Page 143 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain and “unofficial” musical diplomacy …
14
for living composers. Certainly, promoting professional rights and oppor-
tunities were high on the Guild’s early agenda, particularly through cre-
ating good relations with organisations like the PRS and the BBC. While
the BBC offered extensive patronage to composers, complaints of a lack of
transparency and inadequate opportunities were frequent.
Yet it is interesting in the initial discussions that fostering links with
other countries was at least as important, and that Russia is specifically
invoked as a point of collaboration alongside the US and France. Evident-
ly, these countries were the wartime allies and may therefore have posed
obvious candidates for initial collaboration. In considering this goal, it is
15
also at this juncture timely to introduce Bush in more detail. Bush had
studied at the Royal Academy of Music and become a Professor of Har-
mony and Composition there in 1925. He became interested in politics in
the 1920s and began conducting a choir within a confederation of work-
ing-class choirs, the London Labour Choral Union, becoming its Musical
Advisor in 1929. At the same time, he started spending long spells in Ber-
lin studying musicology and philosophy, while also becoming acquaint-
ed with the lively and experimental working-class music movement there.
In 1935, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and remained a
dedicated communist until his death. In the remaining pre-war years, he
organised numerous mass musical-political events opposing fascism and
promoting Popular Front politics, frequently involving other composers
of his generation including Michael Tippett, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth
Maconchy and Alan Rawsthorne. From the 1950s, he became an increas-
ingly marginal figure in Britain due to his hardline Stalinist principles but
enjoyed a successful career in the German Democratic Republic with pro-
fessional productions of his four operas. Most relevantly for our purpos-
es here, Bush was both a fervent organiser and a cosmopolitan. He made
early contact with the Soviet Union among British cultural figures, trav-
elling there in 1938 and beginning a long correspondence with Grigori Sh-
neerson of VOKS, the Soviet organisation handling relations with foreign
countries. He was also close to German and Austrian communist émigrés
such as Hanns Eisler, Ernst Hermann Meyer, and Georg Knepler, who
spent time in Great Britain during the Nazi period, and had cultivated a
network of like-minded European contacts through events like the annual

14 See: Alan Bush to John Denison, 22 January 1949, MS Mus. 642.
15 For a biography of Bush, see: Nancy Bush, with Lewis Foreman, Alan Bush: Music,
Politics and Life (London: Thames, 2000).

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