Bush, from a prosperous middle-class background, enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in the early 1920s, and spent much of that decade furthering his compositional and piano-playing skills under distinguished tutors.

He taught composition at the RAM for more than 50 years, published two books, was the founder and long-time president of the Workers' Music Association, and served as chairman and later vice-president of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain.

The end of the war in November 1918 meant that Alan narrowly avoided being called up for military service; meantime, having determined on a musical career, he had applied to and been accepted by the RAM, where he began his studies in the spring of 1918.

[7][n 2] In 1926 he made his first of numerous visits to Berlin, where with the violinist Florence Lockwood he gave two concerts of contemporary, mainly British, music which included his own Phantasy in C minor, Op.

[18] He left the ILP in 1929, and joined the Labour Party proper,[14] before taking extended leave from the RAM to begin a two-year course in philosophy and musicology at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University.

His association with like-minded musicians such as Hanns Eisler and Ernst Hermann Meyer, and writers such as Bertold Brecht, helped to develop his growing political awareness into a lifelong commitment to Marxism and communism.

[1] Notwithstanding the uncompromising nature of his politics, Bush in his writings tended to express his views in restrained terms, "much more like a reforming patrician Whig than a proletarian revolutionary" according to Michael Oliver in a 1995 Gramophone article.

[14] Bush resumed his RAM and LLCU duties, and in 1932 accepted a new appointment, as an examiner for the Associated Board of London's Royal Schools of Music, a post which involved extensive overseas travel.

[1] These new domestic and professional responsibilities limited Bush's composing activity, but he provided the music for the 1934 Pageant of Labour,[2] organised for the London Trades Council and held at the Crystal Palace during October.

[24] In 1935 Bush began work on a piano concerto which, completed in 1937, included the unusual feature of a mixed chorus and baritone soloist in the finale, singing a radical text by Randall Swingler.

The largely left-wing audience responded to the work enthusiastically;[25] Tippett observed that "to counter the radical tendencies of the finale ... Boult forced the applause to end by unexpectedly performing the National Anthem".

[34] The ban was opposed by the prime minister, Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons,[34] and proved short-lived; it was annulled following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

[39] But the composer's refusal to modify his pro-Soviet stance following the onset of the Cold War alienated both the public and the music establishment, a factor which Bush acknowledged 20 years later: "People who were in a position to promote my works were afraid to do so.

[n 5] This change was acknowledged by Bush as he responded to the 1948 decree issued by Stalin's director of cultural policy, Andrei Zhdanov, against formalism and dissonance in modern music – although the process of simplification had probably begun during the war years.

[50] Since his youthful Last Days of Pompeii, Bush had not attempted to write opera, but he took up the genre in 1946 with a short operetta for children, The Press Gang (or the Escap'd Apprentice), for which Nancy supplied the libretto.

[54] In December 1960 David Drew in the New Statesman wrote: "The chief virtue of Men of Blackmoor, and the reason why it particularly deserves a [professional] performance at this historical point, is its unfailing honesty ... it is never cheap, and at its best achieves a genuine dignity.

[72] In the same year he published In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays, in which he stated his personal creed that "as a musician and as a man, Marxism is a guide to action", enabling him to express through music the "struggle to create a condition of social organisation in which science and art will be the possession of all".

[79] Daula comments that "Bush's music does not [merely] imitate the sound-world of his Renaissance predecessors", but creates his unique fingerprint by "[juxtaposing] 16th century modal counterpoint with late- and post-romantic harmony".

His obituarist Rupert Christiansen writes that, as a principled Marxist, Bush "put the requirements of the revolutionary proletariat at the head of the composer's responsibilities",[78] a choice which others, such as Tippett, chose not to make.

[80] However, Vaughan Williams thought that, despite Bush's oft-declared theories of the purposes of art and music, "when the inspiration comes over him he forgets all about this and remembers only the one eternal rule for all artists, 'To thine own self be true'.

[78] Bush's years in Berlin brought into his music the advanced Central European idioms that characterise his major orchestral compositions of the period: the Piano Concerto (1935–37), and the First Symphony (1939–40).

[85] Under Bush's influence the "music of the workers" moved from the high aesthetic represented by, for example, Arthur Bourchier's mid-1920s pamphlet Art and Culture in Relation to Socialism, towards an expression with broader popular appeal.

[40] His first venture, Wat Tyler, was written in a form which Bush thought acceptable to the general British public;[92] it was not his choice, he wrote, that the opera and its successors all found their initial audiences in East Germany.

Bowen noted a distinct contrast between early and late works, the former showing primarily the influences of Ireland and of Bush's European contacts, while in the later pieces the idiom was "often overtly folklike and Vaughan Williams-ish".

[98] The critic Hugo Cole thought that, as a composer, Bush came close to Paul Hindemith's ideal: "one for whom music is felt as a moral and social force, and only incidentally as a means of personal expression".

[99] The composer Wilfrid Mellers credits Bush with more than ideological correctness; while remaining faithful to his creed even when it was entirely out of fashion, he "attempt[ed] to re-establish an English tradition meaningful to his country's past, present and future".

He is surpassed only in melody, as are the others, by Walton, but not even by him in harmonic richness, nor by Tippett in contrapuntal originality and the expressive power of rather austere musical thought, nor by Rawsthorne in concise, compelling utterance and telling invention, nor by Rubbra in handling large forms well.

[103] Among postwar Bush students are the composers Timothy Bowers, Edward Gregson, David Gow, Roger Steptoe, E. Florence Whitlock, and Michael Nyman, and the pianists John Bingham and Graham Johnson.

The 2000 centenary of his birth was markedly low key; the Prom season ignored him,[5] although there was a memorial concert at the Wigmore Hall on 1 November,[106] and a BBC broadcast of the Piano Concerto on 19 December.

[110] The trust provides a newsletter, features news stories, promotes performances and recordings of Bush's works, and through its website reproduces wide-ranging critical and biographical material.