"In 1988 the Sorabji Archive was founded in Bath by Alistair Hinton, Sorabji's residual legatee" - thus the Grove Dictionary. That sentence has long fascinated me - how we have always wondered did it all come to be? I hope I am not being impertinent when I remark that it is the personal aspect of this collaboration just as much as the musical that fascinates. I sense a story - how did the two meet; what drew them together: family ties, mutual friends, or musical interests alone? (Yet the musical styles of the two persons differ considerably do they not.) How did the acquaintance grow over the years to the point at which Sorabji the sensitive recluse was able to decide upon the terms of his testament?
If one day told the tale may even rival Fenby's I think!
Anyway it is good that little by little all those giant works are being performed and recorded. What is sad in a way though are 1) all the misprints and illegibilities we hear of and 2) the fact that the composer wrote so quickly. We wonder what kind of preliminary plan he prepared for those above-mentioned giant works. What sort of difference would a "wrong note" here or there actually make? Not the sort of difference it would make in Bach or Webern perhaps?
"He considered the acts of composition and performance intensely sacred," we are also told. Sacred in what sense? The mere word conveys next to nothing there. And then there is his essay "The Validity of the Aristocratic Principle" - is that obtainable? The title seems true.
OK, so let's unpack this one bit by bit.
1988 was the year of Sorabji's death but the archive was hatched well before that; indeed, had that not been the case during the composer's lifetime, it might never have been possible to hatch it at all.
It came about purely as a consequence of my concern that the legacy of Sorabji might die with him were appropriate actions not taken to ensure that this did not occur. Most of his scores were unavailable to the public during his lifetime and those few that were published (the most recently composed of which was
Opus Clavicembalisticum, written in 1929-30 and published in 1931) gradually began to go out of print as public performances of his work began in the mid-1970s. Recordings began around 1980 and new editions of scores at the very end of the composer's life with Kevin Bowyer's handwritten one of Organ Symphony No. 2, a 9-hour-long three-movement work that reached its world première less than 13 months ago. Since those early days, there have been many new editions, performances, recordings, broadcasts, etc. and a book,
Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, ed. Prof. Paul Rapoport (Scolar Press [now Ashgate Publishing], Aldershot, UK; 1992, repr. 1994, still available); a more detailed volume about his life and work will soon be published by one of the contributors to SCC, namely Prof, Marc-André Roberge. Details are to be found at
www.sorabji-archive.co.uk. Those misprints are being ironed out in the new editions, of course.
I encountered his work by chance in 1969. I befriended him in 1972. The rest is history.
Thank you for your interest.
