Music and Letters Advance Access originally published online on June 26, 2009
Music and Letters 2009 90(3):432-452; doi:10.1093/ml/gcp051
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Modernism, Politics, and Individuality in 1930s Britain: The Case of Alan Bush
Correspondence: *Merton College, Oxford. Email: joanna.bullivant{at}music.ox.ac.uk. I am grateful to the Alan Bush Music Trust for kind permission to quote from material, to staff at the British Library and at the BBC Written Archive Centre (hereafter BBC WAC) for their assistance with archival research, and the AHRC for funding the doctoral research from which this article derives. I would also like to thank Jonathan Cross and John Lowerson for their comments. Extracts from Concert Piece are © Copyright by Hinrichsen Edition–Peters Edition Ltd., London and are reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Ltd. Example 3 is reproduced by kind permission of the Workers’ Music Association.
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Abstract |
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This article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between modernism and left-wing politics in 1930s Britain. Accounts of Britten in this decade have associated both his eclectic interest in modernism and his left-wing political leanings with his individuality and otherness in a conservative decade. The 1930s music of Alan Bush (1900–95) has instead been discussed in terms of a conflict between his modernist-influenced serious music and his political commitments, a process that culminated in his open renunciation of his earlier ‘formalism’ in response to Zhdanov's 1948 dictates. Using a variety of contemporary journalistic sources and unpublished letters and writings, broader understandings of the connections between modernism, politics, and Bush's aesthetic theories are explored. Drawing on case studies of Bush's workers’ music and his Concert Piece for Cello and Piano (1936), I argue that Bush sought a connection between modernism and left-wing politics that questioned the desirability of individual expression.