Originally posted by ahinton
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Sorabji, Kaikhosru Shapurji (1892 - 1988)
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Originally posted by ahinton View PostNo, I know that! - but then KSS was not an "Essex boy" either.
Anyway - back to a discussion of Sorabji...
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Originally posted by Beef Oven! View PostWe are discussing Sorabji! I wonder if he voted for Norman The Chingford Skin-head Tebbit. Maybe he’d moved from Chingford by then. It seems to have gone down-hill (just ask ex-boxer Michael Watson!)
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Inconsequentia. Sorabji and Alan Walker's Fredryck Chopin – not essential reading.
I don’t know why the English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988) came to mind a few weeks ago but I recalled his often vituperative letters to Musical Opinion and the impression they made on me in my youth in the 1950s. One in particular was unforgettable as it included, ‘Like the cuttlefish when pursued, Mr --- has emitted a cloud of ink, but very little else.’
With huge pleasure I’ve been slowly reading Alan Walker’s new biography Fryderyk Chopin, (Faber and Faber, 2018). Many of the people in Chopin’s life are well-known, but to be savoured is the insightful detail and digressions about so many others who Chopin came in contact with. And I delight in the Footnotes, (yes, Footnotes – not pesky Endnotes), one of which covers almost a whole page.
When I arrived at p.566, where the acerbic London critic J. W. Davison, no friend of Chopin or others, is introduced, my mind flipped back to Sorabji. Imagine my surprise reading on p.569 ‘Like the cuttlefish when pursued, all that Davison could do was to eject a cloud of ink.’
Sorabji was eccentric and therefore an interesting character. Under his name I recall reading in the ca.1950 edition of Percy M Scholes’ 'Dictionary of Music and Musicians’, an extract from a letter Scholes had received from Sorabji. It read something like, ‘I make a point of confusing lexicographical persons such as yourself.’
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Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View PostAh! Interesting to read about Davison - by coincidence, I'm reading the Jacques Barzun biography of Berlioz, in which he's something of a hero!
Marvellous - and marvellously apt description of a critic: a cuttlefish!
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Originally posted by Bryn View Post.
I'm usually a sucker for Mr. Hinton's punning. Has he jetted off somewhere?
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