Music as Satire in Aldous Huxley’s Utopian Works

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Music as Satire in Aldous Huxley’s Utopian Works is written by Heike Sieger and published by LIT Verlag Münster. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3643918615 (ISBN 10) and 9783643918611 (ISBN 13).

This study explores the satirical function of music in Aldous Huxley’s (anti-)utopian novels Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island, as well as in his stage adaptations of two of these works: “Brave New World: A Musical Comedy” and “Ape and Essence—A Play”. Huxley—himself musically educated and active as a music critic for The Weekly Westminster Gazette in the early 1920s—frequently incorporated his personal likes and dislikes of certain composers and musical styles into his texts. The present analysis builds upon earlier criticism that examined Huxley’s general use of music in his works, but it goes beyond such studies by focusing on the satirical effect of musical elements such as references to composers and their works in his (anti-) utopian fiction: it bridges a scholarly gap between studies focusing on Huxley the satirist and those examining Huxley the music afficionado.