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Here you will find the most current biographical information on
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

(b Chingford, 14 Aug 1892; d Winfrith Newburgh, nr Dorchester, 15 Oct 1988)

The son of a Spanish-Sicilian mother and a Parsi father, Sorabji disliked being labelled as English. He was educated privately in London, receiving several years’ training in music. He was a self-taught composer, his known works dating from 1914 to 1984. Between the world wars he was a music critic, notably for the New Age and the New English Weekly. He remained an outsider as a critic and composer, owing to his anti-establishment views, private training, racial origins, homosexuality and self-described “mania for privacy”. This last led him to mislead or turn away people enquiring after personal data such as the year and place of his birth.

For neo-classicism, serialism, electronics, indeterminacy and other 20th-century musical innovations he had no patience, similarly for music of many established and especially German masters, and for vernacular music of any kind. He championed many composers little known in England, for example Alkan, Mahler, Busoni, Godowsky, Reger and Szymanowski. Of these, Busoni as composer and pianist drew his strongest admiration.

The music he commended often shared features of his own: Baroque structure, post-Romantic grandeur and scope, complex and free harmony and tonality, continuous evolution of long melodies, asymmetrical phrases unaffected by dualistic formal patterns, Impressionistic colour, bountiful ornamentation and virtuosity, and deep mystical or religious qualities. He considered the acts of composition and performance intensely sacred, and the best music to be suitable only for initiates, not the uncultured masses.

Nearly all of his music includes the piano, with solo pieces the most prominent. Works range from musical aphorisms of a phrase or two to some lasting several hours. In the larger keyboard works are found expansive sections based on Baroque models such as variation, fugue and toccata next to luxurious nocturnes or other free, almost improvisatory fantasies. This culminated in his longest published piano work, Opus clavicembalisticum. Modelled after Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, it lasts over four hours.

Sorabji also composed musical paraphrases and freer treatments of pre-existing material. His solo organ works, which require large Romantic instruments, consist of three symphonies, the shortest lasting two hours. Almost all his songs date from the first quarter of his career - most set French texts and are in a French style.

Almost never using sketches, Sorabji wrote his music in its final form quickly. His piano music generally uses three or four staves, and as many as seven. The extreme technical and interpretative difficulty of his music, together with his disdain for the public and its for him, led Sorabji eventually to forbid public performance of his works without his permission. Between the early 1940s and 1976 very few performances occurred. The first to perform his music with permission after this hiatus were the pianists Yonty Solomon (1976) and Michael Habermann (1977). Since then, a few works have been played by others, including eminent keyboard performers such as Ogdon, Madge, Bowyer and Hamelin.

Most of Sorabji’s manuscripts are hard to read or rely on. Copying and editing of portions or indeed all of the composition have been necessary in order to provide usable notation.

In 1988 the Sorabji Archive was founded in Bath by Alistair Hinton, Sorabji’s residual legatee, to be the central resource for Sorabji’s music and writings; in 1994 many of his original manuscripts went to Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basle.

-Paul Rapoport (excerpted from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)

The Sorabji Biography