for his works to be programmatic; although pieces like "Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora" and St. Bertrand de Comminges: "He was laughing in the tower" (both inspired by ghost stories by M. R. James) have been described as such, he repeatedly heaped scorn on attempts to represent stories or ideologies in music. Sorabji's interest in numerology can be seen in his allotting of a number to the length of his scores, the amount of variations a piece contains or the number of bars in a work. Recent scholarly writings on Sorabji's music have suggested an interest in the golden section as a means of formal division. Squares, repdigits and other numbers with special symbolism are common. Page numbers may be used twice or absent to achieve the desired result; for example, the last page of Sorabji's Piano Sonata No. 5 is numbered 343a, although the score has 336 pages. This type of alteration is also seen in his numbering of variations. Sorabji, who claimed to be of Spanish-Sicilian ancestry, composed pieces that reflect an enthusiasm for Southern European cultures, such as Fantasia ispanica, Rosario d'arabeschi and Passeggiata veneziana. These are works of a Mediterranean character and are inspired by Busoni's Elegy No. 2, "All'Italia! in modo napolitano", and the Spanish music of Isaac Albéniz, Debussy, Enrique Granados and Franz Liszt. They are considered to be among his outwardly more virtuosic and musically less ambitious works. French culture and art also appealed to Sorabji, and he set French texts to music. Around 60 per cent of his known works have titles in Latin, Italian and other foreign languages. Harmony, counterpoint and form Sorabji's counterpoint stems from Busoni and Reger, as did his reliance on theme-oriented baroque forms. His use of these often contrasts with the more rhapsodic, improvisatory writing of his fantasias and nocturnes, which, because of their non-thematic nature, have been called "static". Abrahams describes Sorabji's approach as built on "self-organising" (baroque) and athematic forms that can be expanded as needed, as their ebb and flow is not dictated by themes. While Sorabji wrote pieces of standard or even minute dimensions, his largest works (for which he is perhaps best known) call for skills and stamina beyond the reach of most performers; examples include his Piano Sonata No. 5 (Opus archimagicum), Sequentia cyclica and the Symphonic Variations for Piano, which last about six, eight and nine hours respectively. Roberge