The Correspondence of Alan Bush and John Ireland, 1927-1961

Abstract

This volume is a monument to the skill, industry and dedication of its editor, Alan Bush's daughter, Rachel O'Higgins. It will be of lasting utility to historians of English music. The relationship it charts was an equal one, but for unequal reasons. When the correspondence began in 1927, Ireland was an established composer—a position he was to hold for another quarter-century. When Bush chose Ireland as his private tutor in 1922, he was almost entirely unknown, and was (on the whole) destined to remain so. Whereas the master depended wholly on his professional earnings, the pupil, like other artists of this generation, was (to use his own vocabulary) from the rentier class. In the 1930s, Bush responded to Ireland's need for financial support, mainly by subsidising his lease of a town house in Chelsea. Estimating the power-balance by the ratio of letters exchanged (though some of Bush's are missing) it lies inversely in Bush's favour by 1:4. From the outset, Dr O'Higgins sets the relationship between the two men firmly in its international political context. Though Bush sought success, by the mid-1930s he was a dedicated Communist, and saw his art mainly as a means to forward the cause. Ireland's motivation was more conventional. His success had been in large part due to the fortunate happenstance that his stylistic maturity coincided with the birth of the BBC, an unprecedented source of patronage. His network of backers included the corporation's resident musicological tyro, Edward Clark. At this distance it is difficult to estimate what attracted Clark, protagonist of the ‘ultra-modern music’ whose BBC history has been charted by Jenny Doctor, to Ireland's output. Yet Clark was both magus and fellow traveller, and along with others (like the exiled Catalan violinist Antoní Brosa, who gave several Ireland premieres) helped Bush and the CPGB to establish the Workers’ Music Association. This was in 1936, year of the Spanish Civil War. Exploiting the perfervid atmosphere which events in Spain created, Bush took the opportunity to convert his mentor to the true faith. As his letters show, Ireland accepted instruction in terms of language used, and even built radical utopianism into his music. An outstanding case was These Things Shall Be, the BBC's chief commission in celebration of the 1937 Coronation. In what was an amazing coup for the Party, perhaps in retrospect the nearest it came to revolution during the People's Front era, Bush (who orchestrated the piece) persuaded Ireland to yoke ‘The Internationale’ as a descant to the main theme. The work was broadcast in coronation week by Adrian Boult and BBC forces, to considerable acclaim. Indeed, neither Whitehall nor Buckingham Palace seems to have noticed anything amiss.