page_title: Alan Bush
section_title: Persona non grata
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Bush / Life and career / Post-war: struggle for recognition and performance / Persona non grata
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Poválečné uctění Lidických obětí, záběr z amerického filmového týdeníku "The March of Time".
context_page_description: 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.
  Bush, from a prosperous middle-class background, enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music in the early 1920s, and spent much of that decade furthering his compositional and piano-playing skills under distinguished tutors. A two-year period in Berlin in 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.
context_section_description: Bush's return to composing after the war led to what Richard Stoker, in the  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, calls "his best period". However, Bush's attempts to secure a place in the concert repertoire were frustrated. A contributory factor may have been what the critic Dominic Daula calls Bush's  "intriguingly unique compositional voice" that challenged critics and audiences alike. But the composer's refusal to modify his pro-Soviet stance following the onset of the Cold War alienated both the public and the music establishment, a factor which Bush acknowledged 20 years later: "People who were in a position to promote my works were afraid to do so. They were afraid of being labelled". Stoker comments that "in a less tolerant country he would certainly have been imprisoned, or worse. But he was merely ignored, both politically, and, which is a pity, as a composer". Nancy Bush writes that the BBC considered him persona non grata, and imposed an almost complete though unofficial broadcast ban that lasted for some 15 years after the war.
  As well as resuming his teaching routines, Bush embarked on a busy schedule of travel, mainly in Eastern Europe with the WMA choir.  While in Czechoslovakia in August 1947, he and the WMA performed his unaccompanied chorus Lidice at the site of the village of that name, which had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 in a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
  Among Bush's earliest postwar works was the English Suite, performed by the revived London String Orchestra at the Wigmore Hall on 9 February 1946. The orchestra had suspended its operations in 1941; after the war, Bush's failure to secure funding for it led to its closure, despite considerable artistic success. Critics noted in the work a change of idiom, away from the European avant-garde character of much of his prewar music and towards a simpler popular style. This change was acknowledged by Bush as he responded to the 1948 decree issued by Stalin's director of cultural policy, Andrei Zhdanov, against formalism and dissonance in modern music – although the process of simplification had probably begun during the war years.
  In 1948 Bush accepted a commission from the Nottingham Co-operative Society to write a symphony as part of the city's quincentennial celebrations in 1949. > According to Foreman, "by any standards this is one of Bush's most approachable scores", yet since its Nottingham premiere on 27 June 1949 and its London debut on 11 December 1952 under Boult and the London Philharmonic, the work has been rarely heard in Britain. His Violin Concerto, Op. 32, received its premiere on 25 August 1949, with Max Rostal as soloist. In this work Bush explained that "the soloist represents the individual, the orchestra world society, and the work [represents] the individual's struggles and of his final absorption into society". The Daily Telegraph's critic observed that "it was the orchestra, i.e. society, that after a strenuous opening gave up the struggle".
  In 1947 Bush became chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain for 1947–48. He also produced a full-length textbook, Strict Counterpoint in the Palestrina Style (Joseph Williams, London, 1948). On 15 December 1950 the WMA marked Bush's 50th birthday with a special concert of his music at the Conway Hall.
caption: A memorial service in 1947 at the site of the destroyed Czech village of Lidice
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