Ludovico’s Harp
2011
‘Ludovico’s Harp’ was written as a response to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for the 50th anniversary of its completion.
‘I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I’d viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised garbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself’
The viewpoint that Alex laughs off in this passage from Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange seems to come straight out of the tradition of F. R. Leavis and his mid-century literary periodical Scrutiny. The idea of art and literature as ‘universal’, morally elevating pursuits – so devastatingly disproved by concentration camp guards reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven – is heavily satirised in Burgess’ novel.
The disparity between Alex’s callous, ruthlessly amoral actions and the humanist call-to-arms of the Ninth Symphony of his beloved Beethoven is a key theme in the novel, and provides the conceptual material for ‘Ludovico’s Harp’. Here, Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is translated into Clockwork-Orange speak – made more violent, more sinister and more hollow, seizing on Alex’s favourite term of approval, ‘horrorshow’. The harmonicas, a favourite instrument of Burgess’, gradually oppress and submerge the voices and their lauding of brotherhood. ‘Ludovico’s Harp’ is about that most sinister phenomenon of a noble ideal being used for sinister ends – Alex was certainly not the first in the 20th century to pervert Beethoven in this way.
Instrumentation: 4 tenors & 2 basses (all with 2 tremolo harmonicas each), one offstage harmonica
Duration: c. 7″
Premiere: 29th Mar 2011 by George Wilson, Tom Kelly, Celyn Lloyd Thomas, Paddy Mulholland Tim Rathbone & James Berry at the International Burgess Foundation, Manchester