[1] He began piano lessons at the age of seven,[2] and the following year became a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral choir school, where he remained until 1933, studying under Walter Alcock and acquiring a lasting love of traditional English church music.

[3] He took his B.Mus degree in 1940,[1] but his Oxford studies were then interrupted by the Second World War As a pacifist and conscientious objector, Bush served between 1941 and 1945 as assistant warden in the Hostel of the Good Shepherd, a children's home in Tredegar, Wales.

[1] Alongside his teaching, Bush composed a large number of works, including orchestral pieces, operas, choruses and songs.

[1] Outside the world of music, Bush was a keen student of detective fiction, and collaborated with his fellow-composer Bruce Montgomery (who wrote under the name Edmund Crispin) on a story "Who Killed Baker?".

[3] He was happiest writing songs and operas, although he deemed song-writing as a "futile" occupation: "[I[t is distinctly discouraging for a composer who has written (as I have) nearly a dozen cycles to find, far from having sung them, most singers do not even know they exist".

[1] A scholar of Elizabethan and Victorian music, Bush composed largely in the English tradition; his operas, and some of his later songs, reflect the influences of Purcell and Britten.

[5] He was not averse to the adoption of other idioms – in his First Symphony he included a blues-style slow movement, as a tribute to his friend and fellow-composer Constant Lambert.

Major recorded works include both symphonies, the Yorick Overture, the Christmas Cantata, the opera Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and the Oboe Concerto.