Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 1, July, 1999

Contents
Introduction  (by Ben Forkner).	P. 1
Notes on The Malayan Trilogy (by Liana Burgess). 	P. 4
The Music of Anthony Burgess (by Paul Phillips). 	P. 8
Anthony Burgess As Television Critic 
(by Andrew Biswell). 	P. 21
Notes on Anthony Burgess's Music in 1999 
(by Maureen Turquet). 	P. 31

Anthony Burgess Center
Université d'Angers
Maison des Sciences humaines  
2, rue Alexandre Fleming  
49066 Angers Cedex 01 (France)
Newsletter editor : Ben Forkner
Associate editors : Valérie Neveu & Dominique Lemarchal

Introduction
By Ben Forkner
Three essays
For an undertaking still in its infancy, chronologically speaking at least, it is gratifying to announce that this first Newsletter comes into the world fully grown, with a fairly independent will of its own. I had hoped, not unreasonably I think, to have plenty of news to report, but I cannot claim that I had any idea that three original essays would arrive almost at the same time. Thus The Anthony Burgess Newsletter becomes a sort of Anthony Burgess Journal, not by design or deliberation, but by the grace of an artist whose immense gifts continue to inspire new considerations wherever one looks. Liana Burgess, now writing a full-scale memoir of her life with Burgess, has agreed to send us regular notes from her work-in-progress. Her essay on The Malayan Trilogy is part of a longer meditation on her translation of the Trilogy into Italian. Paul Phillips, who is quickly becoming recognized as the main authority on all aspects of Burgess's music, provides a very useful account of the musical career, including a list of some of the major performances given recently. This essay is a version of the Burgess entry Phillips has been asked to write for the next edition of the Grove. Andrew Biswell's discussion of Burgess as a television critic in England during the 1960s points to a relatively unexamined feature of Burgess as a critic and journalist. Biswell first presented his discussion in a public lecture at the Burgess Center last April 5. There is still, by the way, a mass of journalistic matter waiting to be collected and reprinted in book form.
BBC Documentary
As far as news itself is concerned, just to prove that the Newsletter has not lost all notion of its original conception, the major news is the Anthony Burgess documentary that David Thompson and Kevin Jackson of the BBC have just completed. This is a wonderful two-hour documentary spanning the life and career of Burgess, organized into thirty themes, or variations, on the artist: as novelist, of course, but also as critic, biographer, composer, teacher, linguist, journalist, and film writer: the whole symphonic parade of multifarious talents. Much of the documentary consists of original interviews, with Gore Vidal, A.S. Byatt, William Boyd, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Paul Phillips, Liana Burgess, and others. The interview with Liana Burgess was held at the Center in Angers which is featured in the second hour of the documentary. The BBC team stayed several days in Angers last February, filming not only the Center's premises in the University Library, and our special collection, but also a long sequence at the home of Maureen Turquet, our local music correspondent, and a gifted pianist, who gave a private concert of Burgess piano music in honor of Liana. A fuller account of the documentary will be given in our next Newsletter. As of this writing, the exact dates of its first showing have not yet been announced. It should be out in Great Britain before the end of the year, and in the United States shortly after Christmas. I will of course print the dates for our readers as soon as I receive them.
Other News
The Anthony Burgess Center has decided to organize an international conference on Burgess in 2001. We welcome suggestions from all our correspondents and readers. Preparations will begin in the Fall of 1999. By the way, I do want to thank all of you, correspondents and readers, especially those who have sent messages of support during the past few months. Unfortunately I have not been able to answer the hundreds of emails I have received. We hope soon to create a sort of open forum on our Website, thus allowing anyone to send messages and questions and answers directly to the screen. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for not answering each of you individually. And keep the cockle-warming messages flowing our way. Finally, I am very pleased to announce that there is a movement underway to organize an Anthony Burgess Society. The Society will work closely with the Center, but will be an independent entity authorized to take subscriptions, gather funds, solicit sponsors, and organize celebrations of all aspects of the Burgess oeuvre. More details will be announced on this site in a few weeks. Obviously, all our correspondents and readers are warmly invited to join.
Ben Forkner, Director 
Anthony Burgess Center 

Notes on The Malayan Trilogy
By Liana Burgess
"East? They wouldn’t know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East. That’s where the East is, there." He waived his hand wildly into the black night. "Out there, west. You wasn’t there, so you wouldn’t know. Now I was. Palestine Police from the end of the war till we packed up. That was the East. You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. So you know nothing about it either. So you needn’t be talking." 
Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’ clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, "Did you bring any beer back with you?" 
I am revising the Italian proofs of Malesia, or, as the trilogy sounded in its original title, The Long Day Wanes. According to what Anthony tells us, it was his first wife Lynne who found the title in "Ulysses" by Tennyson, a not-so-oblique reference to the British Empire – The Long Day – at its Dämmerung, its sunset.
They arrived in Malaya, or, better, The Federation of Malaya (Persekutan Tanah Melayu ) in Late August 1954 and we have a chronicle of those years with their correct geographical place names in the last part of Little Wilson and Big God. But when one reads one book after the other (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East,) one does not think of mere historical factuality: one rides with the story and the characters. The opening is a sort of debate about the nature of the East. To the Irishman, Flaherty, who served in the Palestine Police, East is Palestine, and not Malaya, which, naturally, for us Europeans, is further east than India but which to Nabby Adams, the deuteragonist we meet on the very first page of the book, is no east at all: it is half of his home, the other half being Northampton. Malaya, east or no east, is a foreign country and he does not speak or understand the language. Hindi and English are his idioms. From one side of the loom to the other in this huge tapistry (or tenture, since we speak in Angers) of The Long Day Wanes we run into the changing, interchanging meaning of East, Far East and West, Far West which imbues the weft with different colourings, a leitmotif, if we prefer a musical analogy, announcing itself and then disappearing into the background before emerging many times over, modified, modulated.
It all began at the opening of the XVIIth century, in India.
The East India Company which was chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 over two centuries later employed in its administrative service the British civilian Stamford Raffles who took part in the capture of Java from the Dutch and while a governor of Sumatra was responsible for the acquisition and foundation of Singapore in 1819. Singapore was for some time the capital of the federation of Malaysia (now it is Kuala Lumpur). What it is perhaps useful to remember is that East in this case is not the East of Marco Polo, but the East of Christophorus Colombus, the post-Columbus East, rather, which has to identify itself by opposing itself to the West Indies. Columbus' mistake of thinking that he had reached India on his way to China, in his effort to prove that the earth is round but had landed in a new continent instead, has obliged us Europeans to have to add the qualifier West every time we say Indian, or India.
Of course there are also the Indians of East India who emigrated to the West Indies and when they, like V.S. Naipaul, born in a Brahmin family of Hindu parents, went back to their homeland, or home continent, quite often they underwent a very thorough shock. Naipaul, as a consequence in 1964 wrote An Area of Darkness. What he felt is implicit in the title. Thus, when we say West Indian the person referred to can simultaneously be East and West Indian.
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, says Kipling in "The Ballad of East and West". But that was, I think in 1892 (Barrack-Rooms Ballads) but now in mid-’50 when John Wilson, later Anthony Burgess, is putting down on paper what he sees, what he hears, what he smells, the world is reshaping itself. Soon after we will be entering the area of post-colonialism with its incredible racial and religious massacres. Incredible because some thought that the end of colonialism would be an end to all that. Victor Crabbe, the un-protagonist, in a way, of the trilogy, falls for Malaya, shuttling between the East and West coast of the peninsula (another sub-theme of the same geographical-cultural opposition) and finally wanting to stay East forever or to that bitter end which he sometimes feels is the doom of the liberal imagination. His wife Fenella, however, the other pillar of the conjugal arch, breaks the symmetry and goes back westward but after falling in love with that East that she has set out hating, an East in the shape of a sultan, abang, rather, who has chosen London and La Côte d’Azur for his exile. And the albino-white lawyer, Hardman, a former classmate of Victor’s, who has turned Muslim and married a Malaya Muslim, ‘Che Normah binte Abdul Aziz, goes East to La Mecca (which is actually west if you come from Kuala Lumpur) in order to become a hadji, a holy man, so that he can fulfil his wife’s ambition, conversion and merging of West to East, of Christian to Muslim, of having, in other words, a whiter than white Muslim husband. Hardman, on his side, has planned to skip boat and to end up in London. But the operational deceit will not be running smoothly and the West will leave behind something of itself waiting to be engulfed by that Bigger Far West of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street. This is already announced when examining the problems of running a British-type Public School in that far mock outpost of Britishness. To solve the problem of a headmaster of the school, we are told, "at times it was thought that an American might be appointed, who, because he would combine the familiar and the exotic and would carry on his breath the magic of the sound track, might arouse in the boys a strong religious devotion. But an American might introduce rounders. Besides, such an appointment would be a complete betrayal of the ideals on which the Mansor School was based, surrender to a culture which, however inevitable its global spread, must for as long as possible meet a show of resistance." This was written in 1955, printed in ’56, long before the 1981 of Midnight’s Children and The Shame of 1983, and it is the first time that that incredible comparably small universe teeming with different races and religions is seen from the inside with love and without squalor. 
These notes were jotted down towards a longer essay on The Malayan Trilogy to be written by Liana Burgess (April 14, 1999).

The Music of Anthony Burgess
By Paul Phillips
Despite his fame as a literary figure, Anthony Burgess has been remarkably unrecognized and underappreciated as a composer. Known to the public almost exclusively as an author, Burgess was also a talented and prolific composer who wrote over 175 musical works during a compositional career that spanned more than 60 years. The literary and musical sides of Burgess's creative life are far more evenly balanced than they appeared in public and to a large degree are interrelated, as future studies of Burgess's books and compositions will be certain to illuminate.
Burgess's music covers a wide range of genres, including symphony, concerto, opera, ballet, and chamber music. His eclectic and ebullient style draws upon classical as well as jazz and popular music. Grounded in the tradition of tonality that spans the Baroque period through late 19th-century Romanticism and early 20th-century French Impressionism, Burgess's music is strongly influenced by the works of Debussy and the English school of Elgar, Delius, Holst, Walton, and Vaughan Williams. Although the majority of his music is what might be termed "serious", he wrote numerous works based on popular styles; sometimes jazz and blues-inflected harmonies reminiscent of Gershwin emerge unexpectedly in Burgess's symphonic compositions.
Often daringly experimental as a novelist, Burgess as a composer was essentially conservative. He often wrote in conventional musical forms, such as sonata and passacaglia, and tended to write traditionally structured works such as four-movement symphonies and three-movement concertos. Burgess had a deep love of polyphony and composed untold amounts of counterpoint; in his autobiography he wrote that each morning he tried "to emulate Bach and compose at least a fugal exposition." Curiosity compelled him to experiment with twelve-tone music, but his conservative musical tendencies led him no further in the direction of the avant-garde. As he wrote in 1982, "I have not finished with the orchestra of Strauss, and I am too old now ever to be ready for the aleatory or the electronic or the Cagean space of silence. I have had enough silence."
Burgess's initial fascination with music was sparked by listening to the Prélude à 'l'après-midi d'un faune' on his self-made crystal radio in early 1929. The sensuality and originality of Claude Debussy's eight-minute masterpiece made a powerful impression on the twelve-year-old Burgess (actually John Burgess Wilson, as he was known until the age of thirty-nine). As a highly imaginative young man afflicted with daltonism, or colorblindness, Burgess took delight in the evocative blend of orchestral color in the Prélude. "My impaired colour sense was already finding, in the quiet impact of Debussy's orchestra, an auditory compensation." Having heard Debussy's vivid orchestral timbres, he felt compelled to see them as well, and undertook a mostly self-taught study of music notation.
Determined to become a great composer, Burgess worked his way through Handel, Beethoven and Schumann while aiming to be 'modern' like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Debussy remained his principal influence – "it seemed to me that he was the primal force that charged all musical innovation." One of Burgess's lasting musical memories was attending the premiere of Constant Lambert's Rio Grande with his father in November 1929. Lambert's music, like Gershwin's, combined jazz with classical traditions in a way that Burgess himself would undertake nearly five decades later in his Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in E flat.
Burgess came by his musical talent honestly, that is to say, genetically. His mother Elizabeth was a music hall performer known in her native Scotland as the "Beautiful Belle Burgess". She was a dancer and singer, a member of the chorus who rose to the status of soubrette. Burgess's father, Joe Wilson, was a piano player from Manchester who accompanied silent films and played in the orchestra pits of music halls by night while plying such trades as bookkeeper, cashier and tobacco shop manager by day. It was while playing piano in a Glasgow music hall that Joe Wilson first caught sight of the blond, beautiful Elizabeth Burgess "by way of her ankles". By the time Joe returned home to Manchester, Elizabeth had become his wife.
Sadly, Elizabeth Burgess never had an opportunity to pass her knowledge on to her son. He was less than two years old when she and his older sister Muriel, born in 1914, died of Spanish influenza in the pandemic that struck in early 1919. Knowing her only as an insubstantial memory, Burgess in later life was attracted to fictional characters whose lives bore a resemblance to his deceased mother, especially Molly Bloom, the music hall soubrette who is the principal female character of James Joyce's Ulysses. Of his mother, Burgess wrote that, "It would be easier to recreate her in fiction, relating her to Molly Bloom and Rosie Driffield, than to wrestle with a virtually non-existent reality." Burgess's lifelong fascination with the book and its heroine culminated in his operetta Blooms of Dublin, a musical version of Ulysses that was produced jointly for radio by Radio Telefis Eireann and the BBC for the Joyce centenary in 1982.
The only music lesson Burgess's father ever gave him occurred shortly after the epiphany of hearing the crackling transmission of Debussy' Faune over the crystal radio. Just before going off to the neighborhood pub, Joe Wilson pointed out to his son the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in a volume of The Music Lover's Portfolio. Pointing to the second theme, he played it on the piano with a cigarette dangling from his lips. "'All you have to do is copy it out. That, by the way,' pointing with a nicotined index, 'is middle C. Under the treble stave or over the bass stave, it's still middle C. And here it is on the joanna.' He prodded and it sounded." Armed with the knowledge of middle C bestowed to him by his father, Burgess figured out the rest by himself. His novel The Pianoplayers, an homage of sorts, was published in 1986. This novel, which contains a short piece of music for "fiddles" (playing only the open strings) and piano on its final pages, is the rather harrowing story of a child and pianoplaying father. Recalling Burgess's own experience, it includes a detailed description of teaching oneself scales and chords navigated from the fixed star of middle C.
Burgess never aimed to become a concert pianist, eschewing scales and technical exercises in favor of big chords. With a keen ear for jazz, film music and popular song ("I have shameful total recall of all the theme songs of the time"), Burgess in his teens developed into a talented player of 'standards' who "could, at a pinch, find employment as a cocktail pianist." He found the piano useful for learning how to compose, but by the age of seventeen chose no longer to compose at the keyboard. "I realized how valueless the piano is as an aid to orchestral composition. A piano misleads, sets up the wrong sounds in one's head. I ceased to pity Beethoven, Smetana and Fauré for their deafness. Deafness was no great handicap: it shut in sonic realities against the intrusive and impertinent noises of the world."
By the age of eighteen, Burgess had composed a trio for flute, oboe and bassoon, a prelude and fugue for organ, song settings of Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, a setting of lines from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel for male chorus, a Dead March for orchestra, and his first symphony. This opus, a four-movement work in E major, was composed with the sounds of symphonies by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Walton "too much in my ears. My orchestration was Elgarian with Holstian condiments; from The Planets I stole a bass flute, six horns and four trumpets…What was the language of this symphony? A language altogether proper for a young man composing music in England in 1935. Diatonic, swift to modulate, inclined to the modal, Vaughan Williams harmonies, occasional tearing dissonances like someone farting at a teaparty, bland, meditative, with patches of vulgar triumph. Totally English music, hardly able to jump twenty-two miles into Europe."
Failure to pass a course in physics kept Burgess from pursuing music studies in college; music students were to have the knowledge of acoustics that a course in physics was expected to provide. He turned to the department of English instead, earning a B.A. with honors for a thesis on Christopher Marlowe. He continued writing music, however, composing a choral setting of lines from Ezra Pound's Cantos, a string quartet, twelve-tone studies for piano, Caedmon's Hymn for male voices, an Irish song for soprano and flageolet, a piano sonatina, incidental music for Flecker's Hassan, words and music for a group of cabaret songs in English and another group in German, a chamber music setting of Eliot's Lines for an Old Man, and the draft of Dr Faustus, a projected one-act opera, by the time of his graduation from the University of Manchester in 1940.
Burgess's desire to become a major composer continued to be his dominant career aspiration for nearly another two decades. His eventual decision to pursue a career primarily in literature over music left Burgess with an anxiety that, in 1985, continued to distress him: "At the age of thirteen I decided that I was to be a great composer… It was an ambition that only really faded in my late thirties, and sometimes, in my late sixties, it is encouraged to re-emerge…The appreciation…of my [musical] work disturbs me into worrying whether I was wrong in turning to literature and taming an old ambition into a diversion like knitting. I am receiving musical encouragement too late."
Induction into the British Army during World War II did not interrupt Burgess's musical creativity so much as divert it in the direction of dance and popular music. As musical director of the 54th Division Entertainment Section (1940-43), he wrote and arranged many pieces for dance band. Reassigned to Gibraltar (1943-46), he wrote a Cello Sonata in G minor, Passacaglia for orchestra, Gibraltar Overture for large orchestra, and numerous smaller works.
From 1946-54, Burgess held a series of academic positions in England in Bedwellty and Banbury, teaching music, speech, drama, English literature and phonetics while beginning to write fiction. (His first novel, Vision of Battlements, dates from 1949). Musical works from this period include Ludus Polytonalis for recorders, Moto Perpetuo for large orchestra, Partita for string orchestra, Wiegenlied for piano, and incidental music for Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), The Ascent of F6 (Auden), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare).
As an Education Officer in Malaya and Borneo from 1954-59, he composed Malayan-influenced works such as Kalau Tuan Mudek Ka-Ulu: five Malay pantuns for soprano and native instruments; Suite for Small Orchestra of Indians, Chinese and Malays; and his second symphony, Sinfoni Malaya for orchestra and brass band. He began writing more seriously in the mid-1950s. With his first major publication, the novel Time for a Tiger in 1956, he adopted the pseudonym Anthony Burgess, adapted from his confirmation name Anthony and given name John Burgess Wilson.
Following a physical collapse in Borneo, Burgess returned to England in late 1959, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and given less than a year to live. Determined to provide an income for his first wife Lynne (née Llewela Isherwood Jones, 1921-1968), he wrote furiously, producing five and a half novels within twelve months, at the end of which time there were no longer any signs of ill health. Now an established author, he continued writing, producing novels, non-fiction, essays, and reviews of literature, television, and drama. As his fame and reputation as a writer grew, his musical production temporarily declined. The few works he composed in the sixties include Fantasia for two recorders and piano, Concerto for flute and strings, Twelve-Tone Polyrhythmics for piano, Preludes for piano, Passacaglia for orchestra, Song of a Northern City for piano, and Minuets in E minor for guitar.
Beginning in the late sixties, Burgess wrote scripts and music for a number of film, television, video and theatre projects: Will! (1968), a film musical on the life of William Shakespeare based on his novel Nothing Like the Sun (music recorded but film never produced); Moses the Lawgiver (1973), a TV series starring Burt Lancaster (music rejected by producer Lew Grade); and The Eyes of New York (1975), an hour-long video produced by Mondadori (music recorded, video completed but never released). In 1971 he composed the incidental music for an acclaimed production of Cyrano de Bergerac, using his translation, at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He wrote that the $500 he received for the music, the first income he had ever earned for composing, "thrilled me far more than the far more substantial earnings that would accrue from the play." The success of the production led to a Broadway musical, with book and lyrics by Burgess and music by Michael Lewis. Cyrano, starring Christopher Plummer in the title role, opened in New York at the Palace Theatre on May 13, 1973 to mixed reviews. It closed after 49 performances; a cast recording was issued by A&M Records. Other compositions from this period include a choral setting of Bethlehem Palmtrees (Lope de Vega, transl. Ezra Pound), a Malay pantun for voice, alto flute, and xylophone composed for soprano Cathy Berberian, music for an Italian production of John Osborne's play The Entertainer, and a suite for piano duet.
Symphony No. 3 (1974-75) marks a turning point in Burgess's compositional career. Commissioned in 1974 by conductor James Dixon for the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra and completed in April 1975, the symphony was premiered in Iowa on October 22, 1975. It was the first public performance of any of Burgess's orchestral works and an overwhelming experience for the composer: "I had written over 30 books, but this was the truly great artistic moment." Doubts about his musical competence, fueled by years of neglect and rejection of his compositions, were dispelled by the successful performance of the symphony. From that point on, Burgess began to compose with a prolificity that would make many a full-time composer proud. That he did so while writing another 30 books and hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles is a phenomenal achievement.
Compositions of the seventies include Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in E flat (1976); three works for chamber ensemble – The Brides of Enderby (1977); The Waste Land (1978); Quartet Giovanni Guglielmi (ca. 1978); Song for Saint Cecilia's Day (1978); Master Coale's Pieces, for piano (1978); Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1979); and Mr W.S. – Ballet Suite for Orchestra (1979). A series of works for harmonica written for harmonica virtuosi John Sebastian, Tommy Reilly and Larry Adler, date from these years into the early eighties.
In 1971, Burgess wrote the text for MND Show, a "madrigal comedy" based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; the music was by Stanley Silverman, a theatre composer he knew from the Guthrie. In 1972, Silverman wrote the music for the Guthrie production of Oedipus Tyrannus based on Burgess's translation; subsequently Burgess and Silverman turned the work into a cantata for speaker, chorus and orchestra, Oedipus the King, which premiered in New York in 1973. They planned to collaborate on an off-Broadway musical called Trotsky's in New York! for which Burgess wrote the text in 1975, but he ended up writing the music for the two-act show himself, completing it around 1979-80. The libretto was later published as one of three intertwoven plots in The End of the World News (1982).
A still grander project occupied Burgess from 1973-82 – Blooms of Dublin, a full-length, two-act musical based on Ulysses by James Joyce, a writer of enormous influence on Burgess. The musical style of the show stems less from opera than "the tonalities of the music hall", a tradition inherited from both his parents. The radio production of Blooms of Dublin was produced in 1982 and broadcast twice – on February 2, Joyce's birthday, and June 16, Bloomsday. To date, no stage production has ever taken place.
Works of the eighties include a String Quartet (1980), Nocturne for four Bassoons (1980), A Glasgow Overture for orchestra (1981), In memoriam Princess Grace for strings (1982), The Wreck of the Deutschland (1982), music for the film A.D. (1983), Man Who Has Come Through (D. H. Lawrence) for tenor and chamber ensemble (1983), an unfinished Symphony (1984), In Time of Plague (Nashe) for chorus (1984), 24 Preludes and Fugues – The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard (1985), three guitar quartets (1986, '88 & '89), Guitar Concerto (1987), Mr Burgess's Almanack for 14 players (1987), Concerto Grosso for guitar quartet and orchestra (1987), Quartet for Oboe, Violin Viola & Violoncello (1987), A Little Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (1987), La pioggia nel pineto (D'Annunzio) for tenor and piano (1988), Concertino for English Horn and Orchestra (1988), Petite Symphonie pour Strasbourg (1988), Meditations and Fugues for Brass Band (1989), Marche pour une Révolution 1789-1989 for orchestra (1989), and A Manchester Overture for orchestra (1989). He also wrote guitar quartet arrangements of Oberon Overture by Weber, "Mercury" from The Planets by Holst, and Irish folksongs.
In 1985, Burgess was commissioned by Scottish Opera to write a new libretto for Weber's Oberon (1826), replacing the stilted, original English language text of J. R. Planché with an updated story about hijackers and hostages set in the contemporary Middle East. It premiered on October 25, 1986 to generally positive reviews. Burgess's translation of Carmen was performed by the English National Opera in 1986. The same year, 25 years after writing the book for which he remained best known, Burgess rewrote A Clockwork Orange as "a play with music," restoring the original ending of the novel, which had been omitted from Stanley Kubrick's film (1972), and supplying his own incidental music, based heavily on Beethoven. The play was published in 1986 by Hutchinson and performed, with music, in Bonn. In 1998, it was republished in London by Methuen in a softcover edition that includes a reproduction of Burgess's handwritten manuscript of the incidental music.
Compositions of the nineties include Quartet for Flute, Oboe, 'Cello and Piano (1990), the orchestral work Sinfonietta for Liana (1990; for his second wife, née Liliana Macellari, whom he married in 1968), and several sonatas for recorder and piano, most of them dedicated to their son, Andrew Burgess Wilson (born 1964), who plays recorders, oboe and English horn. At the time of his death in 1993, Burgess was at work on an Italian version of Blooms of Dublin called I Blum di Dublino, which was to have been presented in Trieste.
An angular, vigorous style, often dissonant although mostly tonal, characterizes much of Burgess's music – a hybrid of Holst and Hindemith. There is a great deal of counterpoint in his music and few of his large-scale works do not contain fugal passages. Harmonically, his music tends toward dense sonorities often built upon fourths; melodically, fourths also predominate, usually in combination with seconds. His music possesses great rhythmic vitality, sometimes bordering on the symphonic jazz style of Bernstein, and playful exploitation of metrical ambiguity occurs frequently. Most of his pre-1970 compositions are lost, but the few that survive are similar in style to the later works. Extensive passages from early works occasionally turn up in later compositions, as in the Preludes for piano (1964), which serve as source material for the Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra (1976). Several manuscripts from the seventies contain lost compositions from the thirties and forties written out from memory, including a keyboard version of Symphony No. 1 (1935).
Burgess composed away from the keyboard; he sent the score of his Symphony No. 3 to the conductor "without my having checked a note of it aurally." Works were rarely sketched in advance – even the orchestral works were written directly as full scores without preliminary drafts – and pencils were eschewed in favor of pens. "I have always approached the writing of an orchestral score with a draughtsman's hand and a draughtsman's materials – ruler, black ink, sharp nibs. I have never used a pencil and an eraser, working out each measure thoroughly in my brain before setting it down in ink." He wrote quickly, often completing works (Master Coale's Pieces for piano, Guitar Quartet No. 1) within a few days, and considered prolificity obligatory. He composed many incidental pieces for friends or family, sometimes writing them out on the spot, and frequently presented brief works as birthday gifts or pieces d'occasion. An abundance of extant fugues and contrapuntal sketches support his claim that he wrote at least the exposition of a fugue every morning.
There are lighter works, such as the satirical 'Song by George Mikes and Anthony Burgess's (1983) and Tango for piano (1984), as well as the two large-scale theatre works, Trotsky's in New York! and Blooms of Dublin, which display his love of popular music and English music hall traditions. His talent as a parodist is evident in his Elizabethan ballet score Mr W.S. and Beethovenian score for the Singspiel version of A Clockwork Orange. An accomplished pianist, at parties he would often play popular tunes and cocktail music and, like his father, was adept at improvising silent film accompaniment, as he did for a screening of Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the University of Iowa in 1975.
Musical elements figure prominantly in many of Burgess's books. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex, a malevolent young droog, is inspired to commit acts of violence by listening to Beethoven's Ninth. Musical references abound in Nothing Like the Sun (1964), a novel about Shakespeare's love life written to celebrate the quatercentenary of the bard's birth. Several novels are structured according to musical form. A. A. DeVitis has written of the correspondences between musical form and literary structure in The Long Day Wanes (1965), Burgess's Malayan trilogy, while James Bly perceives the use of sonata form in Tremor of Intent (1966). In Napoleon Symphony (1974), Burgess set out deliberately to base the structure of the novel on Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, as he explains in This Man and Music.
Interrelationships between Burgess's novels and compositions are numerous. The Eve of Saint Venus, originally intended and partially completed as an opera, was transformed into a novella (1964). The Brides of Enderby, a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble, is a setting of verses from Inside Mr Enderby (1963) and Enderby Outside (1968) attributed to Burgess's fictional poet-protagonist F. X. Enderby. In A Clockwork Testament (1974), Enderby's film treatment of Gerard Manley Hopkins' epic poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, transformed into a violent film of the same name, brings fame and notoriety to the poet, parallelling Burgess's experience with A Clockwork Orange; in 1982, he completed a setting of the poem for baritone, chorus and orchestra. Toward the end of Burgess's quasi-autobiographical novel Beard's Roman Women (1975), two characters listen to a recording of Dryden's 'Song for Saint Cecilia's Day'; in 1978, Burgess composed a setting of the poem for chorus and orchestra. Rom im Regen, the title of the German translation of Beard's Roman Women, corresponds with a concertino for piano and orchestra titled Rome in the Rain. The Pianoplayers (1986), as mentioned earlier, is a tribute to his father, Joe Wilson, a piano-player in pubs and silent movie houses. Portions of Mozart and the Wolf Gang (U.S.: On Mozart, 1992), Burgess's bicentennial homage to Mozart, were performed as a play with music at the Université de Bourgogne in 1997.
Burgess wrote the scripts for BBC programs on composers Bohuslav Martinu (The Music of Exile, 1967) and Igor Stravinsky (1982). Gilbert and Sullivan, Sarasate, and Debussy appear as characters in the short stories collected in The Devil's Mode (1989), which also contains "The Cavalier of the Rose", Burgess's version of the story of Der Rosenkavalier. Essays and articles on musical subjects were published in Homage to QWERT YUIOP (1986; U.S. edition: But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?) and One Man's Chorus (1998) as well as The Listener,The Musical Times, Times Literary Supplement, Manchester Guardian, The New York Times, and numerous other magazines and newspapers.
The two volumes of Burgess's "confessions", Little Wilson and Big God (1986) and You've Had Your Time (1990), are primary sources of information about Burgess's life and music. This Man and Music (1982) is a combination of musical autobiography and essays; it includes a work list which, although not error-free, is an important guide to Burgess's compositions. Contemporary Composers, published by St. James Press in 1992, contains a brief essay by Brian Morton, an abbreviated list of works, and this comment by Burgess: "As a practising novelist and critic, I must relegate my music to a secondary role that is, as I grow older, becoming possibly primary. My work is hardly known in Britain, but this will soon be remedied. Style? Eclectic." Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians contains a short but insightful entry by Nicolas Slonimsky. Although there was no entry on Burgess in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, one did appear in the The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and a new entry on Burgess will appear in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians scheduled to be published in 2001.
Recent live presentations of Burgess's music include performances by the Brown University Orchestra of his Symphony No. 3 in December 1997 and the U.S. premiere of In memoriam Princess Grace in December 1998. In January 1999, soprano Kathryne Jennings and pianist Paul Phillips gave the world premiere of "Strings" and "Ecce Puer", two James Joyce settings composed in 1982, along with performances of "Under the Greenwood Tree" (Shakespeare) and "The Oxen" (Hardy). The Pioneer Valley Symphony with piano soloist Gary Steigerwalt gave the world premiere of his Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in E flat on February 13, 1999 in Greenfield, Massachusetts. An all-Burgess concert at Brown University on February 26, 1999 included the first performance of The Brides of Enderby since 1978, Nocturne and Bergamasque for oboe and piano, and a number of piano works: Wiegenlied, Preludes, Schnee in Savosa, Master Coale's Pieces, Brief Suite for Piano, A Scottish Rhapsody, and Tango.
The manuscripts of most of Burgess's music compositions are located in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas-Austin, which purchased them from Liana Burgess in 1997. Other manuscripts are located at McMaster University in Ontario and in private collections. The only commercial recording of his music currently available is Burgess: Musique d'un écrivain anglais sur la Riviera, a CD of his three guitar quartets performed by the Aïghetta Quartet, which was issued by Harmonia mundi in 1996. Burgess's music is published in England by Saga Music and in the U.S. by Barnard Street Music.
Paul Schuyler Phillips © 1999

Anthony Burgess as Television Critic
By Andrew Biswell
I have to confess that my heart sank when it was announced on the BBC Midnight News (on 8 March 1999) that ‘Stanley Kubrick, the creator of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange,’ had died. Hearing this solemn announcement, I was reminded of the student interviewer from the Transatlantic Review who informed Anthony Burgess that he was the creation of Stanley Kubrick, in the sense that without Kubrick’s intervention nobody would have heard of Burgess, or would have wanted to read him. Yet the fact that the Université d’Angers has set up a Centre to encourage the study of Burgess is in itself a powerful argument in favour of his work. (Perhaps it is worth adding that there is, as yet, no Stanley Kubrick Centre, either in France or, for that matter, anywhere else.)
My purpose here is to argue that Anthony Burgess’s journalistic work as a television critic for The Listener may be seen as a sustained attempt to articulate a Modernist aesthetic. The Listener was, until it closed in 1991, an upmarket weekly magazine published by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The function of The Listener was threefold: firstly to publish edited transcripts of BBC television and radio programmes, particularly talks (at a time when broadcast talks, rather than panel discussions, were still commonplace on the radio); its second function was to provide a commentary on broadcasting in the form of reviews – though for some years after commercial television began in Britain, The Listener had nothing to say about it, confining its criticism to the output of the BBC. The third important role the magazine played was that of a cultural weekly, reviewing new films, plays and books, and it became famous for its literary pages in the 1930s, when it championed and published poetry by W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis and Stevie Smith, as well as work by other, forgotten poets whose work never made it into book form. In its early days, The Listener established a reputation as a forward-looking cultural magazine which was prepared to get excited about the contemporary arts, including the developing art of television. As a magazine which gave to television and radio the same kind of detailed attention that it gave to books or the opera, The Listener occupies a unique place in British cultural history.
The Listener had been running for more than 30 years before Anthony Burgess began contributing to it in 1961. In many ways it seems to have been the periodical that kick-started his journalistic career at a time when he was earning hardly anything from novel-writing. Burgess worked for the magazine occasionally as a feature writer, extensively as a book reviewer, and he was, until 1968, one of its regular television critics. Beyond this, The Listener published transcripts of Burgess’s radio talks and of documentaries he made for television. And, of course, the magazine’s books pages also carried reviews of Burgess’s novels. When Burgess reviewed Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange, he did it in the pages of The Listener. So it is a periodical which tells us a lot about this particular author, and also one which gave him space to say whatever he wanted when he was starting out as a professional writer and critic.
Burgess performed the role of television critic for The Listener on a regular basis from 1963. He was hired as a reviewer of BBC documentaries, with a particular remit to write about arts broadcasting, at a time when there was rather more cultural programming than BBC viewers would find today. I think there is a strong element of performance in Burgess’s television criticism: he sustains a pose of amateurishness, and frequently writes about his inability to operate his television set. On one occasion he says that he stayed up late to watch The Sky at Night, presented by the astronomer Patrick Moore, but was so drunk that he started hallucinating and had to go to bed. He doesn’t appear to have much time for the idea that it might be part of the critic’s job to be both conscious and sober when the programmes he’s reviewing are being broadcast. Nevertheless, Burgess demonstrates that he is no fool when he drops quotations from Joyce, Eliot and Hopkins into his reviews. So the reviewing voice is an odd mixture of things: there’s a knowing literariness present as well as an oafish blokeishness, which is surely intended to reassure by saying something like: ‘I may be a professional television critic, but I don’t really understand the technology, and I can’t even make the machinery go.’ Frequently there is a hyperbolic rage directed against anything the critic finds culturally undesirable, particularly pop music and youth culture. (It becomes harder to know what to make of Burgess’s critique of youth culture if we remember that he had recently published A Clockwork Orange, that orgiastic celebration of teenage violence which was waiting, like a time-bomb, to explode onto the front pages when Kubrick filmed it in the 1970s.)
My first example of Burgess as television critic is a review of a Monitor documentary from January 1965, in which Sir John Betjeman travelled to Hull to interview Philip Larkin in connection with the publication of Larkin’s second collection of poems, The Whitsun Weddings. Betjeman, wrote Burgess
… was the best man to mediate between Larkin and ourselves. Talk about homogeneity: it was sometimes hard to tell where Betjeman’s commentary ended and Larkin’s verse began. The Betjeman eye inevitably hit on some of the stone funerary fantasies of Hull, where Larkin works as a librarian, but for the most part we got the younger poet unalloyed. His personality is a compelling one, despite his instinct to retreat rather than push and his whiff of healthy death-urge, and towards the end of the programme, I experienced one of those rare glimmerings of conviction: here is a poet who is going to be major. The grey tag about ‘welfare state poetry’ won’t do. If Hull stands for the supermarket life which poets must nowadays take as their subject-matter, Hull has been given a voice by Larkin, and that voice is louder than the city’s.
It seems to me that in this piece Burgess is taking his responsibilities as a cultural commentator seriously: the review is a good example of the critic acting as a kind of talent-spotter, drawing the attention of his readers to a relatively unknown poet. But elsewhere in Burgess’s reviews we see him playing the part of cultural gatekeeper, attacking programmes he sees as vulgar, inadequate or not sufficiently critical of their subject matter. Writing about Elizabeth Taylor, Burgess demonstrates that he is capable of scorn and viciousness:   
The limit of frothy insubstantiality was reached on Christmas Eve with that incredible ‘Elizabeth Taylor in London’ – a waste of public money, an impertinence and an insult, an invitation to a feast of nothing … The score was Hollywood-inspirational, overblown variations on Greensleeves, a brassy sepulchre. Elgar and Walton would have brought the sound of real London, and real London was not wanted … The eponymous goddess who conducted us around this unreal city was a jaw-dropping vision of totally meaningless allure – Yves St Laurent icing, delectability of fairy gold, the poor little box of tricks of Zuleika Dobson. The pretence of being interested in London’s poets was disgusting (‘I am an actress and my medium is words’), the mockery of patrician English positively dirty. Miss Taylor’s own idiolect belongs nowhere. Her general quality of rootlessness would be pathetic did she not claim roots in Hampstead … and somehow imply that she had soared above her place of origin. ‘Elizabeth Taylor in London’: she does us too much honour, she does really. The year is over. I can, with confidence, vote this the most deplorable programme of the year.
There’s a surprising degree of anger behind this review, related, I think, to Burgess’s conviction that the purpose of television ought to be to educate as well as to entertain. Part of the critic’s function, as Burgess seems to see it, is to discourage bad programmes by sending flaming arrows of controlled rage in their direction. Yet it’s worth considering the other side of the coin as well, and trying to establish what kind of television Burgess admires in his Listener columns. Most of the programmes he reviews favourably – aside from nature documentaries or political programmes about the Cold War – are popularising accounts of Modernist authors or documentaries about contemporary classical composers. 
It was the policy at the Listener that the choice of programmes to be reviewed should be left to the critic – so, although Burgess was, in one sense, constrained because he could write only about documentaries and arts programmes, the selection of material nevertheless tells us a lot about what culture meant to him at this time. In 1964, for example, we find him expressing admiration for a production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes at Saddler’s Wells. ‘This could not have been better done,’ he writes. ‘It was an important television event, and it should have been on BBC-1. It still remains to be pointed out – and some television programme ought to be concerned with this sort of thing – that the excellence of Peter Grimes has a great deal to do with Montagu Slater’s libretto, the only libretto I know that can be read in its own right as a dramatic poem.’ It’s worth noting in passing that, while Burgess applauds the production of the opera and the BBC’s decision to broadcast it, he voices a characteristic writerly anxiety that Slater’s words, which deserve as much attention as Britten’s music, are in danger of getting lost.
Britten’s music is a subject returned to frequently in Burgess’s Listener reviews, and he followed the televised performances of the War Requiem with interest, though he found it hard to decide whether Britten’s music, good as it was, matched the high standard of Wilfred Owen’s words. 
If documentaries about opera, ballet contemporary poetry and literary fiction represent the kind of television Burgess reviewed warmly in his Listener columns, there were limits to his cultural enthusiasms. One of the documentaries he disliked was about the Royal Academy School of Art: 
One often talks about being driven to drink. I have to record that the second programme in the ‘All Sorts to Make a World’ series sent me pubwards shivering with rage. This [documentary], ‘Art for Whose Sake?’, was as wretched a gallimaufrey of phoney aesthetics and scruffy-underdog whining as ever steamed up from the dog-end littered floor of a Soho-wine-club. [You’ll notice that Burgess’s insults are often much too literary to be really offensive.] We went to the Royal Academy School of Art to meet students who cultivated a deliberate lack of personal allure … Young Mr Dimbleby was their voice when he said that if photography had been invented earlier, perhaps patrons of art would not still be so obsessed with the representational. What it is now a moral duty to buy is the abstract canvas, apparently, and we do foul wrong to ask for something as reasonable as an imaginative composition of shapes that have their origin in the real world. Anyway, said these students, in the last analysis we only paint to please ourselves. Gurt topfloor ararkis wertle dick-dock. That is written to please me, and to hell with communication. I may add that these young painters (not the sculptors; the sculptors were different) spoke as graceless an English as I have heard in a long time.
There is more than a suggestion here of what Umberto Eco has called ‘apocalyptic’ cultural criticism, which steadfastly refuses to see any virtue in such things as experimental, abstract or non-representational art. Such criticism is terribly nostalgic for a period when painters wished to please their public with recognisable images – yet it’s surprising to find Burgess articulating such a position in the same magazine column where he regularly celebrates the difficult, ‘elitist’ art of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot or Benjamin Britten. 
I want to illustrate this problem more clearly with reference to the Engineering Building at Leicester University, designed by the architect Sir James Stirling, completed in 1965 and discussed by Burgess in his Listener column in the same year. There were four other documentaries under review in the same week: two about ballet (examining the careers of Rudolf Nureyev and Morgot Fonteyn), one about a playwright from Bolton called Henry Livings, and one about the conductor Sir John Barbirolli. The Leicester Engineering Building had been discussed in a Monitor documentary which also contained a feature on the architecture of South African townships. Describing James Stirling’s Leicester building, Burgess deplores what he calls its functionalism, though he concedes that, in a broadcast interview, Stirling ‘exhibited the proper artist’s passion.’ The review continues: 
I suppose laymen like myself worry about contemporary architecture because the necessary excitement of the concept is so rarely conveyed in the finished product – different from the other arts. What can we do about the Leicester achievement except admire without being moved? And it’s nothing to do with engineers who, moving others, are themselves as stone. Are we (if there are any such) moved by new theological colleges?
This strikes me as a maddening response to Stirling’s majestic structure, which surely ranks alongside Coventry Cathedral as one of the most impressive post-1945 buildings in England. (Stirling, incidentally, an architect of international reputation, also had a hand in the slightly later New State Gallery in Stuttgart.) I think it’s at moments like this that Burgess defines his position as a critic who was willing to embrace Modernism in writing and in music, but was much more sceptical of it in the visual arts. This position is similar in many respects to that of John Betjeman, the poet and broadcaster who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. Betjeman was, like Burgess, a writer deeply involved in journalism and television, and both men shared the conviction that Modernism was acceptable in literature but a corrosive or alienating force in painting and architecture. Betjeman was well known as the champion of Victorian Neo-Gothic church architecture, and he had argued the case against Modernist buildings both on the BBC and in the pages of the Architectural Review, where he worked as an editor. Writing of the houses in the average English town, Betjeman said: ‘They bear no relation to the landscape in either material, colour or proportion. They aren’t even well built. Electric light poles march with telegraph poles down either side of each road.’ Burgess seems to approach architecture with a broadly similar aesthetic in mind when he complains that Stirling’s Engineering building fails to move him as, presumably, a Gothic cathedral or the Free Trade Hall in Manchester would have done. 
Yet it would be foolish to argue that, simply because you are in favour of certain aspects of the Modernist project, you are therefore obliged to subscribe to all its other manifestations. I think there is a potentially fruitful tension between the Modernist music and writing of which Burgess approves and the painting and architecture which he regards as alienating, inhuman or needlessly solipsistic. One of the basic qualifications for being a television critic (or any other sort of critic) is that it is necessary to have strong opinions, together with a willingness to expose your prejudices. And it is helpful, given the pressures of meeting a weekly deadline, to have a theory of what you are criticising, even if you don’t necessarily state it in any single article. What Burgess’s television reviewing tells us is that his reading of Modernism is not at all straightforward. Although he is sympathetic to experimentation and the ditching of the old fixities in some of the arts, his overall response to Modernism comes across as cautious, critical, and sceptical. Taken together, these Listener reviews seem to argue that Burgess is determined to preserve his status as a rogue, independent cultural commentator, unwilling to be talked into orthodoxies or ideologies. 
Yet Burgess’s scepticism extended in the early 1960s to the medium of television itself. In his novel One Hand Clapping, published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell in 1961, he describes a working class couple from the north of England, Howard and Janet Shirley, whose leisure time is spent eating food out of tins and watching game shows on television. The point seems to be that such lives are artificial and detached from ‘real’ life, ‘real’ food, and traditional forms of culture. Janet’s conditioned response to television advertising is, I think, intended to remind us of a Pavlovian dog:  
Sometimes in the evening when we sat looking at the TV … the feeling would come over me that it would be nice to have a little child upstairs calling down, ‘Mummy.’ This was especially during the commercials, showing mother and daughter both protected by the same soap, or the mother loving her children so much that she washed all their clothes in Blink or whatever it was (they’re all the same, really).
Consider this novel alongside Burgess’s final television review, and it is possible to see how far his opinions had shifted in the intervening seven years:   
Now I give up reviewing but not, I hope, viewing. Television was invented for people like me, a man who can’t bear to switch off for fear of missing something. Wherever I go to live now, it will be the same … Of the importance of the medium I have never had any doubt, and I sincerely despise those who talk of the idiot’s lantern.
There is room (though not here) for a more detailed study of the connections between Burgess’s fiction and his journalism. The critic Malcolm Bradbury sums up Burgess’s achievement well and accurately when he writes: ‘If his work sometimes resembled an unstoppable monologue, it was also intellectually, morally and artistically complex. It bounced with ideas, was laden with freight.’ The one thing I’d disagree with in Professor Bradbury’s summary is his use of the word ‘monologue’. Burgess’s fiction and his journalism both seem to me to exhibit what Mikhail Bakhtin terms the dialogic imagination, a desire to dramatise intellectual problems and to engage with a variety of sometimes conflicting points of view. Bakhtin writes of Dostoyevsky’s ‘passion for journalism and his love of the newspaper, his deep and subtle understanding of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day, where the most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side and one side against the other.’ Perhaps this idea of the newspaper as the site where ideas and ideologies fight it out helps us to understand why Burgess was so drawn to journalism as a literary form. Dialogue takes place most conspicuously in the columns of newspapers. And it is one of the fascinations of Burgess’s journalism that we can see ideas evolving, taking shape, shifting around, being discarded, sometimes contradicting each other, but never standing still, always pushing restlessly onwards. 
In terms of the considerable light they throw on his other writing, Burgess’s articles for the Listener have outlived many (if not quite all) of the books and television programmes he reviewed there. I would argue that these pieces of journalism are worth having in their own right, both as a record of their time and because they display so many of the qualities which we value in Burgess’s novels, qualities such as word-play and unreliable narration – but also reflections on the creative process, and moments of autobiography. Burgess was invariably a careful and performative writer, and the journalism I’ve been discussing frequently connects in unexpected ways with the concerns of his novels. Having said that, I want to add that the pieces Burgess wrote for the Listener represent more than an interesting series of footnotes which might help us to make a reading of his fiction. Although they are also worth having for that reason, they are part of a much larger body of journalistic writing which merits closer attention than it has received so far. 
Everyone who values Burgess’s writing will have welcomed Ben Forkner’s recent edition of hitherto uncollected essays, One Man’s Chorus (1998), which has brought back into circulation many items of literary and biographical interest. One of the fascinations of this book is that it has been edited from typescripts, so it restores the pieces to their original state, prior to any editorial cuts. 
The hard job of collecting everything still remains to be done, and I can think of no better institution than the Anthony Burgess Centre to house a complete archive of Burgess’s journalistic writing. For the future, what is needed is a complete and properly annotated edition of Burgess’s journalism – similar to Peter Davison’s recent collected edition of the works of George Orwell. If it is to be done thoroughly, then it seems to me that this task is an urgent one. Although many of the publishers and editors who commissioned Burgess are still alive, some of them are advancing in years. Others, such as Maurice Ashley and Terence Kilmartin, are already dead. Those who survive will be able to provide important contextual information about the process of editing Burgess’s work, and their memories of the institutions which published him will be crucial to the complete, annotated edition which I am proposing. 
Andrew Biswell is a research student at Warwick University, England, where he is completing a doctoral thesis on Anthony Burgess. He is a regular book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, the Boston Globe and the New Statesman.   

Notes on Anthony Burgess's Music in 1999
By Maureen Turquet
Since the beginning of the year, Anthony Burgess's music has been performed several times, both in the U.S. and here in France. 
On February 13th, Paul Phillips directed the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra of Greenfield, Massachusetts in the world premiere of Burgess' Piano Concerto with Gary Steigerwalt as soloist. Later that same month, Mr. Philipps was joined by his wife, soprano Kathryne Jennings, and several other New England musicians for a concert of piano, vocal, and chamber music by Anthony Burgess at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The Brown University Orchestra had already performed Burgess' Symphony n° 3 in December of 1997, as well as his "In Memoriam Princess Grace" (a U.S. premiere) in December of 1998. 
Mr. and Mrs. Phillips also included four Burgess songs in a recital at the Chamber Music Society of Longmeadow, Mass., in January of this year. 
All of these performances were warmly received by the public and the press. 
The BBC came to Angers in February on the occasion of Liana Burgess's visit to the Center and, as part of their preparation for a two-hour television documentary on Anthony Burgess, they filmed pianist Maureen Turquet performing a selection of Burgess' Preludes and Fugues as well as his "Tango" in the presence of Mrs. Burgess. 
Plans are now in progress for future concerts, particularly in view of the scheduled 2001 Burgess symposium. 
 Maureen Turquet