faith. In the ancient Zarathustrian Parsi community to which, on my father's side, I have the honour to belong, this ceremony is normally performed, as in other Faiths, in childhood, or owing to special circumstances as in my case, later in life, when I assumed my name as it now is or, in the words of the legal document in which this is mentioned ' . . . received into the Parsi community and in accordance with the custom and tradition thereof, is now and will be henceforth known as . . . ' and here follows my name as now."

Between 1936–1976, Sorabji banned unauthorised performances of his music.

Private life

Many details of his life were for a long time hard to come by, as Sorabji was extraordinarily private. He almost always refused requests for interviews or information, often with rude messages and warnings not to approach him again. This has led to numerous misunderstandings, for instance, that he lived in a castle, probably because he lived in the Dorset village of Corfe Castle. He refused permission for his works to be publicly performed. Since he had independent financial means, he felt no need to be tactful in his dealings with the public, critics, and musicians interested in performing his works. His home, which he named "The Eye", had a sign at the gate: "Visitors Unwelcome." Nevertheless, he had numerous friends, including the Scottish composer Alistair Hinton, who is the founder and director of the Sorabji Archive.

Writings

As a music critic, Sorabji was loosely connected to the New Age Magazine group surrounding A. R. Orage. He was friends with Philip Heseltine, who wrote music under the pseudonym Peter Warlock, and became a music critic in part because of their friendship. His critical publications were of concentrated bitterness, weight, and sharpness, but they were also highly sarcastic and displayed an extreme mistrust of the English public taste. Among his publications are essays about Busoni, Reger, Szymanowski, Bernard van Dieren, and other musicians, as well as various musical (and non-musical) issues.

Music

Works

List of compositions by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Style

Sorabji's music was influenced mainly by Alkan, Busoni, Godowsky, Reger, Szymanowski, and Delius.

Although Sorabji's pieces employ (as a result of Busoni's and Reger's influence) many conventional contrapuntal baroque forms (chorale prelude, passacaglia, fugue, and others), Sorabji also rejected the musical symmetry and sonata-allegro form (which he referred to as the "sonata form jelly mould") which characterise the music of composers such as Mozart and Brahms; for this reason (among others), he is not a neoclassical composer in the strict sense of the term.

One of the notable features of Sorabji's mature compositional language are his symphonic first movements, which have been labeled as "symphonic tapestries" and "a kind of pure music drama." While they can be viewed as being superficially based on either the fugue or the sonata-allegro form, they differ from them in that the exposition and development of themes is not guided by conventional tonal principles, but rather by their mutual dialectic, and that which Sorabji termed as the "inner necessity of the music." They can last over 90 minutes, and their complexity varies considerably; while the opening movement of the Fourth Piano Sonata introduces 7 themes, that of the Second Piano Symphony has 64 themes.

Much of Sorabji's melodic thinking can be considered Impressionist, and his transformation of themes and motives can therefore be hard to grasp. Michael Habermann explains it thus:

Sorabji's way of achieving both variety and unity in his work was to base each piece on a number of musical "gestures." Constantly varied, developed, combined, and juxtaposed, these basic ideas are heard over and over again. Gestures differ from themes in that they are defined chiefly by their general outline. Matching pitch sequences or characteristic rhythmic patterns are of less consequence than the overall contour. Their development is governed by the composer's sense of timing and his ideal of constant variation.

While Sorabji wrote many pieces of standard or even sub-Webernian length, several of his works are of extraordinary length and difficulty, making them inaccessible to most musicians. In a letter to his good friend Peter Warlock, Sorabji writes, "Again: 'if you make your work of such monstrous difficulty, no one can play it but the finest pianists.' What if it is only for the 'very finest pianists'? What if it is for no one at all but its creator?" His piano work Opus clavicembalisticum takes about 4 hours to play and was described by the Guinness Book of Records as the longest non-repetitive piano piece ever written. This claim is not accurate, as Sorabji's own Fifth Piano Sonata (Opus archimagicum), Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis, and the Études transcendantes (100) all have substantially longer durations than Opus clavicembalisticum. His piece Symphonic Variations for Piano occupies 484 A3-pages of manuscript and could take nine hours to play. The Second Symphony for Organ lasts about eight hours and its second movement is as long as the complete Opus clavicembalisticum.

In a way reminiscent of Scriabin's work, Sorabji's music was shaped by non-musical subjects, both religious and numerological. Unlike Scriabin, however, Sorabji took inspiration from various sources; hence his Fifth Piano Sonata (Opus archimagicum) is inspired by the Tarot and his Tāntrik Symphony for Piano Alone has seven movements titled after the bodily centers of Tantric and Shaktic yoga, while his song Benedizione di San Francesco d’Assisi sets the text of a benediction by Saint Francis of Assisi.

Partial list of performed and recorded works

Many of Sorabji's major works have not been recorded at all, and some others have had recordings of selected movements only. The record label Altarus intends to eventually release a full discography of Sorabji's work.

Sorabji's often extremely difficult pieces have been tackled by various musicians, the most prominent being Donna Amato, Kevin Bowyer, Elizabeth Farnum, Carlo Grante, Michael Habermann, Marc-André Hamelin, Reinier van Houdt, Tellef Johnson, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Soheil Nasseri, John Ogdon, Jonathan Powell, Yonty Solomon, Ronald Stevenson, Fredrik Ullén, and Daan Vandewalle.

There is information on performances up to its date of publication in the book Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, in the chapter Un tessuto d'esecuzioni. Information on premieres, again up to that date and so far as known can also be found in the entries on individual works in The "Detailed Catalog" section of the chapter called "Could you just send me a list of his works?" The most comprehensive up to date list of performances and broadcasts be can found here, while a complete discography can be found here.

• Orchestral works
  • Two performances of Chaleur have taken place in Frankfurt, in 1999 and 2000.

• Works for piano with orchestra
  • Piano Concerto No. 5 (published as Concerto II pour piano et orchestre in 1923 by F. and B. Goodwin Ltd. of London). Premiered in Utrecht in March 2003, and broadcast by Radio Hilversum, Netherlands in May 2003 with Donna Amato as the soloist.

• Works for chamber ensemble
  • Piano Quintet No. 1 — it was premiered by Chris Berg (piano), Marshall Coid and Lilit Gampel (violins), David Cerutti (viola), and Christine Gummere (cello) in 1998.
  • Il tessuto d'arabeschi — premiered in 1982 in Philadelphia.
  • Fantasiettina atematica — premiered in 1995 in London.

• Works for organ solo
  • Organ Symphony No. 1 — second movement performed in 1928 by E. Emlyn Davies. Entire work premiered by Kevin Bowyer (movements 1 & 3) and Thomas Trotter (movement 2) in 1987. Recorded by Kevin Bowyer on Continuum Records (1001/2, released in 1988).
  • Organ Symphony No. 2 — premiered by Bowyer in Glasgow, June 6, 2010.

• Works for piano solo
  • Sonatas
    • Sonata 1 premiered by Sorabji in 1920, recorded by Marc-André Hamelin for the label Altarus in 1990
    • Sonata 2 premiered by Sorabji in 1922, recorded by Tellef Johnson for the label Altarus in 1999
    • Sonata 3 premiered by Yonty Solomon in 1977
    • Sonata 4 premiered by Sorabji in 1930, recorded by Jonathan Powell for Altarus in 2004
  • Symphonies
    • Fourth Symphony premiered by Reinier van Houdt at Utrecht in March 2003 and performed several times, in Canada in 2003
    • Symphonia brevis premiered in New York City, 2004 by Donna Amato, who recorded the work for Altarus in 2011
  • Toccatas
    • Of the numbered toccatas, Toccata No. 1 (1928) is recorded (by Jonathan Powell, for Altarus in 2003). Toccata No. 2 was premiered by Sorabji in 1936.
  • Opus clavicembalisticum
    • Premiered by Sorabji in 1930. Given its second complete performance in 1982 by Geoffrey Douglas Madge, who performed it several times. Two of these performances have made it to recording media; his first, from Utrecht, was recorded for Keytone Records, and has long since been deleted. A subsequent performance in Chicago has been released on a set of BIS CDs (a Swedish label). Madge has also performed the work in Montréal, Bonn, Paris, and Berlin. Altarus has also released a recording by John Ogdon. The piece has been performed six times by Madge, four times by Jonathan Powell, twice by John Ogdon, twice by Daan Vandewalle, and once by the composer.
  • Études transcendantes (100)
    • Individual ones of these have found their way into concerts (e.g. at the Newport Festival and the Schloss vor Husum festival of unusual piano music) and onto recordings. BIS have announced that the complete set will be recorded by the pianist Fredrik Ullén; to date, the first 62 have been released.
  • Other piano works
    • Michael Habermann recorded many short works in the 1980s for the MusicMasters label, as well as a CD for Elan and a CD of transcriptions for BIS. The earlier recordings have been re-released by the British Music Society.
    • Donna Amato has also recorded several shorter works, all released on the Altarus label.
    • Altarus have also released other shorter works.

• Songs
  • Sorabji's songs for soprano have been recorded by Elizabeth Farnum (soprano) and Margaret Kampmeier (piano) for Centaur.

Further reading

• Le mauvais jardinier: A Reassessment of the Myths and Music of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji by Simon John Abrahams (Ph.D. thesis, King’s College London, 2002)
• A Style Analysis of the Nocturnes for Solo Piano by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji with Special Emphasis on "Le jardin parfumé" by Michael Habermann (D.M.A. diss., Peabody Conservatory of Music, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, 1984)
• Paul Rapoport has edited a book, Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992, ISBN 0-85967-923-3. This book, the first to be devoted to the composer's life and music, clarifies some once-obscure biographical details, contains a more complete list of works than was previously available, and also includes several interviews and analyses.
• Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Around Music, reprinted 1979 by Hyperion Press. ISBN 0-88355-764-9. Available from the Sorabji Archive.
• Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician, reprinted 1986 by Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-76275-7. Available from the Sorabji Archive.

External links

• The website of the Sorabji Archive contains up-to-date information on scores, performances, recordings and broadcasts of Sorabji's music.
• The Sorabji Forum is part of the Sorabji Archive website.
• The Sorabji Resource Site, by Marc-André Roberge (Faculty of Music, Laval University), is an extensive repository of lists, compilations, tables, analytical charts, and links about many aspects of Sorabji's life and work.
• Former (nowadays outdated) website of the Sorabji Archive