A Composer Called Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji is perhaps not a well-known name. However, there's an archive dedicated to his music, and digital access is now possible, so maybe this might attract more interest in his work.*

We've just had a message forwarded to us from the Sorabji Archive, which is informative:-

"We would like to inform you that The Sorabji Archive recently made all of its material available as .pdf files; previously, we had supplied our material as paper copies only.

For details about The Sorabji Archive, please visit www.sorabji-archive.co.uk .

For details of what we supply, please visit http://www.sorabji-archive.co.uk/archive/catalogue.php .

"We look forward to hearing from you and to being of assistance to you in the future."

Alistair Hinton, Curator/Director
The Sorabji Archive
Warlow Farm House
Eaton Bishop
HEREFORD

* There's a biographical essay on the Sorabji Archive website.  Here's a taster:-

"Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born in Chingford, Essex, England on 14 August 1892; his father was a Zoroastrian Parsi civil engineer and his mother English ... He spent most of his life in England. From his early ’teens he developed an insatiable appetite for the latest developments in contemporary European and Russian music and went to great lengths to obtain the latest scores of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Schönberg, Skryabin, Rakhmaninov and others ...  Of an independent and uniquely curious nature, it is perhaps unsurprising given the pre-War English environment that his education, both general and musical, was mostly private. 

"For a composer as prolific as he was soon to become, he was an unusually late developer and his voracity in absorbing all the most recent trends in other people’s music seems to have excluded from his mind the idea of making his own until he reached his twenties."