Articles

Alistair Hinton
And Who Exactly is Sorabji?

Paul Griffiths
A Mystery Man Who Produced Piano Music by the Truckload

Alistair Hinton
Sorabji’s Songs

Sorabji’s Piano Concertos

Simon J. Abrahams
Sorabji’s Orchard: The Path to Opus Clavicembalisticum and Beyond

Reinier van Houdt & René van Peer
Finding one’s way through an immense building of music

Kevin Bowyer / Wolfgang Kleber
Sorabji und die Orgel

Dr Justin Henry Rubin
Thematic Metamorphosis and Perception in the Symphony [No. 1] for Organ of Kaikhosru Sorabji

Alistair Hinton: Sorabji’s Songs (2/4)

Given his love of the voice, it might seem curious that he wrote so few songs and no stage works at all, preferring instead to direct the majority of his energies to keyboard writing, principally a vast quantity of piano music and three substantial symphonies for organ. Performance of his entire song œuvre occupies less than one quarter of that required to present just one of his large piano works, the famous Opus Clavicembalisticum. Apart from what is apparently his very first work, a 1914 piano transcription of Delius’s In a Summer Garden (which he may not have completed and which has yet to come to light), Sorabji did, however, devote his first two years of composition entirely to songs for voice and piano and to piano concertos. Apart from Cinque Sonetti di Michalengelo Buonarroti (for baritone and chamber ensemble) and his final song Benedizione di San Francesco d’Assisi (for baritone and organ), all his songs are for voice and piano and most of these feature the soprano.

As a song composer, Sorabji seemed particularly drawn to the poetry of the French symbolists and their English contemporaries such as Ernest Dowson. His first ten songs were composed during World War I when his harmonic language had yet to develop into the Busoni- and Szymanowski-influenced yet highly individual one of his maturity. His principal examples at this stage seem to have been Cyril Scott, Skryabin, Ravel, Ornstein and even Roslavetz. Although it is uncertain whether his youthful contemporary music researches drew the last of these into his circle of acquaintance, his contemporary writings evidence his awareness of Ornstein’s more experimental music, he certainly attended Skryabin’s London appearances in 1913 and was later to meet Roussel (and possibly also Ravel) in Paris. (Ornstein was, incidentally, a close contemporary of Sorabji; born in the last decade of the 19th century, he survived into the 21st — he died in 2002, aged 109.)

One consequence of Sorabji’s profound desire for personal privacy and his resultant growing reclusivity was a customary reluctance to speak or write about his own music; this also accounts for the dearth of recorded interview material. Furthermore, even in the early days, he seemed to devote little energy to securing performances of his music and none of the songs written during his 20s reached performance until 1921.

Of all Sorabji’s articles on singing, singers and vocal repertoire, it is arguably The Great French Song Writers (Mi Contra Fa, 1947) which points most closely to many of the persuasions in his own songwriting and provides the greatest key to his thinking and ideals as a song composer.

Verlaine’s brief l’Heure Exquise, blending as it does restraint with fantasy, is an untitled poem from his collection La Bonne Chanson (1870) and is rather better known in settings by other composers — Fauré in his cycle La Bonne Chanson, Chausson, Hahn, Delius and even Stravinsky (although, whereas most other settings adopt the poem’s first line La Lune Blanche as its title, Sorabji instead chose its last).