Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc by Joanna Bullivant (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc by Joanna Bullivant Cameron Pyke Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc. By Joanna Bullivant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. [288 p. ISBN 978-1-107-03336-8 (hardback). £88.99; ISBN 978-1-009-15879-4 (paperback). £22.99)] This is an elegantly written and thought-provoking assessment of the work and political and cultural contexts of the composer Alan Bush (1900–1995). While acknowledging that the book is not a comprehensive survey of Bush’s works and career, omitting, for example, a full consideration of his symphonic output, Joanna Bullivant considers the ‘contradictory impulses’ and ‘complex subjectivity’ that define it with a refreshing nuance and sharp understanding of historical detail. Bullivant’s survey is particularly impressive in Bush’s post-war relationship with the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), through opera commissions and his ‘intimate role’ in the development of its music. Bullivant rightly views this engagement as the culmination of his longstanding creative relationship with German political and cultural émigrés, and also relates these works to the régime’s cultural preoccupations. Her assessments of Wat Tyler, The Sugar Reapers, and Joe Hill are particularly astute in their cultural reference. Pertinent comparisons could perhaps have been made with the reception of Benjamin Britten’s operas behind the Iron Curtain, and more reference could have been made to Bush’s correspondence with Grigori Shneerson of the Soviet Union’s Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), but this is impressive and important analysis and research, nonetheless, shedding significant light on Cold War cultural politics. Bush’s relationships with modernism and with ‘late-style’ aesthetics are also discussed with sensitivity. The book employs a significant number of musical examples to illustrate the text. These are clearly presented and discussed in a refreshingly jargon-free way. Bullivant makes a case for a positive reassessment of Bush as ‘a prolific and thoughtful commentator who placed modern music and politics at the heart of his aesthetic concerns’ (p. 19); he is ‘a focal point’ for a fuller understanding of British music. In seeking to substantiate this, she does not downplay what she sees as Bush’s more questionable political judgements, but convincingly highlights continuities in compositional principles and his ‘developing Communist selfhood’ (p. 143). She also astutely highlights some affinities between his personal vision of English music and composers such as Michael Tippett, Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams: allusions, for example, to Christian ritual in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Wat Tyler. These are well-judged, though points of similarity and difference could perhaps have been explored further: why, for example, was it Britten rather than Bush who, of all British composers, established an abiding artistic and personal relationship with a major Soviet composer? It is perhaps only in attempting an overall assessment of Bush that the author’s conclusions raise further questions. She makes a case for absorbing this Communist composer into modern British culture on the basis that he was ‘intimately linked with the most important issues in British culture in the mid-twentieth [End Page 270] century’; in this respect, ‘in all their contradictions, Bush’s works show us precisely what British music is’. Marginal figures in music can of course shed light on the mainstream (Josef Holbrooke might be another case in point), but one is left with a lingering question: at a time when so many of Bush’s preoccupations seem dated, is this music essentially ephemeral, an historical curiosity, or still innately worthy of analysis and performance? Bullivant rather skirts the question. The pre-war workers’ music remains ‘an extraordinary and intriguing project’; Wat Tyler is ‘an intriguing monument to British culture’; while Lidiče ‘was and remains a moving act of remembrance’. An alternative reading might be that whereas Britten, Tippett, and Vaughan Williams were able to renew their art beyond the preoccupations of the 1930s and war years, inspiring other composers such as Elizabeth Maconchy and William Mathias and engaging selectively with elements of musical modernism, the short-lived dissemination of Bush’s operas...