Music Book Review: This Man and Music by Anthony Burgess

This Man and Music
by Anthony Burgess (Music 781.68 Bur)

Anthony Burgess is well known as the author of many novels, including the infamous A Clockwork Orange that received even more attention as Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film of the same name. What you may not know is that he was also a dedicated composer who began teaching himself piano at age 14. Burgess considered his interests in literary and musical worlds mostly equal, and he was keen to point out musical associations discovered in the rhythms and structures of good writing. Although his musical output is less known than his writing, he maintained connections with the musical world throughout his career. After presenting four lectures on the intersections of music and literature at the University of Kent’s Eliot College in 1980, he expanded his thoughts on music into the 1982 book This Man and Music.

 

This Man and Music has just been brought back into print as part of the Irwell Edition series of the works of Anthony Burgess, and in the years since its initial publication, the author’s musical life has received at least a little more attention than it had by the early 1980s. His takes on the intersections of musical and literary thought are at times unorthodox: he finds musical origins for the meters of poetry, for example, and implications of contrapuntal activity in Joyce’s Ulysses. To a large extent, these essays are autobiographical, and the cross-discipline associations Burgess makes are sometimes more personally relevant to him than universally applicable. That said, it’s a fascinating look at how this notable author incorporated musical thinking into his narrative structures, and the book offers lots of unusual perspectives on both practices. I was especially entertained by his surprisingly pragmatic “Let’s Write a Symphony” chapter, where he takes us through the process of laying out a large-scale musical work.

 

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Night Music by Theodor Adorno.]

[ Article about the editing of This Man and Music on the official International Anthony Burgess Foundation web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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