The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain and “unofficial” musical diplomacy in Eastern Europe

The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain was founded in 1945 with respectable patronage from grandees like Ralph Vaughan Williams and a business-like set of aims towards promoting the careers and rights of working composers and forming links with similar groups in other countries. Consequently, its role in Cold War diplomacy has understandably been overlooked in comparison with efforts like the legendary officially-sponsored visits of Benjamin Britten to the Soviet Union between 1963 and 1971. Nevertheless, as this paper will demonstrate, the Guild played an intriguing unofficial diplomatic role in the early postwar period. Composer and British communist Alan Bush, Chair of the Guild in 1947-8, used extensive travels in Eastern Europe to attempt to draw the Guild into diplomatic alliances associated with the Soviet sphere of influence. While his efforts ultimately failed, his connections remained important into the early 1960s with the successful 1960 visit to the USSR by Bush and then-Chair Elizabeth Maconchy. By tracing Bush’s unofficial diplomacy in these years and his influence upon the Guild, this paper will show the nuanced political role a national composers’ society could play, even in the face of an official national position far less receptive to relations with Eastern Europe.