Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (born Leon Dudley Sorabji; 1892–1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer. He was one of the 20th century's most prolific piano composers.

He was born in Chingford. His father was a civil engineer of Parsi parentage from Bombay. His mother, was English. and is said to have been a singer, pianist and organist, but no evidence has been found to support these claims. Little is known of hie searly life.

As a composer and pianist, Sorabji was largely self-taught, and he distanced himself from the main currents of contemporary musical life early in his career. He developed a highly idiosyncratic musical language, with roots in composers as diverse as Busoni, Debussy and Szymanowski, and he dismissed large portions of the established and contemporary repertoire.

A reluctant performer, Sorabji played a few of his works in public between 1920 and 1936, thereafter "banning" performances of his music until 1976. Since very few of his compositions were published during those years, he remained in public view mainly by writing essays and music criticism, at the centre of which are his books Around Music and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician. He had a tendency to seclusion, and in the 1950s he moved from London to the village of Corfe Castle, Dorset, where he spent most of the rest of his life quietly.