(In addition to his forty-year tenure as a UI faculty member, Laird spent decades playing in the Quad City Symphony and cofounded the Iowa City Community String Orchestra. degrees from UI and was serving as a philosophy professor. The bass section included Laird Addis, who had received his bachelors and Ph.D. Not all the blue-jeaned musicians were exactly kids.

Plus, “young people do not take kindly to pianissimo markings: they like to saw or blast away.” Some of what Burgess had written needed fixing. Dixon brought the work before the orchestra, Burgess responded with delight: “I attended the first rehearsal and was awed at the large competence of all those delectable kids in blue jeans…I had written over 30 books, but this was the truly great artistic moment.” It wasn’t all perfect, of course. “Do the people responsible for this bland abomination,” mused Burgess, “realize that there are people around desperately trying to compose music of their own?” Burgess conceded that some passages were composed under the influence of “Christmas bibulosity,” though “the writing seems sober enough.” The rest was penned during a tour of the United States, with Burgess laboring mightily midst airport muzak. So just before last Christmas I bought myself a half-hundredweight of scoring paper and starting writing a symphony.Ĭomposition of the “Symphony in C” began in Italy, around Christmas of 1974. Neglect of my music by the orchestra of the Old World was what mainly turned me into a novelist, but most of this music had by now been blitzed, lost, torn up, and I had nothing in stock. Then I received a letter from Jim Dixon-not the hero of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim but the conductor of the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra-asking me if I had anything in stock, musical of course not literary, that the orchestra might perform when, if, I came there. I’d had a long-standing invitation to visit the University of Iowa, internationally known for, among other things, its Writers’ Workshop, but something always got in the way of acceptance. He had written it specially for James Dixon and the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra. In a move that distinguished him from other visiting writers, Burgess brought with him a new symphony. “I can honestly say that Anthony Burgess did present in fine form a considerable number of problems.” Anthony Burgess teach this subject,” wrote Kevin Cookie. “I would like to thank the Iowa English Department for arranging such a unique class as Problems of the Modern Novel and for arranging to have Mr. His course received endorsement in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Daily Iowan. The English novelist Anthony Burgess visited Iowa City in 1975 to teach at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Anthony a clockwork orange author