Word: burgess
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THIS MAN AND MUSIC by Anthony Burgess McGraw-Hill; 192 pages...
Told by a doctor at the age of 43 that he had a year to live, Anthony Burgess greeted the news by taking up a literary career. He turned out five books in one year, hoping that the royalties might make a legacy for his wife. Now, 23 years and some 40 books later, the author of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers still regards writing as an "unwanted" gift, an "enforced vocation...
...true vocation, he says, is the one he has aspired to ever since adolescence, when he sat transfixed by a BBC radio broadcast of Debussy's L 'Après-Midi d'un Fanne: composing. With little outside encouragement, young Burgess taught himself music, beginning with the piano keyboard. "Find middle C," he maintains, "and you have found everything." At 20 he had written his first symphony. By the time of his erroneous death sentence he had, while supporting himself as a teacher, produced a catalogue of 65 mostly unplayed works...
...This Man and Music, Burgess sets out to see what his two arts have to say to each other. Music, of course, does not "say" anything; its content is tension and release. It communicates, but mysteriously, as "a semiotic organization." When the symphonic tone poems of Berlioz and Strauss try to incorporate narrative and character, the novelist in Burgess protests...
...slapstick grows redundant at times, whether in self-parody or not. As the stories go on for a combined 400 pages, the devices that serve a half-hour TV show become, at times, painful. In contrast to television, which is fanatically purged of everything outside the common denominator. Burgess is resolutely idiosyncratic...