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Alan Bush (22 December 1900 – 31 October 1995) was a British composer, pianist, teacher and political activist. From a prosperous middle-class background, Bush enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music in the early 1920s. Many of his early works took the form of settings for pageants and workers' songs and choruses. In his maturer years he wrote symphonies, operas and other large-scale works, which found greater acceptance in Eastern Europe than at home, in part because of his lifelong communist convictions. In his prewar works, Bush's music retained an essential Englishness, but was also influenced by the avant-garde European idioms of the period. Later he sought to simplify this style, in line with his Marxist-inspired belief that music should be widely accessible. Bush taught composition at the Academy for more than 50 years and was the founder and president of the Workers' Music Association. (Full article...)