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The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain and “unofficial” musical diplomacy …
as an exemplary cultural export, and one that represented Britain as a cul-
8
tural and political alternative to totalitarianism.
We might reasonably assume that the period 1939–1955 was one of hia-
tus given the cataclysmic impact of the Second World War and subsequent
tensions of the early Cold War. Nevertheless, as this article will demon-
strate, there was a striking exception to this picture in non-governmental
or “unofficial” musical diplomacy undertaken by the Composers’ Guild of
Great Britain in the period 1947–8. This diplomacy on behalf of the fledg-
ling guild was almost entirely the work of British communist composer
Alan Bush (1900–95), a figure who, unlike Britten, would go on to have a
frosty relationship with the British Council and who was already under
9
observation by the British security service, MI5. Despite this lack of an
official imprimatur, his activities on behalf of the Composers’ Guild were
important in three respects. Firstly, this represented some of the earliest
post-war musical diplomacy from Britain, and thus exposed audiences to
recent British music (particularly, in contrast to the choral tours, orchestral
music) for the first time. Secondly, this activity casts an intriguing light on
the sentiments in Britain of the immediate postwar period before the hard-
ening of Cold War ideological divisions. As I have discussed elsewhere, in
1945 it was by no means clear to left-leaning British cultural figures that the
country would unilaterally ally with the United States, as opposed to find-
ing a position of compromise that enabled some relations with both East
10
and West. Finally, while Bush’s tenure at the Guild was relatively brief, his
actions laid important groundwork for later musical diplomacy both with-
in the organisation and beyond.

The Composers’ Guild
The Composers’ Guild was founded in 1945 as a specialist sub-section of
the Society of Authors, with the first General Meeting of Members taking
place on 24 May that year. This was not the first effort in Britain to estab-
lish a professional musical society for the benefit of composers. The Society
of British Musicians was founded in 1834 to promote the work of composers

8 Stewart Duncan, “‘An Excellent Piece of Propaganda’: The British Council’s Use
of Choirs as Cultural Diplomacy in the 1930s,” The Musical Quarterly 105, no. 1–2
(2022): 6–7.
9 See: Joanna Bullivant, Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural
Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), 96–115.
10 See: Ibid., 111–13 and 136–8.

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