English Folk under the Red Flag: The Impact of Alan Bush’s ‘Workers’ Music’ on 20th Century Britain’s Left-Wing Music Scene

Workers’ music: songs to fight injustice, inequality and establish the rights of the working classes. This was a new, radical genre of music which communist composer, Alan Bush, envisioned in 1930s Britain. At the time, Bush was an established figure of the musical elite and was well known for his highly modernist, serial compositions. Yet he began theorising a new cultural movement, one which would diametrically oppose pre-existing musical norms found in capitalist-driven, bourgeois-influenced society. His radical vision prompted new compositions, concerts, events, publications and recordings in the run up to the second world war. Due to the inaccessible nature of the materials and its topical subject matter, much of this music has been disregarded in academic literature. Yet, by tracing the development of the movement, this thesis attempts to shed light on its pivotal role in the left-wing music scene. It considers how it continued to grow and diversify in the postwar era, even whilst Bush’s ambitions for workers music reached a hiatus. It argues that Bush’s theories, which underpinned the socialist concept of workers’ music, were an elemental component of the work which cultivated the Second British Folksong Revival. The approach taken in this study is twofold: on the one hand it interprets vast amounts of unpublished, undocumented archival materials and, on the other, it goes on to contextualise such material within contemporary historical and cultural movements.