Alan Bush has been played on NTS shows including Tafelmusik w/ Francesco Fusaro, with Cycle For Declamation first played on 20 January 2024.

Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 –31 October 1995) was a British composer and pianist and committed socialist whose politics were sometimes central themes in his music. Contents

Personal life

Bush was born in Dulwich, London, first attending Highgate School and then the Royal Academy of Music. Later he studied musicology and philosophy in Berlin and later still had lessons with the composer John Ireland. He also studied the piano under Benno Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel. 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. An embargo on his work at the end of the war by the establishment led to Ralph Vaughan Williams refusing a BBC commission in protest, even though he did not share Bush'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.