SOURCE: "Beethovenian Overlays by Carpentier and Burgess: The Ninth in Grotesque Juxtapositions," in Melopoiesis: Approaches to the Study of Literature and Music, New York University Press, 1988, pp. 140-54.

Barricelli is an American fiction writer, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he argues that the use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in A Clockwork Orange is arbitrary and inappropriate, "overlay[ing with negative associations one of the supreme compositions in the musical repertory."]

[The] Ninth Symphony, with its lofty reputation, is not ipso facto always an object of celebration, and it continues to appear in grotesque contexts. With the author of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, it is once more demythicized and overlayed with negative associations. Here again, the Ninth is treated, not as a work of art, but as a device in the novel whose dystopian vision centers around politics (the authoritarian socialism of future society), the media...