MS Mus. 404-405

MSS Mus. 404, 405. Alan Bush Collection. Vols lxxix, lxxx. ‘Festival of Music for the People’, music for a pageant to a scenario by Randall Swingler, for military band; [1939]. The music for the pageant was organised by Bush, and included contributions by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Cooke, Elisabeth Lutyens, Edmund Rubbra, Erik Chisholm, Christian Darnton, Frederic Austin, Norman Demuth, Elizabeth Maconchy, Alan Rawsthorne and Bush himself. Performed at the Royal Albert Hall on 1 April 1939. Parts, in ink, with markings in red and blue crayon. Copies, in various hands. On some parts entitled ‘Music of the People’. The first movement is a ‘Flourish for Wind Band’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the autograph score of which is Add. 57489: this score includes parts for oboe, 1st and 2nd cornets, 3rd and 4th horns and 3rd trombone, none of which is included in this set of parts. Later movements include arrangements of ‘The Land it is the Landlord’s’, ‘We’re Low’, ‘Song of the Peatbog Soldiers’, ‘People of England’, ‘Russian Funeral March’ [not the arrangement by Britten], ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘The Internationale’. Cornet-conductor score of Vaughan Williams’s Flourish published Workers’ Music Association, 1951 (W.M.A. Brass Band Publications, no.8029); full score published Oxford University Press, 1973.

Two volumes. 304 x 238mm.