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FEATURE
Paul Dalgleish discusses the unjust neglect of the English composer and his music
Although Alan Dudley Bush was a musician and composer of some prominence for over forty years, from the 1930's to the 1970's, his music is very rarely heard today. Even the Proms completely ignored the Centenary of his birth. Was his copybook blotted so badly that his music is to be banished from the concert repertoire and forgotten, as though it had never been written? Surely not!
Born in Dulwich in South London on 22 December 1900, Bush showed early promise, studying under John Ireland at the Royal Academy of Music. He became Professor of Composition there in 1925 and at the same time continued his piano studies with the legendary pianists Benno Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel. He spent from 1929 to 1931 reading Philosophy and Musicology at the University of Berlin. He died in Watford General Hospital on 31 October 1995.
His music was internationally acclaimed in the 1930's. The Dialectic for String Quartet, composed in 1929, was well received at the Prague International Festival in 1935 and his Piano Concerto, which includes the unusual feature of a Male Voice Chorus, was performed during the 1938 Henry Wood Promenade Concert Season. His Symphony in C major, one of three Bush composed, was one of the successes of the 1942 Promenade Season.
After the Second World War his compositional style changed. Until that time his compositions were technically sophisticated, appealing mostly to the musical elite of the period, but then he began to employ his thematic method, every note having to bear significance to the thematic progression of the music. He simplified the mode of his work, answering what he considered to be the conflict in modern music by the use of simple dissonance leading to consonant resolution. At the time it was suggested that his method had something in common with Schoenberg's twelve-note system, although Bush himself rejected the suggestion.
Stylistically, his music is unmistakably and typically English, bearing a slight resemblance in expression and tone colour to that of Benjamin Britten. At times, too, his work has a folksiness mildly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams.
His children's opera, The Press Gang or The Enraged Apprentice, appeared in 1946...