Alan Bush

Alan Bush (right) with Stephan Hermlin, 1952.

Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 –31 October 1995) was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed communist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.

Personal life

Alan was born in Dulwich, London, to Alfred Walter Bush (1869–1935), a director of the manufacturing chemists, W. J. Bush & Co., and his wife, Alice Maud Brinsley (1870–1951). He was educated first at Highgate School (1911–17) and then at the Royal Academy of Music (1918–22), where he studied composition under Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias Matthay. Later he studied musicology and philosophy with Johannes Wolf and Friedrich Blumein at the University of Berlin (1929–31), as well as taking composition lessons (1927–32) with John Ireland. He also studied the piano under Benno Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel . One of his fellow composition students was Michael Head, who introduced Bush to his younger sister Nancy. They married in 1931. She provided libretti for three of his four full-length operas, three children's operas and other works.

From 1925 to 1978 he taught at the Royal Academy of Music where his compositions included A Homage to William Sterndale Bennett. His academic training, particularly in Berlin, put him in contact with well known socialist artists from different traditions, such as Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler.

Music and politics

He was known as an outspoken advocate of Marxism, holding posts as conductor of the London Labour Choral Union and in 1936 was co-founder of the Workers' Music Association, and later its President. Bush composed the music for and conducted the choir at the Pageant of Labour at the Crystal Palace on 15–20 October 1934. This influence can also be seen in many of his works, including the operas Wat Tyler (1948–50) and Men of Blackmoor (1954–55), and his piano concerto which has a communist text declaimed by a male chorus in the last movement. A broadcast embargo on signatories to the People's Convention in 1941 that included Bush led to Ralph Vaughan Williams refusing broadcast rights for a new work in protest, even though he did not share the group's political views.

Other works include four symphonies (No. 1 in C; No. 2, The Nottingham; No. 3, Byron Symphony and No. 4, Lascaux Symphony); Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Sea-song, Op. 60, for piano and orchestra; and Songs of the Doomed.

Well known students

One of his most notable students is Michael Nyman.

Death

He died in Watford in 1995 after a short illness.

References

• Richard Stoker, ‘Bush, Alan Dudley (1900–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 17 February 2008

Further reading

• Bullivant, Joanna. 2009. "Modernism, Politics, and Individuality in 1930s Britain: The Case of Alan Bush". Music & Letters 90, no. 3 (August): 432–52.

External links

• Alan Bush Music Trust
• Violin Concerto, Six short pieces & Dialectic - Claudio Records Review & Track Listing