What an odd delusion, and how prevalent, that when some composition that one dislikes has been put on the dissecting table, one will dislike it less, or, in that singularly meaningless phrase, "understand it" better. The only result of this ghoulish process, pushed to the furthest lengths of boring absurdity in the analytical programme note, is to make one dislike it even more. It is like someone who, having introduced you to some antipatico person, shows you a radiograph of him, saying, "Oh you are ridiculously prejudiced against him! Just look at what a fine skeleton he has!" [Kaikhosru Sorabji]
"Il tutto sotto voce: oscuro e velato" could easily be the subtitle of "Opus secretum", but "luminoso", "martellatissimo", and "focoso", scattered elsewhere in Sorabji's score, contradict the notion of a "hidden" or "secret" work. "Opus secretum" has neither the mystical feel of Gulistan nor the explicit occult ground-plan, gigantic time-scale, and unprecedented textural density of "Opus archimagicum". Kenneth Derus has said that it "belies its title, and is in fact a Vesalian exposé of the bone and sinew which remain when Sorabji's characteristic decorative designs are scraped away." (Derus is the dedicatee of "Opus secretum". He has claimed, more generally, that whereas Sorabji's music manuscripts have a magical look, the music itself has "an almost Diderotian appeal".)
Sorabji avoids the twin temptations of tonality and atonality, in most of his works, by juxtaposing explicable materials in inexplicable ways. His highly personal, freely-associated combinations of common, altered, dissonant, and modal chords rarely suggest keys or modes or pitch classes of any sort, much less the music or methods of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, or anybody else. No moment of Sorabji's music is chaotic, but every moment is a deliberate rejection of order. The effect is far more unsettling than anything in the Music of Changes. (Sorabji has Goethe's Mephistopheles characterize the final chord of "Opus clavicembalisticum" - "I am the spirit that denies" - but according to Derus "the entire work is a tissue of harmonic denial - literally Satanic in Milton's sense.")
All of this and more is evident in "Opus secretum". Horizontal juxtapositions of eight to twelve pitches span two, three, or more octaves and often seem pasted together from short fragments of common scales. (Reiterated juxtapositions within an octave, suggestive of common scales, rarely exist.) Busoni-like vertical juxtapositions of pitches create open-ended branching chains of random inner harmonies, as though by a process of fractal arborescence.
The work's somewhat attenuated textures highlight rather than ameliorate a number of performance-related difficulties. Derus has said that "Opus secretum" is "the best place to visualize hands meeting on the key surfaces of Sorabji's imagination - surfaces neither Moór nor Janko, but not ordinary either" and it is true that, by the 1950's, Sorabji preferred to write for an idealized piano having multiple keyboards (or unusual key shapes) and the ability to sustain sounds equally well in all registers. Independent lines of music sometimes collide, on actual piano keys, in ways which make it almost impossible to articulate the necessary cross-rhythms. .A bigger problem is that patterns of notes are always suggested but never realized. Fingers are urged by their own action to make mistakes, in a way that they never are when playing aleatory or serialized music. [Program note by Carlo Grante]
Kaikhosru Sorabji composed 80 hours of piano music during a 65-year period that began in 1917. (Four times as much piano music as Michael Finnissy in twice the time.) Some of Sorabji's piano works are short but most are not. Five of his works are 2 hours long; five are 4 hours long; three are 6 hours long; and two are 8 hours long. One of his sonatas is longer than all of Schubert's sonatas put together; several of his fugues last nearly an hour. (Finnissy, a comparably prolific composer of important piano music, has produced 12 times as many piano works in half the time; but only three of his works are over 1 hour long and only three others are 45 minutes long.)
Sorabji's major piano works are dense-textured and exhausting to perform. Often the music moves in seven or eight or nine parts and close to as many rhythms (with doublings, a dozen or more parts, notated in some cases on six- and seven-staff systems). Many contemporary piano scores have an even more forbidding look, but none imply hands and fingers moving faster and farther.
("Evryali" and "Tract" and "all.fall.down" are hardest to play in just those spots where not every note matters. The same is true for Sorabji. Wrong notes are sometimes no easier to play than right notes. The frisson of "Lemma-Icon-Epigram" is visual, not kinematic; hence good performances are not only possible but unsurprising. Sorabji is at his most difficult when his music is simplest on the page. Patternless streams of notes for both hands, moving at a rate of almost a thousand notes a minute for many minutes; large chords moving straightforwardly but with the speed of Ravel's thirty-second notes; these things seem to demand a trick or emollient, comparable to wool gloves in Stockhausen.)
Nothing is easier than to write unsuccessful works of great complication - composition students do it every day. Sorabji manages to sound complex despite his complexity. (Everybody says that Sorabji sounds like five people playing Busoni. Nobody ever says that Ferneyhough sounds like five people playing Donald Martino.) One thinks of Nancarrow's studies for player piano, as examples of works which sound as complex as they look. No human fingers can do what a player piano can do, but one can actually distinguish more happening when one listens to Sorabji - because more of what is happening is distinguishable.
Sorabji isn't big the way LaMonte Young is big or Feldman is big or Wagner is big, just as he isn't complicated the way Carter is or Babbitt is or Ferneyhough is. There is a sense in which his music primarily accumulates, often for many hours, and there is a sense in which this is untrue. On one account, his music has more structure when it is remembered than when it is heard. («Everything passes by like "Finnegans Wake", only to get recollected like "The Making of Americans"».) The claim, more specifically, is that a memory of Sorabji's music has emergent structure only when notes are parts of its object but not objects of its parts. This might mean that sounds are irrelevant to the Sorabji-related experiences that matter most. [Program note by Kenneth Derus]
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