Alan Bush

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Alan Bush (r.) With the writer Stephan Hermlin in Berlin (1952)

Alan Dudley Bush (born December 22, 1900 in London , † October 31, 1995 in Watford ) was an English composer , pianist and conductor . He was Professor of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Life

Alan Bush was born in 1900 as the youngest of three sons of the entrepreneur Alfred Walter Bush (1869-1935) and his wife Alice Maud Bush (née Brinsley; 1870-1951) in the affluent London borough of Dulwich . The father ran the family business W.J.Bush & Co. , founded in 1951 , which produced fine chemicals and essential oils . Bush's mother, the daughter of a real estate agent , had attended the Crystal Palace School of Art and had ambitions to be an artist herself, but that put her Victorian middle-class family off . First, Alan Bush received home schooling . From 1911 to 1917 he attended Sir Roger Cholmeley's School at Highgate in north London on a scholarship . At that time he received composition lessons from William Wodding Starmer . In 1915 he composed his first works. Bush's eldest brother, Alfred, died as an infantry officer near Ypres , Belgium , during World War I in 1917 .

After graduating from high school in 1917, Bush began studying music at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in January 1918 . His teachers included Reginald Steggall (organ), Tobias Matthay and Lily West (piano) and Frederick Corder (composition). He gave his first public concert at the RAM in the summer of 1918. He first appeared at Wigmore Hall in 1920. During his studies he received several awards for piano interpretation and composition (Charles Mortimer Prize, Oliveria Louisa Gift, Thalberg Scholarship, Battison Haynes Prize, Philip L. Agnew Prize, Matthew Phillimore Prize). After meeting John Ireland , he took private composition lessons with him from 1922 to 1927. In addition, he had piano lessons from 1924 to 1929 with Benno Moiseiwitsch and Mabel Lander . There he learned the piano method from Theodor Leschetizky . In 1924 he received the Carnegie Award for his string quartet in A minor, op.4. In 1925 he became professor for harmony and composition at the RAM; from 1936 to 1938 he gave his first lectures in music history there . In 1938 he became a Fellow of the RAM and taught there until 1978. His students included u. a. Edward Gregson , Roger Steptoe and Graham Johnson .

From 1929 he complemented his studies with philosophy (with Max Dessoir , David Baumgardt and Johannes Rieffert ) and musicology (with Johannes Wolf and Friedrich Blume ) at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin . In 1931 he trained with the pianist Artur Schnabel . During his Berlin years he gave numerous piano and chamber music concerts, some with his own works. As a result of the effects of the Great Depression in 1929 he returned to London, where he worked as a professor again from 1931. In 1934 he met the German exiles Gerhart and Hanns Eisler , Ernst Hermann Meyer and Georg Knepler in London. As a result, he performed several times the drama The Measure (1930) by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, which influenced him politically, on in London. During a trip to the USA in 1938 he met Aaron Copland , Charles Lomax and several exiles such as Hanns Eisler. In the same year he also traveled to the Soviet Union.

Together with Michael Tippett he performed in 1934 as a conductor at the Pageant of Labor at the Crystal Palace in London. In 1935 his string quartet Dialectic (1929) was performed at the World Music Days of the International Society for New Music (IGNM) in Prague, making him internationally known; In 1937 his music was performed at the IGNM World Music Days in Paris. In 1936 he directed the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's Russian Funeral at the Westminster Theater . In 1938 he played his piano concerto as a soloist at a BBC concert for contemporary music (conductor: Adrian Boult ). In 1939 he organized and conducted the Festival of Music for the People at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In 1940 he conducted the British premieres of the 5th Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich and the piano concerto by Aram Chatschaturjan (soloist: Moura Lympany ) in the Queen's Hall . From March to June 1941 ( invasion of the Soviet Union ) his works were banned by the BBC because of his support for the People's Convention . In November 1941 he was drafted into service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, which he served at Queen Alexandra's Military Hospital Millbank in London. He also organized a military choir and directed the London String Orchestra , which he founded in 1938 and was active until 1951. Numerous concerts were broadcast on the BBC World Service during the war years . Members of the ensemble were u. a. the violinists Norbert Brainin and Emanuel Hurwitz . In 1942 he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra , which performed his symphony in C. In 1944 he took over the piano part (together with the Philharmonic String Quartet under Jean Pouget ) in the British premiere of Shostakovich's piano quintet.

After he was released from military service in December 1945, he resumed his work as a composer and music teacher. He also conducted works by u. a. Edward Elgar , John Ireland , Vaughan Williams and William Walton . He also performed his own pieces at the London Proms . In 1947/48 he was chairman and 1956/57 treasurer of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain . In 1949 his violin concerto was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Basil Cameron and with the soloist Max Rostal . The Nottingham Symphony was also performed at Albert Hall in Nottingham. At the Festival of Britain 1951 he was awarded several times by the Arts Council of Great Britain for his opera Wat Tyler ; The first stage performances were given in Leipzig in 1953 and in Rostock in 1955, followed by an English production by the Keynote Opera Society in 1974 . He received three further opera commissions at the opera houses in Leipzig (under Helmut Seydelmann , 1953 and under Rolf Reuter , 1966), Weimar (own conductor, 1956) and Berlin / Staatsoper (under Heinz Fricke , 1970). His opera Men of Blackmoor was staged again in 1961 by the Oxford University Opera Club . Further works were u. a. presented at Cheltenham , Bath and Aldeburgh Festivals . He also composed the Byron Symphony, which was premiered in 1962 by the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Herbert Kegel in Leipzig. His fourth symphony was performed in 1986 by the BBC Philharmonic under the baton of Edward Downes in Manchester. In the 1990s he had to stop his compositional work because his eyesight dwindled.

From the mid-1920s he became involved in the British labor movement . In 1924 he became a member of the Independent Labor Party , which he left in 1929 in disappointment. He then joined the Labor Party . In 1935 he became a member of the Communist Party of Britain . From 1929 to 1940, Boughton succeeded Rutland as music advisor and director of the London Labor Choral Union . In 1936 he founded the Worker's Music Association (WMA) with; from 1941 to 1995 he took over the presidency. In 1941 he founded the William Morris Musical Society . From 1946 to 1956 he conducted the WMA Singers .

From 1931 he was married to the lawyer daughter Nancy Rachel Bush (née Head; 1907-1991), a sister of the singer and composer Michael Head . He and his wife, who often worked as a librettist and copywriter, had three children, one of whom died in a traffic accident in 1943 : Rachel Elizabeth (* 1931) and the twins Catherine and Alice (* 1936). From 1932 until his death he lived in Radlett near London in Hertfordshire . Bush died in 1995 at the age of 94 after a short illness in Watford General Hospital in Watford and was cremated in Golders Green Crematorium in the London Borough of Barnet , his ashes given to the family.

After his death in 1997, the Alan Bush Music Trust was founded to support his music. RAM students are awarded the Alan Bush Composition Prize and the Frank and Hilda Stokes and Marjorie Meyer Memorial Prize for Sight-Reading .

Works

Bush's catalog raisonné includes the operas Wat Tyler (1948–1950), Men of Blackmoor (1954/55), The Sugar Reapers (also known as Guyana Johnny ; 1962–1965), Joe Hill - The Man Who Never Died (1965–1967) , three children's operas, four symphonies , a violin and a piano concerto , further orchestral works, chamber, piano, choral music and songs. Initially he used the twelve-tone technique , later he established a personal style in free harmony . He was a staunch Marxist , and his political stance can be seen in many of his works. His music has been performed all over Europe as well as the USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia.

Awards

In 1962 he received the Handel Prize of the Halle district . In 1938 he had already taken over the artistic direction of the premiere of the Handel oratorio Belshazzar at the Scala Theater in London. From 1965 to 1993 he was a corresponding member of the music section of the Academy of Arts in Berlin (East). In 1968 he became Doctor of Music from the University of London and in 1970 he received the Doctorate of Music ( Honoris causa ) from the University of Durham .

literature

Web links

Commons : Alan Bush  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nancy Bush: Alan Bush. Music, Politics and Life . Thames, London 2000, ISBN 0-905210-83-2 , p. 12.
  2. ^ Nancy Bush: Alan Bush. Music, Politics and Life . Thames, London 2000, ISBN 0-905210-83-2 , p. 23.
  3. Performances of Alan Bush at BBC Proms and All works in BBC Proms by Alan Bush (1900–1995) , bbc.co.uk/proms/events, accessed April 7, 2020.
  4. Steffen Lieberwirth (Hrsg.): Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. The history of the symphony orchestra . Written on behalf of Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk by Jörg Clemen, Kamprad, Altenburg 1999, ISBN 3-930550-09-1 , p. 185.
  5. Christoph Rink: Chronology of the Handel price . In: Announcements of the Friends and Sponsors of the Handel House in Halle eV 1/2012, pp. 20–25, here: p. 23.
  6. Members: Alan Bush , adk.de, accessed April 8, 2020.