He was self-taught – the University of Manchester wouldn’t let him study music because

He was self-taught – the University of Manchester wouldn’t let him study music, because he hadn’t passed his exams in Physics – and just about the only compositions he’d had performed were incidental music for amateur drama, arrangements for wartime dancebands and things like that. In Phillips’s view, it transformed his attitude to composition “Until then he’d been writing almost entirely for himself. Hearing it, he sometimes said, gave Burgess the greatest artistic satisfaction of his life. When BBC Radio broadcast Blooms of Dublin for Joyce’s centenary in 1982, the musicologist Hans Keller gave it an unmerciful roasting. The reason for the Third Symphony’s mid-western name is that it was commissioned by Professor James Dixon of the University of Iowa, who had read Burgess’s experimental novel Napoleon Symphony, guessed that it could only have been written by a composer, and wanted to hear what that composer could do.The symphony was premiered at Iowa in 1974. In December 1997, he conducted performances of the Iowa Symphony both in Cambridge, Mass, and in Providence – “We got standing ovations, and the local newspaper in Providence said that it was one of the highlights of the year.” America, it should be said, has always been more hospitable to Burgess’s music than has his homeland. Something like 60 works have been preserved, “many of which are quite long, like Blooms of Dublin, which was an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses into a music-hall show, or the Third Symphony, also known as the Iowa Symphony, which has a manuscript that’s well over 100 pages long”.It was the latter work with which Phillips chose to launch his public campaign of rediscovery.

Phillips estimates that Burgess must have composed around 150-160 complete pieces and any number of minor works, but almost everything that he wrote before 1970 had been lost, discarded or destroyed, including the First Symphony in E Minor (c 1935, when “John Burgess Wilson”, as he was then known, was just 18) and the Sinfoni Malaya of 1957, composed when he was a schoolteacher in Malaya. and I was just astonished by what was there.”Astonishing as it was, this pile of manuscripts represented only a fragment of a lifetime’s musical output. This writer then put Phillips in touch with Burgess’s widow, Liana, and eventually, “in August 1997, she invited me out to stay at their flat in Monaco, where all the manuscripts were in storage So I went to Monaco… So I wrote to his publishers, and found out that almost none of his musical work had been published.”Phillips’s researches then stalled for a couple of years, until he received a message at Brown University from a writer who was working on a Burgess biography. “That caught my eye, because I already liked Burgess very much as an author – I associated him with other verbally brilliant novelists like Nabokov and Joyce – but I had no idea that he was also a composer, and I was fascinated.

Phillips has also started work on the first full- length critical study which should be completed by the end of next year. Working title: A Clockwork Counterpoint.This one-man crusade began more or less by chance, when Phillips was browsing through The New York Times for 26 November 1993 and chanced upon a headline in the obituaries section,”Man of Letters and Music”. Thanks largely to the assiduous efforts of an American conductor and composer, Paul Phillips, who directs the orchestras and teaches music at Brown University, Burgess’s substantial musical output has been brought into order for the first time; in addition, Phillips has written a lengthy entry on Burgess for the next edition of Grove’s, and is hard at work publishing and performing various Burgess compositions for the first time.Last month alone, he conducted two Burgess concerts in the United States, including a world premiere of the Piano Concerto in E Flat, and an all- Burgess evening including The Brides of Enderby, “which I believe is unique in the history of music – a setting of poems written by one of his own fictional characters”.Over the next few years, Phillips hopes to premiere many more compositions, and to have some issued on CD; as far as I’m aware, the only one available is a French recording of some slight, if agreeable works for guitar by the Aighetta Quartet under the title Burgess: Musique d’un ecrivain anglais sur la Riviera (1995). But you do know that at the end of the day there’s a comfortable hotel and sympathetic people who, were you to get thoroughly squished by an elephant on the way to the Red Fort, would care for you and see that you were sent back home safely.No, this is not encouraging the spirit of adventure, I know. THE TROUBLE with a lot of conceptual art, you may say, is that it remains a concept. The good thing about packages is that they enable you to get to know places in safety, and then, if you want to return the following year on your own, you feel far less frightened.And packages can be used You needn’t join the herd every day You can do your own thing. I had seen strong mothers who lived in dreadful poverty but never thought that their children were a burden in their lives, only their gold.These are the women, and others such as Asma Jehangir, the head of the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan, and Roxanna Carrillo, the Peruvian feminist, who have taught me what to think, feel and do.

But a much more valuable solution would be for conceptual artists to work at levels that cannot be boiled down to the intellectual level of the snake-oil salesmen; to produce works of art that are too rich and ambiguous in meaning for any hired mediocrity to snaffle for the benefit of a new chocolate bar.. DRIVE ALL the way from Ealing to the British Library to attend the launch party for The Whole Woman by the formidable Dr Greer. The think-tanks are empty.At the end of January, in his speech to the Scottish Tories, William Hague concluded with this sentence: “We have started to change the Conservative Party,” he said; “now we must make sure we finish it.”Perhaps he will.. “I think one of the things an opposition can do,” he said, “is associate itself with the grievances people are bound to have – and, let’s face it, there are still teachers worried about conditions and standards in school, and nurses worried about their value and whether they are paid enough.”But six weeks ago Mr Hague stated that “spending [is] higher than it should be, and taxes [are] higher than they should be”. The only great political virtue of the Texas Governor and Republican presidential contender George W Bush is that he is neither Dan Quayle nor Pat Buchanan.