Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War

Joanna Bullivant is Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford. She has published widely on British composers, modernism, and music and politics. This is her first book.

• Introduction; 1. Bush as modernist: material and performance; 2. Bush as activist: the idea of workers' music; 3. Bush as outsider: music and communism in wartime; 4. Building in the rubble: the winter journey and Lidiče; 5. Bush as Stalinist: the year 1948; 6. Bush and the self: Wat Tyler's rituals of becoming; 7. Bush and East Germany: opera, sex, and the communist body.

'Her [Bullivant's] book will serve as a key reference on the composer, and its perspectives deserve full consideration by anyone studying twentieth-century music and communism … drawing on newly available archival material, it carefully considers key 'images' of Bush - as modernist, as left-wing political activist, national outsider, 'Stalinist'. The result is a nuanced assessment of Bush's ideas and position within both British and East German musical life.' Mike Makin-Waite, Twentieth Century Communism