Days with Kaikhosru Sorabji

During the second week of July, leading up to the 14th of the month, we celebrated the work of Ingmar Bergman, watching six of his films, and discussing them daily on Clubhouse. Before embarking again in the world of cinema, though from a very different space and time to celebrate the offerings of Pedro Almodovar (*IX 25 1949), this coming week will once more lead us to the 14th of the month.

While searching for unusual music samples in the months passed, I came across the Organ Symphony No 1. KSS 39, by the composer and pianist Kaikhosru Sorabji. In similar fashion, the second week of the current month will lead us into the 14th, as we listen to (in all likelihood) fifteen works by Sorabji, who was born in 1892, on the 14 of August.

I am deeply grateful to the director and curator of The Sorabji Archive, Alistair Hinton, for the assistance and support he has provided towards this endeavor. Being composer and pianist himself, as well as friend and collaborator with Sorabji, he is certainly apt to provide biographical detail on the man we are celebrating.

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A short biography — By Alistair Hinton

“TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, IF ANY, AND OTHERS WHO MIND ANYBODY’S BUSINESS BUT THEIR OWN.”

“Dates and places of birth relating to myself given in various works of reference are invariably false.”

“… Certain lexographical canaille, one egregious and notorious specimen particularly, enraged at my complete success in defeating and frustrating their impudent impertinent and presumptuous nosings and pryings into what doesn’t concern them, and actuated, no doubt, by the mean malice of the base-born for their betters, have thought, as they would say, to take it out of me by suggesting that my name isn’t really my name.”

“Insects that are merely noisome like to think that they can also sting.”
—Kaikhosru Sorabji

“A great composer, a great critic, and a prince among men, I know nothing about Sorabji (none of the particulars men usually know of each other, family affairs, education, hobbies, etc.) — nothing, but I think everything that matters, everything, as Jeeves would say, that is ‘of the essence.’”
—Hugh MacDiarmid, in The Company I’ve Kept, 1966.

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For those interested in such matters, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born in Chingford, Essex, England on 14 August 1892; his father was a Zoroastrian Parsi civil engineer and his mother English (for a long time, until the work of Sean Vaughan Owen, she was reputed to be part Sicilian, part Spanish). He spent most of his life in England. From his early ’teens he developed an insatiable appetite for the latest developments in contemporary European and Russian music and went to great lengths to obtain the latest scores of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Schönberg, Skryabin, Rakhmaninov and others at a time and in a country where almost all such music was largely unknown and unrecognized. Of an independent and uniquely curious nature, it is perhaps unsurprising given the pre-War English environment that his education, both general and musical, was mostly private.

For a composer as prolific as he was soon to become, he was an unusually late developer and his voracity in absorbing all the most recent trends in other people’s music seems to have excluded from his mind the idea of making his own until he reached his twenties.

A close friend and confidant of the English composer Philip Heseltine from 1913, Sorabji wrote to him that he was considering a career as a music critic. Once he had begun to compose, however, the floodgates of his imagination burst and a tremendous river of musical creativity flowed forth almost uninterrupted until the early 1980s.

An intensely private person who loathed to participate in public gatherings of any sort, he performed some of his own piano works on rare occasions and with considerable success, most notably in the 1930s in Erik Chisholm’s historic Glasgow-based Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music concert series. Sorabji’s final concert appearance (1936) may have coincided with a decision to withdraw his work from the concert platform by vetoing public performances without his express consent, an unusual and courageous step that led to virtual silence for almost 40 years, declaring that he considered them unsuited to conventional concert performance and that “no performance at all is vastly preferable to an obscene travesty”. While he never actually imposed an unequivocal “ban” on public performances of his works, as used to be claimed, the result was that concert-goers around the world heard almost none of his music for nearly four decades. In view of the colossal difficulties involved in performing much of his music, it was not unexpected that this regrettable situation would continue almost unchallenged for so long.

In the intervening years, Sorabji worked as a critic for The New Age and The New English Weekly until his retirement in 1945; he also continued composing richly expressive and extraordinarily elaborate music at a furious pace, mostly for the piano, without the slightest care as to whether or not it might ever reach the ears of the public.

He resented the intrusion of casual inquirers about himself and his work, as a result of which many entries on him in major music lexica were more notable for their conflict than for the reliability of their information about him. As a result, some of those who remembered his continued existence but knew little or nothing of what he was doing and why, chose — almost inevitably, one supposes — to spin webs of myth and legend about him. These tell more about their creators than they do about Sorabji. It has taken some years to wipe away the fatuous “Howard Hughes of Music” image of him which had been fostered by some who had little better to do.

He lived quietly and modestly in London and then in South Dorset in self-chosen isolation, undisturbed by the mêlée of professional public music-making. He had the good fortune of a small private income which allowed him this existence and permitted him to get on with his work uninhibited and undisturbed.

From 1976, the pioneering efforts of South African pianist Yonty Solomon began to turn the history of Sorabji’s reputation. In a monumental series of London recitals, he presented a number of Sorabji’s piano works for the first time and the interest which these generated has grown and developed ever since. This inevitably led to increasing international interest in his music; following Solomon’s pioneering, more performers presented authorised performances, broadcasts and commercial recordings, laying to rest at last the long-held myth of its unplayability. In suitable conditions, Sorabji permitted — even encouraged — this, once he recognised the existence of musicians capable of doing it justice. Cognoscenti of the major keyboard works do not predict such compendia of fearsome difficulties becoming “standard repertoire”, but whilst the music hurls uniquely forbidding challenges at performers, it exerts an immediate intellectual and emotional grip on listeners.

The 1980s witnessed, among other performances, an astonishingly accurate and powerful première of Sorabji’s two-hour Organ Symphony No. 1 (1923–24) and an absolutely stunning account of all four-and-three-quarter hours of his piano work Opus clavicembalisticum (1929–30), which proved to be the crowning glory of John Ogdon’s career. Further major premières have followed since.

Following Sorabji’s death at the age of 96, a series of CD recordings began to appear, including the two works mentioned above. The Sorabji Archive has encouraged major performers and scholars to create fine new editions of the composer’s works from his manuscripts.

International artists of distinction who have performed, broadcast and recorded Sorabji’s music include pianists Yonty Solomon, John Ogdon, Marc-André Hamelin, Michael Habermann, Donna Amato, Ronald Stevenson, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Carlo Grante, Charles Hopkins and Jonathan Powell, organist Kevin Bowyer and sopranos Jane Manning, Jo Ann Pickens and Sarah Leonard.

His centenary was marked not only by performers and broadcasters but also by Scolar Press’s publication of Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, a multi-author symposium edited by Prof. Paul Rapoport. This first full-length survey of Sorabji was reprinted in 1994. One of its contributors, Prof. Marc-André Roberge, has since prepared a substantial Sorabji biographical study; entitled Opus Sorabjianum and first published online in 2013; it is updated from time to time to reflect newly discovered information.

Source: The Sorabji Archive

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The seed bringing about this Sorabji celebration week stems from two independent ideas. While living in the Belgian city of Liège, it dawned on me that a life ought to be lived in such a way that even postmortem the individual life may bear fruits. As the Clubhouse application surfaced in 2020, and I began to program my own rooms, the perfect opportunity had arrived to pay tribute to those I consider to live or have lived in that manner. The Life You Give series was born, and I have been celebrating the birthdays of such individuals for over two years. Sorabji is certainly one of those individuals.

Beyond being worthy of celebration for his contributions to society for centuries to come, Sorabji is the first subject in yet another idea aiming to dive into the mind of the aesthetic catalyst. Minds, and souls and hearts aplenty have dedicated much of their lives to their craft with sweat and vision, be it through music, science, cinema, philosophy, and literature, just to bring depth, clarity, joy or elevation to this thing we call life. And some do it with a highly wholistic, and sustainable, as well as with a focused, refined, contextual and conceptual approach. They pay attention to detail, to threads, and to complexities to such extent, that slowly but surely the fruit they bear becomes nourishment of unimagined dimensions for all — yes, often for all, aware or not. Subsequently we have been listening to Johann Sebastian Bach for well over three centuries, and no musician, neither serious nor entertaining one, can ever escape him; Richard Wagner injected his very own drama as “Gesamtkunstwerk” (totality of an art work) into the realm of the opera; and, though through mere interpretation, Maria Callas, and Aretha Franklin gave us an eternity of their metaphysically embodied grand voices; further yet, while popular for his entertaining level to millions for over half a century, David Bowie, not only through his musical, performative and visual artistry, left an imprint way beyond the commercial success he achieved. None of these artists gave us fruits that this planet would be ever better without.

Through The Life You Give, and the musicus, organicus concepts, I cordially invite you to join me in celebrating the music and demanding attitude of the life known as Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji.

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Days with Kaikhosru Sorabji
at
musicus, organicus / Clubhouse

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