CXCIII. SORABJI, Kaikhosru (1892-1988)
Anton Webern wrote music that measures in seconds from beginning to end.
John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP will take 639 years to complete.
So why should a measly four hours be a problem?
Heh-heh. I've actually listened to this entire work twice! That's not necessarily a dare, but more an invitation to experience something entirely different than the latest pop song or even a Mahler symphony!
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His father was a wealthy Parsi businessman and his mother was a Spanish-Sicilian opera singer.
"One thing above all else infuriates me and that is to be called English or British for no better reason than that I happen to have been born here. Is a kitten born in a dog kennel a puppy I ask you????" [letter to Kenneth Derus, August 21, 1977]
Essentially self-taught, he wrote a ton of music, most of it still unpublished. And not all of it is at this length either -- he wrote some pieces that are briefer than the briefest Webern.
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The design of Opus recalls Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica -- which takes a mere 25 minutes to perform -- and Busoni's composition was an homage to Bach's Art of the Fugue.
"Gertrude Stein was fond of saying that paragraphs are emotional and sentences aren't. Each great structural and emotional paragraph of Opus is made up of an extraordinary number of minutely differing sentences: the representatives of some particular genus of melody. The paragraphs can't be heard -- all that can be heard are representatives of melodic genera, passing by in a welter of counterpoint. But the paragraphs can be remembered -- as objects of poignant and rather terrifying unity. Everything passes by a little like Finnegans Wake, only to get recollected like The Making of Americans" -- Derus
The first three pages:
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