Alan Bush

Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 – 31 October 1995) was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed communist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.

Alan Bush 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). 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 (1922–27) with John Ireland. He also studied the piano under Benno Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel.

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.

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.

In April 1940 he conducted the British premiere of Aram Khachaturian's Piano Concerto in D-flat with Moura Lympany as soloist. She had agreed after Clifford Curzon had declined Edward Clark's offer, even though the score was still in manuscript and she had only one month in which to learn the piece. Clark was a conductor and influential former BBC producer, but was in this instance acting in his capacity as a member of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR. Bush had been friends with Clark for some years; Clark was also left-leaning but not a committed Communist like Bush. In 1930 Bush had dedicated his Dance Overture for Military Band to Edward Clark.

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