David W. Barber's video: The Silver Swan

Some 40 years ago, on something of a dare, the esteemed and incomparable novelist, journalist and composer Anthony Burgess created for me a simple quatrain about a silver swan, the text to a madrigal we imagined might be found in his Shakespearean novel Nothing Like the Sun. I duly returned it to him, set to music I had composed in the style of a 16th-century madrigal. And so began a literary/musical friendship that led to him writing a glowing preface to my book Bach, Beethoven and the Boys (1986) and continued until his death in 1993. There are few writers like him. Here's my setting of his madrigal text. And please check out my publisher's website at IndentPublishing.com