Page 144 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes | Composers’ Societies Past and Present
festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music and the
1935 International Workers’ Olympiad in Strasbourg. Finally, in this pe-
riod he was deeply concerned with the future of British music and mu-
sicians, seen through his own political lens. In an unpublished article of
1942, “The Outlook for the British Composer,” Bush contrasted the rela-
tively favourable conditions for composers under socialism with those in
Britain:

For some decades the public all over the world has tended to fight shy
of the works of living composers, but in many countries an exception
has been made in the case of the nationals of the country in question,
while in free Czechoslovakia, in Spain during the period of the Popular
Front Government, and in the Soviet Union during its whole existence,
the works of their living composers have been demanded by the public
as a necessary ingredient of every programme which was in any way of
a miscellaneous character. 16
Bush went on to argue, however, that the existential struggle of the
Second World War could actually generate a new situation in Britain, as
Our institutions are being called in question, and our survival depends,
not in organising our affairs as we have been accustomed to do in the
past, but in moving during the fight towards a far more truly democrat-
ic state of society than we have ever known in actual practice, whatever
our theorists may have propagated. 17
What Bush envisaged as democracy here was in fact the totalitarian-
ism of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, what is significant here is his close
interest in the example of other countries’ musical practices. Seeing the
context of Bush’s ideas about forming a new society more supportive of liv-
ing composers, we can detect his influence here in seeking, from the start,
to model Guild policy on what he saw as the most successful composers’
societies abroad. As he wrote enthusiastically to Shneerson with reference
to the Soviet system, “This organisation is the beginning of a Union of Brit-
ish Composers.” 18

16 Alan Bush, “The Outlook for the British Composer” (1942), unpublished typescript,
Alan Bush Archive, Histon, Cambridge, 2.
17 Ibid., 3.
18 Alan Bush to Grigori Shneerson, 30 November 1946, British Library Alan Bush Col-
lection MS Mus. 440: Correspondence with Grigori Shneerson.

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