A few thoughts to begin with. As I hear it, Sorabji's music could be described as improvisational, textural and concerned with states rather than developments or transformations.

Improvisational: apparently Sorabji would write his scores directly into their final manuscript form, without (normally) the intermediary of sketches, plans, calculations and so on, and this shows itself in the way the music evolves from one moment to the next (or stays where it is) without much in the way of structural reflexivity (recurrence of themes, for example) - it also shows itself in his interest in pieces like Bach's Chromatic Fantasy, which he "arranged" for piano by adding masses of resonant harmonies in an attempt to reflect the more glistening and partial-rich sound of the harpsichord (though in his case Wanda Landowska's harpsichord, which is a somewhat different matter!). The improvisational quality in Sorabji is a feature which distances his music from stylistically related composers like Busoni and Scriabin, both of whom were concerned with tighter and less open-ended structures. For me this very irregularity, the refusal to fall into patterns or close anything off before unfolding in a new direction, is one of the most interesting things about the music, partly because it's a mode of musical thinking which I find alien and almost incomprehensible.

Textural: in Sorabji's piano music the emphasis is on the texture, in which area (I would argue) his work is fascinatingly imaginative. While the music is basically atonal in not depending in any way on the temporal relations and tensions between tonal harmonies, its material is frequently triadic - harmony is almost always used in a completely colouristic way, as it often is (in completely different ways of course) in Messiaen or Nancarrow. Thematic relationships too are very much in the background relative to the unfolding of texture, and so function not that differently from the 12-tone series in Schoenberg's music.

States:I suppose the insistence on states rather than transitions might be seen as an "exotic" feature in Sorabji, especially in those pieces in his favourite "nocturne" vein, like Le jardin parfumé and several of the slow movements in multi-movement pieces, culminating in the extended Gulistan which preserves the same mood of restrained dynamics and multiple layers of ornamentation for 35 minutes, which personally I must say I find rather beautiful and seductive.

That will do for now. I think I might come back with some comments on individual pieces as and when there's some interest in getting a conversation going. It would be nice to keep the conversation on appreciative lines, hence the thread title...

I think I'm going to start a thread on the use of National Anthems in music.

I'm ashamed to say I have never explored Sorabji - mainly because descriptions of OC made it sound so unattractive and forbidding.

The descriptions you give, Richard, of three aspects of the music are fascinating. The absence of closure in music and the cultivation of "states" is something that interests me a great deal - going back to what I said on the "how one listens" thread about what happens to clock time when listening to music.

I'm going to get hold of some of these pieces; in the meantime, I'll just say that I am reminded very much of my response to some of Koechlin's music eg Les heures persanes, and nearer to our own time, that of Jeffrey Lewis eg Musica Aeterna

///////////////////////////<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<This is highly interesting. But I do find Sorabji's music repellant, whilst at the same time admiring his achievement greatly. I think he is for me in this respect unique: normally if i find a composer repellant I can't find words bad enough to denigrate him/her with! eg Prokofiev,  Lutyens, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, and zillions more. But Sorabji I feel has achieved something wonderful and great, and I am simply just shut out from it: I can't enjoy it. But I do not feel it would be right to be negative about him. It is true, from what I have read, that he was highly elitist in his approach to society and to the rest of the music profession (which is what Ian Pace was saying about his right-wing political beliefs being to the right of Ezra Pound, I suppose.)

Thanks for all of this Richard. Must find the time to listen back to recordings I have of Jonathan Powell's concerts. My memory of some of these pieces is becoming a bit hazy . . .

What do you hear expressed in the music?


I find that an extremely narrow and inadequate view of the ways in which world-views are expressed in music, making the issue purely one of explicit allusions. Do you deny that, say, Beethoven's world-view (or Schumann's, or Wagner's, or countless others) was deeply rooted in the music they wrote? Music can be ambiguous, most definitely (indeed that can be one of its strongest aspects) and exceed the boundaries of existing aesthetic and ideological frameworks. In Sorabji's case I find neither such thing.


Hmm, I think that's a rather convenient form of special pleading for protection for one's own field of interest. Artists of all types are embroiled in the wider social, political and ideological spheres of the world they inhabit, to which they bring to bear their own mediated, subjective takes upon such things. I find it ludicrous to imagine this has no bearing upon their work.

Ah, so are you telling me those sort of racial and anti-semitic ideologies are purely the product of an earlier era, and need not concern us nowadays?


This is still woefully non-specific; HOW does he do this, in your view? Who is to say that the "mysticism" is "contrived"? (compared - or not - to that in late Skryabin) and, in any case, what part does it play in the opening movement of his Fourth Piano Sonata?[/quote]

If I had a recording or score of the Fourth Piano Sonata to hand, and a bit of time, I would go into detail about this. But I don't and have other things to do (though I do intend to write something for elsewhere on this subject at some point in the future)., The mysticism is indeed contrived in quite a bit of late Skryabin, emanating as it does from a handful of harmonic exoticisms with which he has little idea what to do other than repeat passages wholescale a tritone apart from their original key, or the like, or the sometimes rather predictable ways of pumping up the textural volume. Not all late Skryabin is like this, some of the figurations show some genuine imagination and spontaneity; in Sorabji's case there is almost none of that, but he did not have the technique of Skyrabin. But there's nothing particularly mysterious about either composer, especially the latter, when their tricks are relatively transparent (to draw upon Carl Dahlhaus's definition of kitsch). Just a handful of exoticist tricks and empty note-spinning (not always the case in other 'exoticist' composers, though hardly infrequent).


Indeed I do, and I also have some time for all three poets. But I also know there are numerous elements intrinsic to their world-view that can't be ignored. Just take Baudelaire (actually in some ways my personal favourite of the three, but I have no illusions about him and the confused and conflicting ideologies that informed his work at all levels), who said the following:

From Journaux intimes:

La femme est naturelle, c'est-à-dire abominable.

Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables : le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.

J'ai toujours été étonné qu'on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?

La jeune fille, ce qu'elle est en réalité.
Une petite sotte et une petite salope; la pœlus grande imbécile unie à la plus grande dépravation.

Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pédéraste.


And I think we should ask some more questions about which aspects of such figures attracted various composers to their work, and what that says about them.

(I'm sure you are going to say the above constitute a very selective reading of Baudelaire - indeed they do, and I think some things of worth can be salvaged from the world-view that is utterly essential to his poetry. But these sorts of ideas recur in so many forms in the poetry itself that they cannot be ignored - I can give examples of those as well. Just like with Eliot's anti-semitism, contempt for democracy and human beings (thoroughly shared with Sorabji), and so on)


I will at some point, I have other more pressing things on my to-buy list right now.

It will be instructive to us all if you can pinpoint specific characteristics in Sorabji's melodic shapes, rhythm patterns, harmony, structures, etc. that you believe illustrates how his racial / nationalistic / other ideas manifest themselvds in his music for all with ears to hear.[/quote]

I haven't explicitly said that his racial theories are made apparent in his music (though I'm not necessarily denying that either). I will go into detail about this all on some future occasion; for now suffice to say I think the music simply expresses what a sad individual he was, and how empty his delusions of grandeur were.


As I say, I will come back to you with more detail on this.

But, as I asked Richard, tell me what Sorabji's music does express or communicate to you? What to you makes it any more than just a bunch of notes?

Oh dear, there goes the thread title. I was hoping (against hope) that we might get around to actually discussing some of the pieces, or performances of them, or whatever, rather than getting tied up in exactly this kind of quagmire. Then there might at least be some remote chance of coming to some mutual understanding about what makes it "more than just a bunch of notes", though any music can be seen as "just a bunch of notes", or as expressing what a "sad individual" the composer was, if one wants to hear it like that. Ian, I said a few words, albeit not highly specific, in the first post of this thread about what I find interesting in Sorabji's music, which you pooh-poohed on another thread, so I don't se there's much I can say which is going to change your mind. Neither am I interested in changing your mind. When I see posts about a composer I'm not interested in, or whose work repels me for one reason or another, I tend to ignore the thread in question. Whereas here you come steaming in, reiterating the same extreme assertions about Sorabji and his music (and even about those who listen to it) that we've heard from you before, as if expressly to prevent any discussion from proceeding except in your terms. So that's all clear now, thanks.

Maybe an interesting starting-point for a discussion of the music is to look at where Sorabji's work proceeds from its predecessors like Scriabin (whose work I know to some extent), or Busoni and Szymanowski (whose work I hardly know at all). I'd also be interested to know where the extended durations come from (the First Organ Symphony being Sorabji's first work in this line, if I'm not mistaken), since this is certainly an aspect which separates his work from most other music before or since.