page_title: Alan Bush
section_title: 1930s: emergent composer
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Bush / Life and career / 1930s: emergent composer
caption_attribution_description: English: The Crystal Palace, general view from the Water Temple.
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: In March 1931 Bush and Nancy were married in London, before returning to Germany where Bush continued his studies. In April a BBC broadcast performance of his Dance Overture for Military Band, Op. 12a, received a mixed reception. Nancy Bush quotes two listeners' comments that appeared in the Radio Times on 8 May 1931. One thought that "such a medley of fearful discords could never be called music", while another opined that "[we] should not cry for more Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven if modern composers would all give us sheer beauty like this". 
  At the end of summer 1931 the couple returned permanently to England, and settled in the village of Radlett, in Hertfordshire. In the following years three daughters were born. Bush resumed his RAM and LLCU duties, and in 1932 accepted a new appointment, as an examiner for the Associated Board of London's Royal Schools of Music, a post which involved extensive overseas travel. These new domestic and professional responsibilities limited Bush's composing activity, but he provided the music for the 1934 Pageant of Labour, organised for the London Trades Council and held at the Crystal Palace during October. Tippett, who co-conducted the event, later described it as a "high water mark" in Bush's drive to provide workers' choirs with settings for left-wing texts. In 1936 Bush was one of the founders of the Workers' Musical Association (WMA), and became its first chairman.
  In 1935 Bush began work on a piano concerto which, completed in 1937, included the unusual feature of a mixed chorus and baritone soloist in the finale, singing a radical text by Randall Swingler. Bush played the piano part when the work was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult on 4 March 1938. The largely left-wing audience responded to the work enthusiastically; Tippett observed that "to counter the radical tendencies of the finale ... Boult forced the applause to end by unexpectedly performing the National Anthem". A performance of the concerto a year later, at the 1939 "Festival of Music for the People", drew caustic comments from Neville Cardus in  The Manchester Guardian.  Cardus saw little direction and no humour in the music: "Why don't these people laugh at themselves now and then? Just for fun."
  Bush provided much of the music, and also acted as general director, for the London Co-operative Societies' pageant "Towards Tomorrow", held at Wembley Stadium on 2 July 1938. In the autumn of that year he visited both the Soviet Union and the United States. Back home in early 1939 he was closely involved in founding and conducting the London String Orchestra, which operated successfully until 1941 and again in the immediate postwar years. He also began to write a major orchestral work, his Symphony No. 1 in C. Amid this busy life Bush was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.
caption: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, venue for the 1934 Pageant for Labour
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