Alan Bush

Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 – 31 October 1995) was a British composer and pianist. He was a committed communist, and politics sometimes provided central themes in his music.

Personal life

Alan Bush was born in Dulwich, London, to Alfred Walter Bush (1869–1935), a director of the manufacturing chemists, W. J. Bush & Co., and his wife, Alice Maud Brinsley (1870–1951). He was educated first at Highgate School (1911–17) and then at the Royal Academy of Music (1918–22), where he studied composition under Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias Matthay. Later he studied musicology and philosophy with Johannes Wolf and Friedrich Blumein at the University of Berlin (1929–31), as well as taking composition lessons (1922–27) with John Ireland. He also studied the piano under Benno Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel.

One of his fellow composition students was Michael Head, who introduced Bush to his younger sister Nancy. They married in 1931. She provided libretti for three of his four full-length operas, three children's operas and other works.

Bush

Bush may refer to:

People

Places, United States

Places, elsewhere

Organisations

Alan

Alan may refer to:

People

Orchestra

An orchestra (/ˈɔːrkᵻstrə/ or US /ˈɔːrˌkɛstrə/; Italian: [orˈkɛstra]) is a large instrumental ensemble used in classical music that contains sections of string (violin, viola, cello and double bass), brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. Other instruments such as the piano and celesta may sometimes be grouped into a fifth section such as a keyboard section or may stand alone, as may the concert harp and, for 20th and 21st century compositions, electric and electronic instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ὀρχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus. The orchestra grew by accretion throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but changed very little in composition during the course of the 20th century.