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Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (born Leon Dudley Sorabji; 14 August 1892 - 15 October 1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer. He was one of the 20th century's most prolific piano composers. As a composer and pianist, Sorabji was largely self-taught, and he distanced himself from the main currents of contemporary musical life early in his career. He developed a highly idiosyncratic musical language, with roots in composers as diverse as Busoni, Debussy and Szymanowski, and he dismissed large portions of the established and contemporary repertoire.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born Leon Dudley Sorabji in Chingford, Essex (now Greater London), on 14 August 1892. His father, Shapurji Sorabji, was a civil engineer of Parsi parentage from Bombay, India, born on 18 August 1863. His mother, Madeleine Marguerite Mathilde Sorabji (nee Madeline Matilda Worthy; 13 August 1866 - 5 May 1959), was English. She is said to have been a singer, pianist and organist, but no evidence has been found to support these claims. They married on 18 February 1892. Shapurji Sorabji had married in India in 1880 but, as no record of his first wife's death or his divorce from her has yet been traced, it is possible that he married the composer's mother bigamously. Very little is known of Sorabji's biography, particularly his early life and musical beginnings. He studied music with Charles Arthur Trew from the early 1910s until around 1915, during a private education that is thought to have ended at about the same time. He reportedly started to learn the piano from his mother at an early age, and he later received help (but no lessons) from his mother's friend Emily Edroff-Smith. The first significant insight into Sorabji's life comes from his correspondence with Peter Warlock, which began in 1913. At least partly as a result of Warlock's influence, Sorabji began to focus on composition and music criticism. In those letters he showed great interest in interacting with the world of musicians--an attitude that changed dramatically in later years. The first significant instance of such interaction took place in November 1919. Sorabji had sent several of his scores, including that of his First Piano Sonata, to Ernest Newman, who paid them no attention. Sorabji then played the piece to Ferruccio Busoni, who expressed some reservations about the work, but gave him a letter of recommendation, which helped Sorabji get it published. Already as a teenager, Sorabji took great interest in recent developments in art music--in the work of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Mahler and Debussy, among others--at a time when they received scant attention in the United Kingdom. This interest, along with his ethnicity, cemented his reputation as an outsider. He and his music had their detractors, but some musicians received his work positively: Frederick Delius, who heard a 1930 radio broadcast of Sorabji playing his own piece Le jardin parfume: Poem for Piano Solo, sent a letter of admiration to Sorabji; the French-Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot expressed interest in performing Sorabji's piano concertos; and Alban Berg reportedly took an interest in Sorabji's music. Although Sorabji performed some of his works in the UK and abroad in the 1920s, the most important period of his pianistic career was a result of his friendship with the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm. Their first meeting took place when Sorabji went to Glasgow to premiere his Piano Sonata No. 4 on 1 April 1930 for Chisholm's Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music. In the Society's concerts Sorabji played some of the longest works he had written to date: in addition to the Fourth Piano Sonata, he premiered Opus clavicembalisticum and Piano Toccata No. 2 and gave a performance of his Nocturne, "Jami". The two remained friends until Chisholm's death in 1965, although their correspondence became less frequent after Chisholm moved to South Africa.
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji