Durham E-Theses

Durham E-Theses English Folk under the Red Flag: The Impact of Alan Bush's `Workers' Music' on 20th Century Britain's Left-Wing Music Scene ROBINSON, ALICE,MERIEL How to cite: ROBINSON, ALICE,MERIEL (2021) English Folk under the Red Flag: The Impact of Alan Bush's `Workers' Music' on 20th Century Britain's Left-Wing Music Scene , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/13924/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 English Folk under the Red Flag: The Impact of Alan Bush’s ‘Workers’ Music’ on 20 th Century Britain’s Left-Wing Music Scene Alice Robinson Abstract Workers’ music: songs to fight injustice, inequality and establish the rights of the working classes. This was a new, radical genre of music which communist composer, Alan Bush, envisioned in 1930s Britain. At the time, Bush was an established figure of the musical elite and was well known for his highly modernist, serial compositions. Yet he began theorising a new cultural movement, one which would diametrically oppose pre-existing musical norms found in capitalist-driven, bourgeois-influenced society. His radical vision prompted new compositions, concerts, events, publications and recordings in the run up to the second world war. Due to the inaccessible nature of the materials and its topical subject matter, much of this music has been disregarded in academic literature. Yet, by tracing the development of the movement, this thesis attempts to shed light on its pivotal role in the left-wing music scene. It considers how it continued to grow and diversify in the postwar era, even whilst Bush’s ambitions for workers music reached a hiatus. It argues that Bush’s theories, which underpinned the socialist concept of workers’ music, were an elemental component of the work which cultivated the Second British Folksong Revival. The approach taken in this study is twofold: on the one hand it interprets vast amounts of unpublished, undocumented archival materials and, on the other, it goes on to contextualise such material within contemporary historical and cultural movements. English Folk under the Red Flag: The Impact of Alan Bush’s ‘Workers’ Music’ on 20 th Century Britain’s Left-Wing Music Scene Alice Robinson Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement of the requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music. Supervisor: Professor Jeremy Dibble Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Music Department of Durham University Submitted to the institution of Durham University, February 2020. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Acknowledgments I am indebted to many people for their support and help in the research of this thesis. It would never have been realised without the encouragement, support and extreme patience of my supervisor, Professor Jeremy Dibble. Had it not been for Rachel O’Higgins, Alan Bush’s granddaughter, such a topic of research would have been impossible. Her archive, which holds masses of letters, articles, scores and paraphernalia pertaining to the legacy of Bush, gave me invaluable insight into the composer. She was extremely generous with her time and I thank her for her wonderful hospitality. I would also like to extend special thanks to John Powles, curator of the Janey Buchan Political Song Collection at Glasgow University, for the numerous times he gave me practical assistance in my research. There are many other people who have helped this thesis come to fruition and I am grateful to them all, including to my husband, Joe, for his continued support and encouragement. Contents Abstract i Declaration ii Acknowledgments v Introduction 8 Literature Review 19 (i) Overview: Politics vs Popularity (ii) Archives (iii) Letters (iv) Alan Bush’s Articles (v) Other Publications Chapter One: A ‘Second Culture’ of Music in the 1930s 31 Chapter Two: Workers Music and the Realisation of a ‘Second Culture’ 53 Chapter Three: Pageants and a ‘Second Culture’ 80 Chapter Four: Politics and Propaganda; Left wing Music in Wartime 117 Chapter Five: Postwar Socialism and New Beginnings 146 Conclusion 174 Bibliography 178 (i) Archives (ii) Articles, Books, Manuscripts (iii) Letters (iv) Scores (v) Newspaper Articles (vi) Websites Appendices 1. Workers’ Songs 189 (i) Bush, ‘Song to Labour’, 1926. (ii) Bush, ‘To the Men of England’, 1928. (iii) Bush, ‘Question and Answer’, 1931. (iv) Bush, ‘Song of the Hunger Marchers’, 1934. (v) Bush, ‘Labour’s Song of Challenge’, 1936. (vi) Eisler, ‘Far-away Song’. (vii) Eisler, ‘United Front Song’. 2. Programme for the Festival of Music for the People. 216 Alice Robinson Student ID: 000622425 Introduction In his day, Alan Bush (1900-1995) was considered an influential composer, musicologist, writer, and lecturer, yet in more recent times his work has fallen into obscurity. His individualistic approach to musical composition is rarely acknowledged and his role, as the leading figure of many cultural initiatives, is often ignored. As this thesis will go on to explore, it is possible to credit this social and cultural marginalisation to his left-wing political convictions. Bush was a communist sympathiser and correspondingly he endeavoured to portray these sentiments, such as the importance of the working classes, through a broad spectrum of compositions. One particularly innovative style of composition was his ‘workers’ music’, a new form of socialist music which Bush theorised and developed in the 1930s. This study will consider the impact of the workers’ music genre, by showing the extent to which it differed from established musical practices and how it became the genesis of a new, socialist, second culture of British music. Alan Bush was appointed at the young age of 25 to the role of Professor of Composition and Harmony at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) where he remained for 52 years (1925-1978). In 1928 he temporarily suspended this teaching post to move to Berlin and continued his music studies in piano, musicology and philosophy in order to learn ‘more about the world, more about politics’. 1 During this time, he came into close contact with Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) and Bertolt Brecht (1898- 1956) whose influence radicalised Bush’s political opinions, markedly affecting his musical output for the rest of his life. On his return to the academy, Bush was accepted as a musical authority and he was often called upon to speak at symposiums and interval talks. ‘Musicology’ was not a fully developed discipline in British Universities in the early twentieth century, yet in 1936-37 he gave the first ever series of lectures on music history at the RAM. 2 During this time, he proved himself to be a prolific composer and wrote in many different genres. For example, he wrote works for professional orchestras, chamber ensembles and amateur choirs, as well as going on to complete four full operas 1 Bush, In my eighth decade and other essays, 20. 2 Kerman, Contemplating Music, 27. 8 Alice Robinson Student ID: 000622425 and scoring multiple musical pageants. However, regardless of his vast oeuvre and his active professional career, it is apparent that his work has received much less attention than those of his contemporaries, such as John Ireland (1879-1962), Michael Tippett (1905-1998) and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). Any assessments that have been made of his music are often narrow, with writers focusing on his role as a modernist composer or evaluating his political interests through the veil of his art music. This is a narrative that must change. As a composer who wrote throughout the whole of the twentieth century and played an active role in many grassroots organisations, Bush’s work uniquely encompasses a turbulent era of political and social change. The two world wars revolutionised the role of music in people’s lives and the breadth and topicality of Bush’s work neatly encompasses these changes. In 1925 Bush joined the Labour movement and by 1935 he had become a fully-fledged member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He surrounded himself with eminent east European composers and musicologists that he had met in Berlin and who shared his socialist principles: including Eisler, Georg Knepler (1906-2003) and Ernst Hermann Meyer (1905-1988). During the same period, he became director of the London Labour Choral Union and founded the Workers’ Music Association (WMA). Both societies had musical performance and education at the heart of their work, with the intention that music would bring working-class people together to celebrate their identity. Bush was a major contributor of musical material for these proletarian organisations, writing seemingly simplistic yet passionate works for non-musical members to engage with. Compositionally, such works contrasted with the other compositions Bush wrote in his early career. As a new professor at the RAM, he also composed highly individual and dryly complex works to explore various new composition techniques, from which he developed a new method of serial composition called ‘thematic composition’ or ‘total thematicisation’.

Load more