Uploaded March 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Alan Bush - Relinquishment, Op. 11 (1928)
Alan Bush (piano)
BBC radio broadcast
“The tonality of the piece is A flat mixolydian. The first section is in three-part counterpoint; the lower voice parts introduce notes which contradict the modal basis of the melody. The harmonic idiom is that of West European twentieth century style, but quite free from Schoenberg's repetitive use of thematic material. The middle section is built up from rapid and contrasting rhythmic figures, developed almost exclusively from seconds and fourths. In the coda section a recapitulation of the opening appears above a tonic pedal.
The title is derived from the feeling expressed of deep regret that a particular course of action had to be consciously abandoned.” (Alan Bush)
“Bush started to engage with aspects of modern music from Continental Europe in the late 1920s. [...] this very period was significant for Bush both musically and politically. The year 1928 – in which he composed Relinquishment – was when Bush moved to Berlin and began experiencing what [Luigi] Nono called ‘the historical, cultural and political importance of Berlin in the years before 1933’.
Having already begun working with the LLCU (London Labour Choral Union) in 1926, alongside his fellow English communist composer Rutland Boughton, Bush sought out both radical music and radical politics in Berlin. He attended both the Berlin premiere of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in 1928 and a performance of Brecht and Eisler’s masterpiece of political theatre Die Massnahme. As his fellow student in philosophy, Egbert Hildebrandt, would later attest, such outings ‘were always the occasion of serious discussions on fundamental artistic and aesthetic questions and on problems of world outlook, over which we struggled to come to a clear understanding’. Nor was there an abrupt division of music and politics in Bush’s [...] Radical politics did not supplant modernism for Bush; rather, he discovered them at the same time within a cultural discourse with which modern music and politics were constantly associated.”
(Joanna Bullivant, 'Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc')
Alan Bush - Relinquishment, Op. 11 (1928)
Alan Bush (piano)
BBC radio broadcast
“The tonality of the piece is A flat mixolydian. The first section is in three-part counterpoint; the lower voice parts introduce notes which contradict the modal basis of the melody. The harmonic idiom is that of West European twentieth century style, but quite free from Schoenberg's repetitive use of thematic material. The middle section is built up from rapid and contrasting rhythmic figures, developed almost exclusively from seconds and fourths. In the coda section a recapitulation of the opening appears above a tonic pedal.
The title is derived from the feeling expressed of deep regret that a particular course of action had to be consciously abandoned.” (Alan Bush)
“Bush started to engage with aspects of modern music from Continental Europe in the late 1920s. [...] this very period was significant for Bush both musically and politically. The year 1928 – in which he composed Relinquishment – was when Bush moved to Berlin and began experiencing what [Luigi] Nono called ‘the historical, cultural and political importance of Berlin in the years before 1933’.
Having already begun working with the LLCU (London Labour Choral Union) in 1926, alongside his fellow English communist composer Rutland Boughton, Bush sought out both radical music and radical politics in Berlin. He attended both the Berlin premiere of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in 1928 and a performance of Brecht and Eisler’s masterpiece of political theatre Die Massnahme. As his fellow student in philosophy, Egbert Hildebrandt, would later attest, such outings ‘were always the occasion of serious discussions on fundamental artistic and aesthetic questions and on problems of world outlook, over which we struggled to come to a clear understanding’. Nor was there an abrupt division of music and politics in Bush’s [...] Radical politics did not supplant modernism for Bush; rather, he discovered them at the same time within a cultural discourse with which modern music and politics were constantly associated.”
(Joanna Bullivant, 'Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc')
