Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and "Sorabji" Fragrance

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was a British-Indian composer who wrote one of the longest piano pieces ever created, Opus clavicembalisticum. A performance of this work takes between four and four and a half hours, and was, for many decades, the longest written and performed piano work in existence. Sorabji went on to write even longer pieces, including 100 Transcendental Studies, an 8 1/2 hour work, often performed as separate units.

Sorabji was a deeply complex man who wrote equally complex music. His compositions demand tremendous effort from the performer and even, at times, from the audience. Encountering Opus clavicembalisticum, one is tossed into a world of chaotic melody; jumping, sweeping chords, fingers that plunge down deeply into the far bass piano keys followed by long fades into silence and then twinkling high notes like birds' wings flapping. During such a long piece with such dramatic variations between each movement, the range of emotion is astounding. What has struck me during the few times that I've listened to the entirety of Opus clavicembalisticum is the vast fluctuation between deep human pathos and an almost off-handed obfuscation of feeling, as though Sorabji was merely an artistic observer of things, making no comment or commitment. In this way, Opus clavicembalisticum carries with it the sensations, triumphs, and doldrums of a human day, viewed with coupled poignancy and exacting detail that only a quixotic artist such as himself could view it.

After learning more about Sorabji, and listening to more and more of his music, I felt compelled to create a fragrance that, in some way, captured even a fraction of the shadow left by his life of Earth. I do not know how much of the perfume is about music, or about an unusual man who rarely left his small village in England, or about the dedicated fan base of musicologists who dragged him out of very early retirement so that he might compose again before he passed away in 1988.

I relate on some level to Sorabji in the way that I relate to anyone who has a peculiar view of the world - a view that they refuse to relinquish and one that they will explore for much of their lives. That tenacity, that refusal to let go, is much like the dog who will hold on fiercely to the end of a toy during a game of tug-of-war. The world hadn't asked for a four and a half hour composition, but he created it because he had to. We are richer for it. And it inspired a perfume as well.