Gradus ad Sorabji

GRADUS AD SORABJI ANDREW MEAD n the morning of November 15, 2014, I was driving north on Interstate 65 on my way to a recital in Chicago. A friend had alerted me to an announcement that Jonathan Powell would be offering a complete performance of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s monumental piano work, Sequentia cyclica super Dies irae ex Missa pro defunctis, and I was curious to hear it live. I had some misgivings: the prospect of sitting for more than seven hours to hear a single piece of music was daunting, and while I was familiar with shorter compositions by Sorabji through recordings, I didn’t know if I had the stamina or concentration to face something that promised to be considerably longer than Parsifal. I almost turned back a couple of times, but I’m glad that in the event I didn’t do so. The concert began at 3:00 PM, and by the time of the first break at 6:00, I and the other eight people who attended the performance agreed that we were in the midst of an extraordinary musical experience. When next we spoke, at the second break two and a half hours later, our impressions had only been intensified and we were all eager to hear the last stretch. When the performance wrapped up around 11:30 that evening, I found I was beyond words. During my drive back home—there was no sleeping after that experience!—I realized that what I had heard was forcing me to reevaluate and expand my O 182 Perspectives of New Music notions of what was musically possible. Not only had I just witnessed a single pianist play at the highest levels of concentration for the equivalent of a full day of work, but I found that the whole gigantic span resonated in my memory as an all-of-a-piece of music. That this had been witnessed by less than a dozen people—the nine of us in audience , an intrepid page turner, and the recording engineer—made the experience all the more unreal. Over the next few days I perused a copy of the score, and was amazed how readily I could dip into it and remember the passage in question from the recital. In part this was because of Powell’s extraordinary performance, but what seized me at the time and yet still seems hard to comprehend fully is how Sorabji was able to shape such a long span of dense, complex music into what still remains in memory months later a coherent whole.1 I first encountered the name of Kaikhosru Sorabji (1892–1988) in The Guinness Book of World Records in 1969. His entry was very near that of Havergal Brian, whose Gothic Symphony was cited as calling for one of the largest ensembles ever demanded. Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum was listed as, supposedly, the longest non-repetitive piano work ever written. Being an impressionable seventeen year-old, I was immediately curious about both of these musicians. It didn’t take too many years to satisfy my curiosity about Brian’s symphonic monster, but accessing Sorabji back then was virtually impossible. I had to wait until I went to college even to see the score of the O. C. (as it is commonly abbreviated), as well as that of his first Organ Symphony, which was also in the music library. Both seemed just too much to take in. The Organ Symphony looked like all of the Reger organ works printed at once, recombined and piled on top of each other for a couple of hundred pages. And the O. C. was just as mind numbing. Again, there were hundreds of pages with thousands of notes, often on as many as five staves. Unlike British composer Alistair Hinton, one of Sorabji’s greatest advocates, I was not immediately drawn in, but had to wait several years before taking the full plunge. I’ll not detail the journey, but suffice it to say that a few years ago, when a series of conversations with organist Timothy Tikker brought me back to Sorabji’s music, not only was I ready to listen, but I was...