Authors: Anthony Burgess
ISBN-13: 9781557834898, ISBN-10: 155783489X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Applause Theatre Book Publishers
Date Published: December 2001
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Anthony Burgess was the author of over 50 books, including his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange. But Burgess always emphasized music as the ruling passion in his creative life. Largely self-taught, Burgess composed his first symphony before he was twenty, many years before his first novel, and he was the composer of over 65 musical works.
In these deeply insightful meditations, the renowned writer explores the meaning of music, the intention of the composer and the process of composition, and the seemingly elusive relationships between literature and music. Burgess shows how "the processes of literary composition are revealed by the writers themselves"and then gathers evidence to understand the "inexplicable magic" of the details of the operation of music. From Shakespeare to the lyric verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the modernists T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to the modern lyricists Lorenz Hart and Stephen Sondheim, Burgess reveals how prose writers have struggled to tap the inherent musicality of their material.
This treasured classic provides a fascinating perspective on the mutually enriching relationship of these two creative arts by a man who mastered them both.
Foreword | 9 | |
1 | Biographia Musicalis | 11 |
2 | A Matter of Time and Space | 41 |
3 | Let's Write a Symphony | 50 |
4 | Music and Meaning | 73 |
5 | Meaning Means Language | 84 |
6 | Under the Bam | 96 |
7 | Nothing is so Beautiful as Sprung | 117 |
8 | Re Joyce | 134 |
9 | Contrary Tugs | 150 |
10 | Oedipus Wrecks | 162 |
11 | Bonaparte in E Flat | 180 |