I do this really stupid thing every night before going to bed. I make sure the door is locked and then, since there is a closet right by the door, I open the closet door and leave it open at such an angle that it would block the front door from opening should an intruder try to get in during the night. It's so stupid and I am certain it would have virtually no effect should someone want to get in here and steal all my precious valuables, but I've performed the closet door ritual almost religiously for as long as I've had this place, even getting up from sleep or near-sleep to do it when I realized I'd forgotten.

Every time I do the closet door ritual I think of a story I heard on the local news one time when I was growing up. A man had rigged the front door of his family's house with a gun so that the gun would fire at anyone who tried to break in. And the story was that the teenage son came home late one night and was shot dead by the father's home-brewed security system. I don't remember enough about the source of the story to have any idea if it was true, but like any apocryphal story it made its point.

I'm thinking of re-arranging this apartment, putting the living room in the bedroom and vice-versa. For the first year or so in which I lived here I almost never used the living room for anything but practicing and as a place for the spare bed where the once-a-year visitor could sleep. Then for whatever reason, probably just nervous energy, I moved all the computers and gadgets out here so that the bedroom could just be a bedroom. I guess I'd read somewhere that it's important to have a room dedicated to sleeping, and it sounded good at the time. Now I don't think I possess the nervous energy to move everything back into the bedroom, so I might as well get used to it out here.

I've done nothing productive with my life lately. Except for practicing. There has been a lot of practicing, which feels fantastic for the first time in about 2 years. It was about 2 years ago that I fell down the steps at a Canal Street subway station, and I'm still not sure exactly what happened but basically I smashed my left thumb under the weight of my body as it fell down the slimy, slippery steps. The thumb only feels back to 100% as of the last several weeks, and it's been so fun playing through all the piano music that I own or can afford to purchase that I guess I should be careful not to over-practice or I might injure it again.

I was trying my hand at the Kaikhosru Sorabji 1st Piano Sonata, which is a piece I've long wanted to perform. Like most of Sorabji's music, it's not as technically difficult as its reputation makes it, but it's no picnic either. Some of it is genuinely beautiful in ways that any piano music audience could appreciate, but other parts of its attractiveness lie beneath what Ferrucio Busoni described as the "thorny brambles" of Sorabji's style of writing for the piano.

The 1st Sonata is an early work, and not the stuff upon which Sorabji's reputation is based. Sorabji's reputation as a composer of unplayable piano music who transformed his career into something an ivory tower experiment come from works like Opus Clavicembalisticum and Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis. Opus Clavicembalisticum, a 3-1/2 hour series of fugues, cadenzas, passacaglias, etc., is probably Sorabji's most frequently mentioned composition, while the Sequentia Cyclica, at anywhere between 5 and 7-1/2 hours in length, exists mostly in the minds of Sorabji fanatics as the final frontier in Sorabji's music.

I'm not crazy about the Opus Clavicembalisticum, and I can't say I've met anyone who is. A few weeks ago, however, I found myself standing in line for what was billed as the first ever New York performance of Sorabji's complete Opus Clavicembalisticum. It was to be performed by a relay of Juilliard student pianists, and as I stood in line I couldn't help but read outright cynicism and even contempt in the faces of the people standing in line for this event. All seemed to be aware of what they were getting into, that this was to be a 5-hour concert (with intermissions). But no one seemed prepared to take it very seriously, no one seemed prepared to be transported to some Nietzschian place of philosophical stimulation, and no one appeared to have the slightest intention of staying through to the conclusion of the performance. To me the expressions on the faces of the audience said "Yeah, right. Gimme a break."

Of course, I'm really just describing my own point of view as I projected it onto those around me. But I heard a lot of pshaw and snickering at the whole idea of the Opus Clavicembalisticum, and I have to say that I found it somewhat heartening to see unearned reputation of this mammothly bland composition take a beating from its public. I know that Sorabji's music has a lot of greatness in it, but unfortunately the Opus Clavicembalisticum gets so much of the attention that more deserving, mature works like Gulistan and the Transcendental Studies get cast into the shadow of their more infamous cousin.

At any rate, it was just as well that few in attendance appeared to be ready to stay through to the end, because before the performance began we were informed that most of the Juilliard student pianists had cancelled out of the performance. I think 3 performers actually made it to the stage. This should not come as much of a surprise; what would have been really surprising would be if a dozen or so pianists in professional training had the time and the dedication to sacrifice the required amount of their time and career to such a thankless monster as the Opus Clavicembalisticum. To me the fact that most of the performers cancelled reflects not the technical difficulty of the score but the unsatisfying quality of the music and the lack of any good reason to bring it to a live audience. Maybe I am being idealistic, but I think that if those pianists had felt that this score was worth bringing to the public then they would have come together and rallied around it. But they did not.

If it had been just about the music I would probably not have gone to the performance at all. And as I said before, I had no intention of sitting through 5 or more hours of this stuff. But a number of friends and acquaintances I've made over the years who are interested in and have performed the music of Sorabji (and other obscure composers whose compositions fill the hinterlands of the modern piano repertoire) were there, and it was really pleasant to see them again. The last time I was able to talk about Sorabji (or Claude Loyola Allgen, or Andrew Violette, or Dennis Gustafsson...) with people who had any idea what I was talking about was at an earlier Sorabji recital in New York at the Citicorp Building several years ago, when Donna Amato played a recital of all Sorabji music. I didn't realize how much I missed the company of people who are able to talk about these things. And I was genuinely thrilled to find myself sitting right next to Michael Habermann, the man whose recordings of Sorabji in the 1980s first turned me on to the music of this composer whose reputation will someday come back down to the ranks of merely accomplished and even great composers whose scores are worth study and performance.

Michael was sitting to my right and to my left was Donald Garvelmann, a friend of Sorabji's in the 1980s and one of the first people I ever met in New York. There were other there. Chris Berg, whose 1998 performance of Sorabji's Piano Quintet No. 1 has circulated underground on cassette since never being released commercially. Andrew Violette, who was described to me by Donald Garvelmann as "the Sorabji of Washington Heights" because of his own insanely complex and difficult piano scores (many of which I have on my shelves).

I don't know why I'm doing this roll call, but I think I'll stop. Maybe I'm just dropping all these names to perk up some search engines and somehow legitimize my use of www.sorabji.com as my domain name and main website address. Or maybe it's just my way of populating my website with the names of people I know so that the next time they look themselves up on an Internet search engine they'll end up right here with me.