 Ornamentation assumes a preeminent role in much of Sorabji's music. His harmonic language, which frequently combines tonal and atonal elements, is thus freer than in the music of many other composers and less amenable to analysis. Like many other 20th-century composers, Sorabji displays a fondness for tritone and semitone relationships. The opening gesture of his Fourth Piano Sonata, for example, emphasises these two intervals, and the two long pedal points in its third movement are a tritone apart. However, some people have remarked that his music rarely contains the tension that is commonly associated with very dissonant music.
