Paul Phillips, author
A Clockwork Counterpoint is the first book to examine the musical side of Anthony Burgess, an astonishingly prolific and talented composer, revealing how his lifelong involvement in music is an essential key toward understanding his life and work.
Whether explaining the sonata form structure of A Clockwork Orange and the musical underpinnings of dozens of his other novels, his distinctive views on the interrelationship between music and literature, music's role in his ties to his father and wives, or what his compositions tell us about his troubled relationship with his son, A Clockwork Counterpoint illuminates Burgess's dual creative life, providing the first complete portrait of a prodigious artist whose musical accomplishments have remained largely unknown until now.
A Clockwork Counterpoint was published in November 2010 by Manchester University Press and is distributed in the US exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan.
Considered the leading authority on the music of composer-novelist Anthony Burgess, Phillips is a featured commentator in the BBC television documentary The Burgess Variations and the author of the Burgess entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a contributor to Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange and Anthony Burgess and Modernity, and author of A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess.
The collection of papers and essays published in Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange (Presses de l’Université d’Angers) represents the fruits of the first international conference devoted to Anthony Burgess since the establishment of the Anthony Burgess Centre at the University of Angers in 2001. In “Alex in Eden: Prologue and Music to Burgess’s Dramatisation of A Clockwork Orange”, Paul Phillips examines the score that Burgess composed for his theatrical adaptation of the novel as “a play with music” while examining the significance of an unpublished and hitherto unknown prologue to the play written by Burgess as a Biblical allegory. Six songs from A Clockwork Orange: a play with music performed by singer with Phillips at the piano are included on the CD that accompanies this volume.
Anthony Burgess and Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2008) provides a variety of new perspectives and contexts for assessing Burgess’s literature and music. A range of international scholars and critics explore the writer’s novels and music to consider how Burgess contributed to modernist and postmodernist art. The 16 essays in this volume examine and interpret Burgess’s achievements in from theological, psychological, linguistic, literary and musical perspectives.
“Phillips’s paper [‘The postmodernist always swings nice’] provides one of the best illustrations of just how difficult and complex is the issue of Burgess’s relationship to modernism and postmodernism, the issue that all of the papers in this collection in their various ways try to illuminate. Phillips’s paper also shows just how rewarding and invigorating the search for answers can be for those willing to follow Burgess.” Carson Bergstrom, from his introduction to Anthony Burgess and Modernity.
Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009) is a collection of papers delivered at the 2006 Burgess symposium at the University of Angers. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book proposes a new insight into the relationship between literature and music through the prism of Anthony Burgess' works and those of his spiritual fathers, be they writers or composers, covering topics that include Napoleon Symphony, Mozart and the Wolf Gang, and Burgess’s relation to pop music. The book opens with Phillips’s essay “That Man and Music: Ten Reasons Why Anthony Burgess’s Music Matters”, a cogent explanation of the value of Burgess’s musical accomplishments, describing what they reveal about his literature and why they are important in their own right.
