Postal Music

On 7 April 2005, The British Postal Museum & Archive sponsored a concert in the Britten Theatre of the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London. The concert heard seminal British film music performed live in public for the first time in nearly seventy years. The concert also included excerpts and stills from the films for which the music had been orginally composed.

This concert was the culmination of an unusual research project undertaken for the BPMA: Charles Wiffen worked for several months in 2003-4 investigating music associated with British postal history.

The project drew on materials and documents from The Royal Mail Archive, as well as from sources in the RCM’s own collections and other institutions internationally. Over 400 musical compositions were located that were either composed specifically for Royal Mail and its forebears, or that refer to postal issues.

The research part of the project produced the report available here to download. You can also download the list of music associated with the postal service.

Postal Music Research Report (PDF, 167KB)

List of music associated with the postal service (PDF, 52KB)

Thanks to this foundation, the project researcher Charles Wiffen was able to take his work in a new direction, which ultimately led to the concert in 2005: rescoring music written for the General Post Office Film Unit.

The GPO Film Unit is widely acknowledged to have broken new ground in documentary film during its brief existence in the 1930s. In the early years of the Film Unit, the producer John Grierson operated a very enlightened commissioning policy, and employed young and relatively inexperienced composers such as Benjamin Britten and Walter Leigh.

Other composers for this series of influential and often avant-garde films included RCM alumni Richard Addinsell, Brian Easdale and Constant Lambert as well as other significant figures such as Darius Milhaud and Alan Rawsthorne.

Because the Film Unit worked so quickly, to tight schedules and budgets, many original scores do not survive. Using the computer system 'Sibelius', Charles Wiffen was able to rescore music, drawing on information from those composers' notes and partial scores that have survived in various archive collections.

Since the concert in April 2005, the BPMA has continued to support the increasing exposure of the music of the GPO Film Unit, including performances of Britten's score for Night Mail at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2006.

Night Mail is available to buy on DVD from our online Shop.