Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji - Music - Mature Works and Symphonic Thought

Mature Works and Symphonic Thought

While various people have stated that Sorabji achieved compositional maturity with the works Three Pastiches for Piano (1922) and Le jardin parfumé: Poem for Piano Solo (1923), or only the latter, it was in 1924 that he wrote his First Organ Symphony, which he regarded as his first mature work and which is the first piece of his where baroque organisational principles play an important role.

Symphonic thought eventually came to dominate in Sorabji's musical thought. In spite of having composed his First Organ Symphony in 1924, the first piece that contains the architectural blueprint of his symphonic style is his 4th Piano Sonata (1928–29). It consists of three sections:

• A "tapestry of motives". This has its roots in Sorabji's Piano Sonatas Nos. 2–3, as well as the closing movement of his 1st Organ Symphony.
• An ornamental slow movement (virtually always classified as a nocturne).
• A closing compound movement, which includes a fugue.

Sorabji's symphonic first movements have been labeled as "symphonic tapestries" and "a kind of pure music drama". While they can be viewed as being superficially based on either the fugue or the sonata-allegro form, they differ from them in that the exposition and development of themes are not guided by conventional tonal principles, but rather by their mutual dialectic. They can last over 90 minutes, and their thematic character varies considerably; while the opening movement of his Fourth Piano Sonata (1928–29) introduces seven themes, that of his Second Piano Symphony (1954) has 64 themes.

The nocturnes are the most gestural of Sorabji's works. Sorabji's descriptions of his Symphony No. 2, Jāmī give an insight into the organisation of his nocturnal music. In a letter to Frank Holliday, Sorabji compared this work to his Gulistān—Nocturne for Piano, and later spoke of the symphony's "self-cohesive texture relying upon its own inner consistency and cohesiveness without relation to thematic or other matters". Melodic material is treated loosely in these works, due to their harmonic freedom, with ornamentation and textural patterns assuming a preeminent position. Given this degree of focus on non-thematic processes, they have been described as "static". They include the works The Garden of Irān, Anāhata Cakra and Symphonic Nocturne for Piano Alone, among others.

The fugues, which are the most atonal of Sorabji's works, generally follow traditional methodology; they are divided into an exposition, the main section where the themes (and particularly in the earlier fugues, also countersubjects) are developed in all four contrapuntal forms, a stretto and a concluding section emphasising augmentation and thickening of lines into chords. They can contain up to six themes. They are also more conservative than most of his output in that they rarely contain polyrhythmic writing. What marks them as different to virtually all other fugal writing are his themes. Some of them are among his most unconventional melodic creations, since they can lack the general change of direction that characterises most melodic writing, while others are possibly the longest ever conceived. This has led some people to treat them either with suspicion or critically.

Other important forms in Sorabji's mature work are the toccata, as well as the variation set. The latter can in fact be viewed as his most ambitious conception, since both his longest single movement and longest piece are examples of it. Moreover, Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis (1948–49), a set of 27 variations on the Dies Irae chant, is considered by some to be his greatest work. His toccatas, in turn, are more modest in scope and take Busoni's work of the same name as their starting point.