The music of Debussy sparked Burgess's musical imagination so powerfully when he was a boy in Manchester that he composed his first symphony at eighteen years of age and aspired to a career as a professional composer until his mid-thirties. Writings about his own music provides valuable information about many of Burgess's compositions, including his Symphony in C, his works for guitar quartet, and his opera Blooms of Dublin based on Joyce's Ulysses.
Carcanet also publishes The Ink Trade, a companion volume of literary essays.
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, he wrote more than sixty books of fiction, non-fiction and autobiography, as well as classical music, plays, film scripts, essays and articles. Burgess was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side. He was educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He lived in Malaya, Malta, Monaco, Italy and the United States, and his books are still widely read all over the world.
Paul Phillips is the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, published in 2010, and essays on Burgess published in six other books, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange. He has led performances of many Burgess compositions in concert, including numerous premieres, and conducted the first commercial recording of Burgess's orchestral music, released by Naxos in 2016.