Bombster

Black-bearded Composer Alan Bush, professor at London's Royal Academy of Music, an industrious writer of acid, modernistic scores, has long believed that the only important function of music is to encourage revolution. In 1929, while staid London music lovers frowned and looked the other way, London's musical leftists, led by Composer Bush, drew throngs to a class-angled production of Handel's venerable sacred oratorio, Belshazzar. Handel's serene 18th-Century score was sung with traditional massiveness by a chorus of 1,800 voices. But it was so staged that the fall of Handel's Babylonians was made to represent the fall of capitalism, and the victory of Handel's Persians, the victory of science, art and socialism.

A year ago Alan Bush threw another musico-political bomb: a leftist piano concerto. The concerto started normally, but in the middle of its last movement the pianist stopped and a tenor voice swung out in a long, earnest recitative on the undignified position of artists in capitalist society.

Last week Bombster Bush did it again. This time he rented Albert Hall (capacity 12,000), and launched a three-day Festival of Music for the People. Main feature: a massive pageant depicting the story of "the people in their struggle forward out of subjection." In it danced, acted, sang and marched 500 pageanteers from London's Labor choirs, 100 folk dancers from the village of Abbott's Bromley, dancers from London's Communist Unity Theatre, Negro Baritone Paul Robeson, and 100 English veterans of the Spanish Loyalist army. Its music was composed by a bombing squad of British composers, headed by London's famed and respected 200-lb. Symphonist Ralph Vaughan Williams.

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