Anthony Burgess, a professional to his finger- tips, knew how to write an arresting first sentence. The locus classicus is his opening to Earthly Powers. But try this for size, a lapel-grabbing start of a piece about William Walton in The Listener:

Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the (a) bloody mary and (b) raspberry yoghurt helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing.

Apo-what? I have just enough Greek to know that it’s something to do with death; a helpful footnote reminds us that ‘άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω’, or ‘I want to die’ are the closing words of The Waste Land’s epigraph. I doubt the readers of the Listener in 1968 were given a footnote, but then maybe they didn’t need one.

Music was always Plan A for Burgess: ‘Neglect of my music by the orchestras of the Old World was what mainly turned me into a novelist,’ he says, perhaps tongue in cheek, for he tells other origin stories about his career elsewhere, about a performance of his Third Symphony at the University of Iowa. I have heard some of Burgess’s music and while I can’t remember what it was, I do remember I wasn’t all that impressed.It owed more to Weber than to Webern and I am no fan of the former. There are some writers on music who are so good – Hans Keller on Haydn’s Quartets, Charles Rosen on Beethoven, this magazine’s Michael Tanner on opera – that they can change the reader’s taste which would otherwise have been non disputandum. I thought Burgess was going to do that to me when I read his thoroughly engaging piece about Handel. (Another great opening sentence: ‘He was a big man, given to corpulence, of immense strength and uncertain temper’.) But all it did was make me think better of the man than of his music. I heard his Firework Music a day later on Radio 3 and still didn’t like it. But so what? Burgess writes so well about everything that mere agreement seems irrelevant.

As it happens, Burgess had no beef with Webern – Cage and Stockhausen were more his bugbears – and once gently chided Yehudi Menuhin for never having played Berg’s Violin Concerto. Menuhin, in a letter printed here, very sweetly replied that he had, ‘quite often’, and this seems to have started a friendship between them. Burgess wrote a Violin Concerto for him and he loved it, so what do I know? One of Menuhin’s letters quoted here contains the mind-boggling words: ‘We will be in Monte Carlo in the summer of ’78, and if I may give you a few tips on the violin I shall be delighted!’ ‘!’ indeed. (And how poignant to see Menuhin’s Highgate address at the top of his letters. I have, or had, a programme for the Highgate Choral Society’s 1974 Christmas concert which Menuhin signed for me. I only had the faintest idea of how close I was to greatness.)

That said, most of the lines that produce an exclamation mark in the thought bubble above the reader’s head come from Burgess himself, as you would expect. I know he never wrote a dull sentence, not even in his reviews – especially not in his reviews, because he loved explaining with enthusiasm – but I think he went to town in his music pieces. He was a show-off and this is why we love him. ‘Plenty of musicians hear the dropping of Worcestershire pippins in Falstaff.’ I am not entirely convinced, but again, so what? It’s a lovely turn of phrase, and writing it may have made the daily damnation of writing a little less painful. In a review of a book about countertenors he naturally digresses on castrati (‘properly evirato – devirilised or emasculated’). ‘The image of papal shears snipping off testicles to ensure the continuation of a fine boy’s voice is not strictly accurate,’ he says, and that’s an image no one’s going to forget in a hurry.

But much as Burgess liked his fun, he was also very interested in the nuts and bolts, as well as the para-musical aspects of the musician’s life:

I should like an account of what a virtuoso earns, how much he pays his agent and the taxman. From every artist’s autobiography one looks for the immediate artistic problems and their solution; one is always given mainly a journey, unfinished or otherwise.

(The title of Menuhin’s autobiography was Unfinished Journey.) Burgess is no snob: the line ‘for my part I do not think we shall need another book on the hurdy-gurdy for a long, long time’ might seem condescending but it is not. Just. He concludes a summary of the plot of the Ring cycle, which of course he loves, with the words: ‘The age of capitalism is dead, but so are the gods and the planned race of heroes. It has all been rather a waste of time.’ As you can see, he could do endings as well as beginnings.

Whoever at Carcanet had the idea of collecting all Burgess’s writings about music – the editor Paul Phillips himself, I presume – deserves a medal. Many of these pieces have appeared in other collections of Burgess’s journalism but plenty of them have resurfaced for the first time. Thankfully the failure of the British Library’s online catalogue has prevented me from doing some tiresome research as to which these are. One can just get stuck straight in. I don’t think I can conceive of a more enjoyable book being published this year, and it’s only February.