The short answer might seem to be "not much," but that's not really true. While this site is not wholly dedicated to Sorabji, the Piano Music section of this site includes an audio track of myself playing Sorabji's "In the Hothouse" in a live concert in New York; the message boards at one time hosted very active discussions about "Obscure classical composers", Sorabji not least among them; and if you spent any length of time listening to the now defunct Sorabji Radio you would have heard music by Sorabji.

Nevertheless, anyone who types "Sorabji" into certain search engines is likely to hit this site before any of the handful of scholarly sites about Sorabji.

I have a theory that the obscurity of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji leads some who know little or nothing about the man to scrutinize this web site with the assumption that I am Kaikhosru Sorabji or that this site somehow expresses a Sorabji aesthetic and is, in a spiritual or abstract sense, All About Sorabji. (I know for a fact that people have reached this site and made this exact assumption)

Well, it is and it isn't, depending how deep into my personality you want to go (and we're not going too deep in this essay, or evidence to the contrary anywhere else on this web site). But it's safe to say that if you're looking for meaningful information about Kaikhosru Sorabji then Sorabji.com is not where you want to be.

This essay aims to explain why this site is named Sorabji.com. I also attempt to show where you can go for more information about the real Sorabji. Additionally, this essay is intended for my friends, family, and acquaintances who occasionally ask or would like to ask "What's a Sorabji?"

• Sorabji banned public performances of all his works for several decades
• Sorabji wrote piano pieces that were hours and hours long and virtually impossible to play
• Sorabji was a writer of acid-tongued, mean-spirited music criticism

Sorabji's most famous composition is probably the "Opus Clavicembalisticum," a 3 to 4 hour solo piano extravaganza that was formerly listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest non-repeating solo piano piece ever written. In fact Sorabji himself wrote pieces that were longer than the OC (The "Sequentia Cyclica" is said to require 8 hours), but the OC has been recorded thrice in its entirety and is thus a tangible connection to the composer's otherwise mythical reputation.

While the duration of some of Sorabji's scores might be sufficiently off-putting to any interested pianists, the reputation of Sorabji's music suffers further from the perception that it is all but impossible to play.

The anecdotes, whether true or not, of certain pianists spending several weeks practicing single measures from Sorabji's music only support the notion that this is music which requires a tremendous commitment of time and (... I'm gonna say it now ...) servitude.

But Sorabji wrote numerous pieces of more modest scope, and there is no reason why his Sadko arrangement or "In the Hothouse" should not find a way into the repertoires of more enterprising performers.

Perhaps Sorabji's reputation as a writer of mammoth piano pieces casts a pall of inadequacy over performances of his smaller pieces when in fact these comparative miniatures could help build the case among audiences that this is a composer worth exploring further.

If Sorabji's music appeals to you, either in substance or purely in theory, then some other composers I think you might want to explore include Karol Szymanowski, Havergal Brian, Conlon Nancarrow, Andrew Violette, Allan Pettersson, and Claude Loyola Allgen.

However, I am going to end my discussion of Sorabji the composer and leave that subject matter to the real experts whose work can be found in a variety of places: in the liner notes of the various Sorabji CDs and records, in the limited quantity of musicological writing (which should be available through a decent library), and through the very limited amount of information available on the Internet.

Like most people who know anything about him, my knowledge of Sorabji comes from the above hodgepodge of sources, but in my case I learned other things from friends and acquaintances who either knew Sorabji personally or took up the cause of his music years and even decades ago.

The lack of any single, credible source of information about Kaikhosru Sorabji should soon be remedied -- the Sorabji world looks forward to the publication of Marc-Andre Roberge's Opus Sorabjianum, which as I understand it will be the first complete, critical biography of Sorabji.

My interest in unknown composers certainly is not limited to Sorabji. Composers like Roslavets, Lourie, Alkan, and others who now inhabit varying levels of neo-obscurity were as tip-of-the-tongue to me in the early 1990s as Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninov are to the general public.

Until fairly recently I had the unfortunate tendency to talk about those unknown composers as if they were household names. People would come away from conversations with me saying "Yeah, Mark told me all about Alkan and Bortkiewicz. They were great composers!"

Sorry.

I started using online interactive services in the early 1990s, when services like GEnie, CompuServe, and hundreds if not thousands of FidoNet-connected BBSes ruled the modems. From the first time I ever logged on to a BBS or other networked computer service I have always used "Sorabji" as my login id or handle or screen name or whatever you want to call it. This has been true of every chat room, instant messenger, BBS, e-mail account, and on and on that I have ever used.

The reason for this is probably self-evident to anyone who has ever created an online e-mail account: most people who create an online persona for their personal use try to do so with a unique login id that says something about them and their personality. This is no different for me, and I specifically chose Sorabji over Stojowski because as far as I was concerned Sorabji was the ultimate obscure composer. Sorabji welcomed the obscurity that crushed Alkan. I imagined Sorabji spending his years cranking out more and more impossible music from his bizarre ivory tower only to spite all and sundry who dared approach.

This is not my general feeling about Sorabji today, though like all attempted humor there is an element of truth in there.

The world wide web started to develop, and I built my first web page in 1994. I naturally used "sorabji" as part of my web site address, and eventually -- with no regard to the future of search engines and the scattered remains of information that are now returned when attempting to research Sorabji on the Internet -- I registered sorabji.com as the domain name for all my web sites. I expect that this will be my address on the Internet for years to come.

If you are interested in which Sorabji recordings I personally recommend from the batch of currently available CDs, please check this page again in a few weeks. I intend to compile such a list on this page but want to wait until I've purchased a few Sorabji CDs which I have not yet heard. Specifically, I want to wait until Michael Habermann's new CD of Sorabji transcriptions is released in the U.S. I recommend without question any of Michael Habermann's recordings of Sorabji's music, and I also recommend any of Donna Amato's recordings.

That's all for now. Check back again soon if the K.S. Sorabji thing interests you.

April 20, 2003