Bruce Duffie was a classical music radio broadcaster for a Chicago-based station. His website includes a huge number of transcribed interviews with world-famous musicians, including Geoffrey Bush…
Transcription posted 2009
I am Bruce Duffie, and I worked as a programme presenter for WNIB. In 1991 I had occasion to interview Geoffrey Bush. Bush, an English composer born in 1920, was not a well-known name, but had a strong reputation and by the 1980s was represented on several discs. In the nineteenth century, it was the piano transcription which carried music to the home; in the twentieth century, it was the phonograph record and the compact disc. Apparently, the twenty-first century will rely on downloads and other methods of streaming and digitising music just as these words are being beamed to you now from my website. Keep up and adapt, or get left behind and die…
But before we are all reduced to the dust from whence we came, allow me to give you this conversation I had with Geoffrey Bush. The entire interview has been transcribed, and here is part of what was said . . .
BD: Do you feel that you yourself are part of a line of English composers?
GB: Yes, I do. In fact, that’s just what I do feel. It’s partly due to my training. I was trained as a choirboy at Salisbury Cathedral, and there we sung an immense repertory of church music — not only British composers, but a large number of them stretching back to the Tudors and beyond, and right up to the present day. And it gives one a great feeling of being part of a tradition of music.
BD: Does it stretch continuously back to the Tudors? Once you get back behind Vaughan Williams and John Ireland, and perhaps Parry and Stanford, there seems to be a big gap between then and Henry Purcell.
GB: Well, [laughs] I’ve partly spent some of my life trying to disprove this. There’s a whole series of publications now in a series called Music of Britannica, which are the classics of British music. It was an edition started in 1951, at the time of the Festival of Britain. If you look at that, you’ll see there are, in fact, several works and composers dating from this so-called blank period. Just to name one which I think will be familiar, is Thomas Arne, composer of Rule, Britannia, who wrote a great deal of excellent music! It is not as good as Handel, not as good as Bach, but individual, and with a special flavor.
BD: Coming back to your own music, have you basically been pleased with the performances you have heard through the years?
GB In general, yes. And I’ve always found, in my experience, that in a sense, the better the performer, the more keen they are and the more able they are to give a good representation of your music.
BD: Do you have some advice in general for performers who are going to perform your works in public?
GB: No, I don’t think so. As I said, it’s not really complex music;
BD: So you’re more of a tunesmith.
GB: Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable answer. Yes, melody is primary with me. I think it’s how I was brought up. I think it’s in my nature.
BD: Tell me the joys and sorrows of writing for the human voice.
GB: Ah! I love writing for the human voice, and that’s because I was a choirboy. I spent five years between the ages of eight and thirteen singing all day. In fact, we had three hours, roughly, a day, including practices and church services. So I think I have a feel for the voice. I’m also, not surprisingly, a tremendous admirer of Purcell, who above all knew how to write for the human voice, particularly when setting English words. Of course, it’s exasperating when you have a strong feeling for a climax, and you feel you have taken the voice too high; you have to rethink the whole passage. That’s one of the problems of writing for the voice. Unless you write for a specific professional who has a very wide range, you have got to take into account that most singers have a compass which is limited, to some extent, at each end. But in any case, I suppose that’s true of all kinds of composition. Composition is the art of the possible, like politics.
BD: But at least with most instruments, you know exactly where they can go, and most notes are fairly much the same at either end. Whereas the voice gets a little bit different at the top and bottom.
GB: That is true. That’s perfectly true, and of course it varies from singer to singer. One of the important things is to make quite sure that you’re not asking singers to sing impossible vowel sounds on impossibly high or low notes; also not to block the voice in its lower register with the accompaniment. All these things come with practice and experience, but I sometimes wonder… I know one shouldn’t criticize one’s contemporaries, but I sometimes wonder whether they wouldn’t write a little bit differently if they’d sung themselves.
BD: Do you think that everyone who writes for voice should take a few voice lessons?
GB: Yes, I do.
Related Link: Composer Geoffrey Bush
Conversation with Bruce Duffie
BD spoken by Stephen Miles GB speken boy Graham Trew
J.R. This biographical note is drawn from Lewis Forman’s published Obituary, and we also thank members, Garry Humphreys and Grahem Trew, for personal recollections of the composer. All have spoken of his love of teaching, his caring nature and his modesty, which perhaps explains why he remains an ‘Unsung Hero’.
S.M. Geoffrey Bush was a dedicated music teacher and Scholar with a range of behind-the-scenes activities for Music Charities, such as the PRS Members Fund, the Composer’s Guild and the John Ireland Trust. He was also a composer of largely unacknowledged worth.
Five years as a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, left Geoffrey with a detailed knowledge and love of the English choral tradition and of composing, though, later, at Lancing College his teacher, Jasper Rooper demanded self- criticism. Bush destroyed everything he had written. “Looking back”, he said “I rather regret my lost innocence.”
J.R. His studies, as Nettleship Scholar at Oxford University were interrupted by the Second World War which, as a pacifist he spent in a hostel caring for difficult evacuee children in an extremely deprived area in Wales. During this time he wrote much music, some of which was performed for the Festival of Britain in 1951 but it was later withdrawn and only his violin sonata, from those years, achieved publication
S.M. Geoffrey Bush spent his life championing British music, as scholar and teacher. (Several students remember his generosity with Mars bars as an accompaniment for their studies of modern music.) He was a wonderfully sympathetic person, remarkable for his equable temperament and urbane intelligence. His lectures gripped his students, and no one ever felt Bush was talking down to them.
Bush’s career as an educationalist encompassed the Extra Mural Departments of Oxford University , of London University, and he was simultaneously visiting Professor at Kings College, London and was the moving spirit behind the London University External Diploma in the History of Music. At the Extramural Centre’s Summer School at Westonbirt, the end-of-course pantomime gained legendary status, with Bush, year after year, being the prime mover, writing cabaret songs at breakneck speed and showing his passion for another musical genre – Broadway.
Somehow, through all of this he continued to compose everything from Art Song to Symphony. Sadly as a tonal composer, who actually wrote ‘tunes, his music had a hard time and gained little appreciation
J.R.To mark Geoffrey Bush’s 70th birthday the Songmakers’ Almanac promoted a Wigmore Hall concert entitled “A Celebration of English Song 1850-1990”, and including some of his own songs. The hall was packed and Bush went on stage dressed characteristically in a bright red pullover and sporting an equally bright yellow bow tie. No one present could believe the anniversary this youthful and energetic figure was celebrating. He died eight years later,
Janine Roebuck & Stephen Miles
