page_title: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
section_title: Inspiration and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji / Music / Inspiration and influences
context_page_description: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer. One of the 20th century's most prolific piano composers, he is best known for his works for the instrument, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica, 100 Transcendental Studies, Opus clavicembalisticum, six piano sonatas and his "Gulistān"—Nocturne for Piano.
  Sorabji expressed a sense of otherness early in his life. As a homosexual of mixed ancestry and feeling alienated from English society, he was educated privately and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion. His mother was English and his father a wealthy Parsi businessman from India, who set up a modest trust fund that freed him from the need to work. Although a reluctant performer and not a virtuoso, Sorabji played a few of his works in public between 1920 and 1936. In the late 1930s, a shift in his attitude took place and he imposed restrictions on performance of his music, which he lifted in 1976.
context_section_description: Sorabji's early influences include Cyril Scott, Ravel, Leo Ornstein and particularly Scriabin. He later became more critical of Scriabin and, after meeting Busoni in 1919, was influenced primarily by the latter, both in his music and writings. His mature work was also significantly influenced by Alkan, Debussy, Godowsky, Reger and Szymanowski.
  Eastern culture had some influence on Sorabji. According to Habermann, this manifests itself in the following ways: highly supple and irregular rhythmic patterns, abundant ornamentation, an improvisatory and timeless feel, frequent polyrhythmic writing and the vast dimensions of some of his compositions. Sorabji wrote in 1960 that he almost never sought to blend Eastern and Western music, and although he had positive things to say about Indian music in the 1920s, he later saw limitations inherent in it and the raga, including a lack of thematic development, which was sidelined in favour of repetition. A major source of inspiration were his readings of Persian literature, especially for his nocturnes, which have been described by Sorabji and others as evoking tropical heat, a hothouse or a rainforest.
  Religious and occult references appear in Sorabji's music, too, and they come from various sources. His Fifth Piano Sonata (Opus archimagicum) is inspired by the tarot and the song Benedizione di San Francesco d'Assisi sets the text of a Catholic benediction, while the Variazioni e fuga triplice sopra "Dies irae" per pianoforte end with sections named after the seven deadly sins. However, Sorabji rarely intended his works to be programmatic, and although some of them have been described as such, he repeatedly heaped scorn on attempts to represent stories or ideologies in music.
  Part of Sorabji's formal planning was allotting a fixed number to sections or components of his works, which reflects his interest in number symbolism. This can be seen in the length of his manuscripts, how many variations a piece contains or the number of bars in a work. Recent scholarly writings on Sorabji's music have also suggested an interest in the golden section as a means of formal division. Squares (e.g. 64, 81 and 100) and cubes (e.g. 27) are common, as are repdigits and other numbers with special symbolism. Page numbers may be used twice or absent, in order to achieve the desired result; a notable example is Piano Sonata No. 5 (Opus archimagicum), the last page of which is numbered 343a, although the score has 336 pages. This kind of tweaking is also seen in the numbering of variations.
  Sorabji, who claimed to be of Spanish-Sicilian ancestry, composed pieces that reflect an enthusiasm for southern cultures, such as Fantasia ispanica, Rosario d'arabeschi and Passeggiata veneziana sopra la Barcarola di Offenbach. These are works of a Mediterranean character and are inspired by Busoni's Elegy No. 2, "All'Italia! in modo napolitano", and the Spanish music of Isaac Albéniz, Debussy, Enrique Granados and Liszt. They are considered among his outwardly more virtuosic and musically less ambitious works.
caption: Ferruccio Busoni, who exerted a strong influence on Sorabji's music and writings
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