his music is conceived vocally. He once described Opus clavicembalisticum as "a colossal song", and the pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge compared Sorabji's playing to bel canto singing. Sorabji once said, "If a composer can't sing, a composer can't compose." Some of Sorabji's piano pieces strive to emulate the sounds of other instruments, as seen in score markings such as "quasi organo pieno" (like a full organ), "pizzicato" and "quasi tuba con sordino" (like a tuba with mute). In this respect, Alkan was a key source of inspiration: Sorabji was influenced by his Symphony for Solo Piano and the Concerto pour piano seul, and he admired Alkan's "orchestral" writing for the instrument. Organ music Besides the piano, the other keyboard instrument to occupy a prominent position in Sorabji's output is the organ. Sorabji's largest orchestral works have organ parts, but his most important contribution to the instrument's repertoire are his three organ symphonies (1924; 1929–32; 1949–53), all of which are large-scale tripartite works that consist of multiple subsections and last up to nine hours. Organ Symphony No. 1 was regarded by Sorabji as his first mature work and he numbered the Third Organ Symphony among his finest achievements. He considered even the best orchestras of the day to be inferior to the modern organ and wrote of the "tonal splendour, grandeur and magnificence" of the instruments in Liverpool Cathedral and the Royal Albert Hall. Organists were described by him as being more cultured and having sounder musical judgement than most musicians. Creative transcription Transcription was a creative endeavour for Sorabji, as it had been for many of the composer-pianists who inspired him: Sorabji echoed Busoni's view that composition is the transcription of an abstract idea, as is performance. For Sorabji, transcription enabled older material to undergo transformation to create an entirely new work (which he did in his pastiches), and he saw the practice as a way to enrich and uncover the ideas concealed in a piece. His transcriptions include an adaptation of Bach's Chromatic Fantasia, in the preface to which he denounced those who perform Bach on the piano without "any substitution in pianistic terms". Sorabji praised performers like Egon Petri and Wanda Landowska for taking liberties in performance and for their perceived ability to understand a composer's intentions, including his own. Writings As a writer, Sorabji is best known for his music criticism. He contributed to publications that dealt