and "the dullest of dull dogs". He also maintained a 20-year friendship with Bernard Bromage, an English writer on mysticism. Bromage acted as joint trustee of the Shapurji Sorabji Trust between 1933 and 1941 and produced a defective index for Sorabji's book Around Music, which the composer was displeased with. He also apparently behaved incorrectly as trustee, causing Sorabji considerable monetary losses, which led to his removal from the Trust and the end of their friendship around 1942. Occult themes rarely appeared in Sorabji's music and writings afterwards. Sorabji spoke favourably of the Parsis, though his experiences with them in India in the 1930s upset him. He embraced only a few aspects of Zoroastrianism before cutting his ties to various Parsi and Zoroastrian organisations over objections to their actions. However, he retained an interest in his Persian heritage, and insisted that his body should be cremated after his death (which is an alternative to using the Tower of Silence). Sorabji's attitude towards Christianity was mixed. In his early life, he denounced it for fuelling war and deemed it a hypocritical religion, though he later voiced his admiration for the Catholic Church and attributed the most valuable parts of European civilisation to it. His interest in the Catholic Mass inspired his largest score, the Messa grande sinfonica. Although he professed that he was not Catholic, he may have embraced some of the faith in private. Music Early works Although there has been speculation about earlier works, Sorabji's first known (albeit lost) composition is a 1914 piano transcription of Delius's orchestral piece In a Summer Garden. His early works are predominantly piano sonatas, songs and piano concertos. Of these, Piano Sonatas Nos. 1–3 (1919; 1920; 1922) are the most ambitious and developed. They are characterised mainly by their use of the single-movement format and by their athematism. The main criticism against them is that they lack stylistic consistency and organic form. Sorabji developed a largely unfavourable view of his early works, described them as derivative and lacking in cohesion, and even considered destroying many of their manuscripts late in his life. Middle-period works and symphonic style The Three Pastiches for Piano (1922) and Le jardin parfumé (1923) have often been seen as the beginning of Sorabji's compositional maturity. Sorabji himself considered that it began with his Organ Symphony No. 1 (1924), his first work to make ample use of forms like the