Kaikhosru Sorabji's letters to Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock)

This book provides the first complete edition of the letters of Kaikhosru Sorabji (1892-1988) to Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) (1894-1930). The central core of the volume presents this corpus of 38 letters and postcards, divided into three parts, with extensive editorial annotations. This is prefaced by a substantial Introduction which provides a new contextual, critical and interpretative framework, incorporating many different perspectives. Selected contemporaneous documents (published and unpublished) pertinent to the correspondence are also included, enhancing the sense of narrative and expanding on certain aesthetic discussions.
The letters and documents provide an invaluable insight into Sorabji and Warlock’s nascent musical careers, and a unique record of their wider socio-cultural milieu in the period 1913-1922. In this they vitally inform 21st-century musicological discourse around canonicity: ‘minor’ creative figures (questioning whether, and why, they are so minor), and their role in cultural and musical histories. More than that, they touch on issues highly germane to such current debates as identity politics (race, religion and sexuality) and aesthetics. The book seeks to enhance the academic and public profile of the still-marginalised Sorabji, in a context where historical exemplars of ethnic minority composers (along with other under-represented groups) in the European classical tradition are actively being sought. At the same time it throws new light on the more extensively documented (and performed) Warlock—a better-established figure than Sorabji, but one whose own persistent radical outsider status is made clearer through Sorabji's communications with him.

Copyright Year 2020

Hardback: June 11, 2019 by Routledge
Paperback: December 18, 2020 by Routledge