Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 –31 October 1995) was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed socialist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.[1]
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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).[2] 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 .[3] 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. [4]
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.
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.[5] 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;[6] 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.
One of his most notable students is Michael Nyman.[7]
He died in Watford in 1995 after a short illness.