Page 349 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

Summaries
Joanna Bullivant
The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain and “unofficial” musical diplomacy in Eastern Europe
The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain was founded in 1945 with respect-
able patronage from grandees like Ralph Vaughan Williams and a busi-
ness-like set of aims towards promoting the careers and rights of working
composers and forming links with similar groups in other countries. Con-
sequently, its role in Cold War diplomacy has understandably been over-
looked in comparison with efforts like the legendary officially-sponsored
visits of Benjamin Britten to the Soviet Union between 1963 and 1971. Nev-
ertheless, as this paper will demonstrate, the Guild played an intriguing un-
official diplomatic role in the early postwar period. Composer and British
communist Alan Bush, Chair of the Guild in 1947-8, used extensive trav-
els in Eastern Europe to attempt to draw the Guild into diplomatic allianc-
es associated with the Soviet sphere of influence. While his efforts ultimate-
ly failed, his connections remained important into the early 1960s with the
successful 1960 visit to the USSR by Bush and then-Chair Elizabeth Ma-
conchy. By tracing Bush’s unofficial diplomacy in these years and his influ-
ence upon the Guild, this paper will show the nuanced political role a na-
tional composers’ society could play, even in the face of an official national
position far less receptive to relations with Eastern Europe.
Keywords: Alan Bush, Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, diplomacy,
Yugoslavia, music and politics

Nataša Didenko
The Composers Association of Macedonia in the past and present: combining
professionalism and nationality
With the establishment of the Composers Association of Macedonia in
1947 in Skopje as an artistic professional organisation, the construction
and development of Macedonian musical creativity began. The challenges
posed by different historical periods have encouraged the Composers As-
sociation of Macedonia to undertake various activities in order to stimu-
late the development of musical creation and science, but also to define the
importance of its members in the preservation and promotion of Macedo-
nian musical culture. Hence, in the paper, through the methods of histori-
cal, analytical and comparative research, we gain knowledge about the con-
stant growth of the Composers Association of Macedonia, which over the
past eight decades has been a driver of musical life in Macedonia and a fo-
cal point of progressive creative ideas.

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