page_title: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
section_title: Books and music criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji / Writings / Books and music criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: A picture of Charles-Valentin Alkan.
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 first expressed interest in becoming a music critic in 1914, and he started contributing criticism to The New Age in 1924, after it had published some of his letters to the editor. By 1930, Sorabji had become disillusioned with concert life and developed a growing interest in gramophone recordings, believing that he would eventually lose all reason to attend concerts. In 1945 he stopped providing regular reviews and only occasionally submitted his writings to correspondence columns in journals. While his earlier writings reflect a contempt for the music world in general—from its businessmen to its performers—his later reviews tend to be more detailed and less caustic.
  Although in his youth Sorabji was attracted to what were then the newest developments in European art music, his musical tastes were essentially conservative. He had a particular affinity for late Romantic and Impressionist composers, such as Debussy, Medtner and Szymanowski, and he admired composers of large-scale, contrapuntally elaborate works, including Bach, Mahler, Bruckner and Reger. He also had much respect for composer-pianists like Liszt, Alkan and Busoni. Sorabji's main bêtes noires were Stravinsky, the late Schoenberg, Hindemith and, in general, composers who emphasised percussive rhythm. He rejected serialism and twelve-tone composition, considering both to be based on artificial precepts, and he denounced the treatment of the voice and use of Sprechgesang in Schoenberg's music, while criticising even his later tonal works and transcriptions. He loathed the rhythmic character of Stravinsky's music and what he perceived as its brutality and lack of melodic qualities. He viewed Stravinsky's neoclassicism as a sign of lack of imagination. Shostakovich and Fauré are among the composers whom Sorabji initially condemned but later admired.
  The bulk of Sorabji's music criticism is contained in the books Around Music (1932; reissued 1979) and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician (1947; reissued 1986), which include revised versions of some of his articles. Both received mostly positive reviews, though Sorabji considered the latter book much better. Readers commended his courage, expertise and intellectual incisiveness, but some felt that his verbose style and use of invectives and vitriol detracted from the solid foundation underlying the writings. This echoes general criticisms of his prose, which has been called turgid and in which intelligibility is compromised by very long sentences and missing commas.
  Roberge writes that Sorabji "could sing the praises of some modern British personalities without end, especially when he knew them, or he could tear their music to pieces with very harsh and thoughtless comments that would nowadays lay him open to ridicule"; he adds that "his biting comments also often brought him to the edge of libel". Sorabji championed a number of composers and his advocacy helped many of them move closer to the mainstream, at a time when they were little known or understood. In some cases, he was recognised for promoting their music: he became one of the (honorary) vice-presidents of the Alkan Society in 1979, and in 1982, the Polish government awarded him a medal for championing Szymanowski's work.
caption: Charles-Valentin Alkan, whose music Sorabji championed throughout his life
exif: {}