Alan Bush
Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works.
From a prosperous middle-class background, Bush enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music in the early 1920s and spent much of the decade furthering his compositional and piano-playing skills under distinguished tutors. A two-year period in Berlin from 1929 to 1931, early in the Nazi Party's rise to power, cemented Bush's political convictions and moved him from the mainstream Labour Party to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he joined in 1935. He wrote several large-scale works in the 1930s and was heavily involved with workers' choirs, for whom he composed pageants, choruses and songs. His pro-Soviet stance led to the BBC temporarily banning his music in the early years of the Second World War, and his refusal to modify his position in the postwar Cold War era led to a more prolonged semi-ostracism of his music. As a result, the four major operas he wrote between 1950 and 1970 were all premiered in East Germany.
In his prewar works, Bush's style was influenced by the avant-garde European idioms of the inter-war years. He began to simplify his style during and after the war, in line with his Marxism-inspired belief that music should be accessible to the masses. Despite the difficulties he encountered in getting his works performed in the West, he continued to compose until well into his eighties. He taught composition at the RAM for more than 50 years, published two books, was the founder and long-time president of the Workers' Music Association, and served as chairman and later vice-president of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. His contribution to musical life began to be recognised towards the end of his life, in the form of doctorates from two universities and numerous tribute concerts. Since his death in 1995, aged 94, his musical legacy has been nurtured by the Alan Bush Music Trust, established in 1997.
Life and career
Family background and early life
Bush was born in Dulwich, South London, on 22 December 1900, the third and youngest son of Alfred Walter Bush and Alice Maud, née Brinsley. The Bushes were a prosperous middle-class family, their wealth deriving from the firm of industrial chemists founded by the composer's great-grandfather, W. J. Bush. As a child Alan's health was delicate, and he was initially educated at home. When he was eleven he began at Highgate School as a day pupil, and remained there until 1918. Both of his elder brothers served as officers in the First World War; one of them, Alfred junior, was killed on the Western Front in 1917. The other, Hamilton Brinsley Bush, went into the family business and ran twice as Liberal candidate for Watford in the 1950s. The end of the war in November 1918 meant that Alan narrowly avoided being called up for military service; meantime, having determined on a musical career, he had applied to and been accepted by the RAM, where he began his studies in the spring of 1918.Royal Academy and after
At the RAM, Bush studied composition under Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias Matthay. He made rapid progress, and won various scholarships and awards, including the Thalberg Scholarship, the Phillimore piano prize, and a Carnegie award for composition. He produced the first compositions of his formal canon: Three Pieces for Two Pianos, Op. 1, and Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 2, and also made his first attempt to write opera – a scene from Bulwer Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii, with a libretto by his brother Brinsley. The work, with Bush at the piano, received a single private performance with family members and friends forming the cast. The manuscript was later destroyed by Bush.Among Bush's fellow students was Michael Head. The two became friends, as a result of which Bush met Head's 14-year-old sister Nancy. In 1931, ten years after their first meeting, Bush and Nancy would marry and begin a lifelong artistic partnership in which she became Bush's principal librettist, as well as providing the texts for many of his other vocal works.
In 1922 Bush graduated from the RAM, but continued to study composition privately under John Ireland, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. In 1925 Bush was appointed to a teaching post at the RAM, as a professor of harmony and composition, under terms that gave him scope to continue with his studies and to travel. He took further piano study from two pupils of Theodor Leschetizky, Benno Moiseiwitsch and Mabel Lander, from whom he learned the Leschetizky method. In 1926 he made his first of numerous visits to Berlin, where with the violinist Florence Lockwood he gave two concerts of contemporary, mainly British, music which included his own Phantasy in C minor, Op. 3. The skill of the performers was admired by the critics more than the quality of the music. In 1928 Bush returned to Berlin, to perform with the Brosa Quartet at the Bechstein Hall, in a concert of his own music which included the premieres of the chamber work Five Pieces, Op. 6 and the piano solo Relinquishment, Op. 11. Critical opinion was broadly favourable, the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag correspondent noting "nothing extravagant but much of promise".
Among the works composed by Bush during this period were the Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello, Op. 5; Prelude and Fugue for piano, Op. 9; settings of poems by Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro and W. B. Yeats; and his first venture into orchestral music, the Symphonic Impressions of 192627, Op. 8. In early 1929 he completed one of his best-known early chamber works, the string quartet Dialectic, Op. 15, which helped to establish Bush's reputation abroad when it was performed at a Prague festival in the 1930s.
Music and politics
Bush had begun to develop an interest in politics during the war years. In 1924, rejecting his parents' conservatism, he joined the Independent Labour Party. The following year he joined the London Labour Choral Union, a group of largely London-based choirs that had been organised by the socialist composer Rutland Boughton, with Labour Party support, to "develop the musical instincts of the people and to render service to the Labour movement". Bush was soon appointed as Boughton's assistant, and two years later, he succeeded Boughton as the LLCU's chief musical adviser, remaining in this post until the body disbanded in 1940.Through his LLCU work, Bush met Michael Tippett, five years his junior, who shared Bush's left-wing political perspective. In his memoirs Tippett records his first impressions of Bush: "I learned much from him. His music at the time seemed so adventurous and vigorous". Tippett's biographer Ian Kemp writes: "Apart from Sibelius, the contemporary composer who taught Tippett as much as anyone else was his own contemporary Alan Bush".
After his 1928 concert tour in Berlin, Bush returned to the city to study piano under Artur Schnabel. He left the ILP in 1929, and joined the Labour Party proper, before taking extended leave from the RAM to begin a two-year course in philosophy and musicology at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University. Here, his tutors included Max Dessoir and Friedrich Blume. Bush's years in Berlin profoundly affected his political beliefs, and had direct influence on the subsequent character of his music. Michael Jones, writing in British Music after Bush's death, records Bush's concern at the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Germany. His association with like-minded musicians such as Hanns Eisler and Ernst Hermann Meyer, and writers such as Bertold Brecht, helped to develop his growing political awareness into a lifelong commitment to Marxism and communism. Bush's conversion to full-blown communism was not immediate, but in 1935 he finally abandoned Labour and joined the British Communist Party.
Notwithstanding the uncompromising nature of his politics, Bush in his writings tended to express his views in restrained terms, "much more like a reforming patrician Whig than a proletarian revolutionary" according to Michael Oliver in a 1995 Gramophone article. Bush's Grove Music Online biographers also observe that in the politicisation of his music, his folk idioms have more in common with the English traditions of Ralph Vaughan Williams than with the continental radicalism of Kurt Weill.
1930s: emergent composer
In March 1931 Bush and Nancy were married in London, before returning to Germany where Bush continued his studies. In April a BBC broadcast performance of his Dance Overture for Military Band, Op. 12a, received a mixed reception. Nancy Bush quotes two listeners' comments that appeared in the Radio Times on 8 May 1931. One thought that "such a medley of fearful discords could never be called music", while another opined that " should not cry for more Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven if modern composers would all give us sheer beauty like this".At the end of summer 1931 the couple returned permanently to England, and settled in the village of Radlett, in Hertfordshire. In the following years three daughters were born. Bush resumed his RAM and LLCU duties, and in 1932 accepted a new appointment, as an examiner for the Associated Board of London's Royal Schools of Music, a post which involved extensive overseas travel. These new domestic and professional responsibilities limited Bush's composing activity, but he provided the music for the 1934 Pageant of Labour, organised for the London Trades Council and held at the Crystal Palace during October. Tippett, who co-conducted the event, later described it as a "high water mark" in Bush's drive to provide workers' choirs with settings for left-wing texts. In 1936 Bush was one of the founders of the Workers' Musical Association, and became its first chairman.
In 1935 Bush began work on a piano concerto which, completed in 1937, included the unusual feature of a mixed chorus and baritone soloist in the finale, singing a radical text by Randall Swingler. Bush played the piano part when the work was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult on 4 March 1938. The largely left-wing audience responded to the work enthusiastically; Tippett observed that "to counter the radical tendencies of the finale... Boult forced the applause to end by unexpectedly performing the National Anthem". A performance of the concerto a year later, at the 1939 "Festival of Music for the People", drew caustic comments from Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian. Cardus saw little direction and no humour in the music: "Why don't these people laugh at themselves now and then? Just for fun."
Bush provided much of the music, and also acted as general director, for the London Co-operative Societies' pageant "Towards Tomorrow", held at Wembley Stadium on 2 July 1938. In the autumn of that year he visited both the Soviet Union and the United States. Back home in early 1939 he was closely involved in founding and conducting the London String Orchestra, which operated successfully until 1941 and again in the immediate postwar years. He also began to write a major orchestral work, his Symphony No. 1 in C. Amid this busy life Bush was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.