Alan Bush: Music and Politics in Modern Britain
The English communist composer Alan Bush (1900–95) was a contemporary of Britten and Tippett. A lesser-known figure in Britain, he mainly achieved recognition in Eastern Bloc countries, where his four operas were professionally staged. Because of his political beliefs, Bush has both been dismissed as a propagandist and, contrastingly, formed the focus of discussion of the marginalisation of communists in British Cold War musical culture. He is consequently an intriguing figure in mid-century British music due to his apparent status as an outsider. Yet the composer’s career also presents a much broader range of activities. He was a proponent of modernist composers in the inter-war period, a leading expert on Soviet music during the war, and a highly influential figure in workers’ music, to name just a few of his interests. Moreover, at a time when music in Eastern Bloc regimes is the subject of burgeoning interest, not only Bush’s significance in Britain but also his relationship with totalitarian regimes (particularly his main point of contact in the Eastern Bloc, East Germany) is of particular interest.
Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, this project will produce the first full-length critical assessment of the composer. Taking key ‘images’ of Bush – as modernist, as political activist, outsider, Stalinist etc – as a starting point, the project examines the evidence for a much more nuanced assessment of Bush’s ideas and his position within both British and East German musical life. The particular circumstances of individual works, performances and working relationships produced a career that was not simply a mirror of competing Cold War ideologies.
While the project discards existing images of Bush, it also considers the political and musical culture (primarily Britain in the Cold War) in which such ideas arose. In this way, Bush’s specific experiences consistently form a provocative case-study for rethinking wider issues – the reception of modernism, attitudes to music and politics, and patronage, for example – in modern British music.
The main output of the research project will be a monograph, projected for publication in 2013. For further information please contact joanna.bullivant@nottingham.ac.uk .