Joanna Bullivant. Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 287 pp. £75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-03336-8.
The Winter Journey stands chronologically and thematically at the centre of Joanna Bullivant's book. It was written at a moment in history when Bush hoped that after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Britain and the United States might still work with the Soviet Union to build international peace. In Britain itself, under a newly elected Labour government, the formation of bodies such as the Arts Council offered the hope of more state intervention to support culture and the arts, and to bring these to the working class. The libretto of The Winter Journey referred back to the shared British civilian and military experience of the war, and musically Bush sought with a more accessible language and the use of a didactic choral form to use his retelling of the Nativity story to urge listeners towards collective action rather than ‘sentimental resignation’ (120). Within only two years ... Bush, notoriously, was one of very few composers in the West publicly to support the Zhdanovist view. In succeeding decades, as more and more Communist supporters in the West deserted the cause after international crises in 1956 and 1968, Bush maintained his steadfast support. He never abandoned this position.
As a result, reception of Bush has been typically cast in a series of binary oppositions: his earlier music has been seen as ‘modernistic’, ‘Central European’, ‘chromatic’, and ‘intellectual’, contrasting with a ‘more simple and direct’ national style after 1948 (141). ...
Inevitably, Bush's reaction to the Zhdanov decree still stands at the centre of this narrative, but Bullivant convincingly argues that in critical ways, Bush had anticipated some of its central demands, notably its call for composers to work in ‘national forms’, and to use folk music as the source of inspiration for music which would avoid ‘formalist’ sterility. ...
Bush's sense of the composer as historical agent with a particular responsibility came to fruition after 1948 not in the Home Counties or the broadcasts of the BBC, but in the German Democratic Republic. Here four of his operas were performed between 1953 and 1973, and Bush was held up to the music profession and the public as a shining example of a ‘progressive’ and ‘humanist’ composer who was swimming with the tide of history. ...
Bush appears to have been unaware of, or indifferent to, the censorial, conformist, and militantly aggressive side of the GDR's culture which was so unappealing to many contemporaries, and to later observers. ... Bullivant does not present a whitewash, or draw a veil over this critical issue. She is forthright in her characterization of this side of Bush. He was, she asserts, ‘fundamentally misguided about the true nature of the attacks on composers’ implied by the Zhdanov decree (153); uncritical in his perceptions of musical culture in Eastern Europe, and naïve in his call (in 1945) for ‘mass popular support for socialism led by the Soviet Union’ (137). ...
Alan Bush belongs to a moment in world history when what the Germans then called ‘serious music’ was envisaged as a real force for social change, and not merely a pleasing diversion for the wealthy and cultivated.
Bullivant concludes with remarks on the collapse of ‘unified national cultures’ in both England and East Germany in the 1960s. After this, Bush's music could not aspire to the mass appeal and mass influence he had hoped to exercise in the 1940s and 1950s. His final opera, Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died (1966–68) was, she argues, ‘an anxious reassertion of Bush's ideas about musical language’. ... Bullivant argues convincingly that Bush used this complex work as a vehicle also for reflection on his own aesthetic project, in ‘a profound instance of artistic lateness’. ...
Alan Bush's reputation as a serious composer remains and, as the Cold War fades into memory, those dichotomous views of Bush which have so long prevailed are also becoming more blurred. This book makes a substantial contribution to this process, and offers new perspectives on a phenomenon which still fascinates us today: the commitment of so many British intellectuals and artists to international Communism in the middle of the twentieth century.
Toby Thacker. Twentieth-Century Music 16, 1 (2019), 175–179.
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