Multitude of Voyces

In 2019 MoV began working with Elizabeth Poston’s former executor, Simon Campion, and with Dr John Alabaster, a private individual who had made the most extensive study of Poston’s life and works to date, to secure the longterm protection of Poston’s copyright and of her vast literary archive. 

In 2022 Multitude of Voyces was honoured to receive the gift of Poston’s available copyright and the ownership of both the copyright and the physical material of her vast literary archive from Simon Campion.  In addition, the executors of John Alabaster’s estate donated his extensive Poston research to the charity following Dr Alabaster’s express wishes. 

We are now working with several other charities and organisations large and small to explore, publish, perform and record multiple unknown or forgotten works and to understand Poston’s relationship with many of the major British music figures of her day. 

Further information about Elizabeth Poston and our major project

The composer Elizabeth Poston is best-known for her setting of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, was a prolific composer of choral and instrumental music including multiple commissions for churches and cathedrals across the UK and US. Many of her compositions have never been published and exist only in handwritten form, and the anthologies she edited for international publishing houses in the 1950s/60s/70s – including the Penguin Books of Christmas Carols - are long out of print.

Elizabeth had a long association with the BBC: while still a student at the Royal Academy of Music some of her compositions were broadcast. During World War II she was appointed Director of Music for the European Service, where her work seems to have included transmitting coded messages in the form of precisely-timed recorded music. This mysterious phase of her life needs extensive further research. 

After the Second World War she helped to set up the BBC Third Programme (later BBC Radio 3) and served on the BBC Advisory Panel while continuing to compose works for performance by the BBC’s singers and instrumentalists as well as other notable performers such as her friend the countertenor, Alfred Deller. She also broadcast as a pianist, often accompanying live premieres of her own works, and she researched and presented documentaries, including two notable series on her close friend, the composer Peter Warlock.

Alongside her own busy and varied career as a self-employed composer and performer she cared for her mother, Clementine, with whom she shared her beloved home, Rooks Nest House, and she also generously volunteered significant support and advice to many of her musical peers including the composer William Busch. 

The scarcity of Elizabeth’s publications in modern editions, and the lack of contemporary recordings of her work have left her music surprisingly underrepresented within both the sacred and secular spheres despite her fame as the composer of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. This can be explained in part by the lack of an established Trust or Society to raise up her work: this is in stark contrast to the many Trusts which exist for the preservation, publication and promotion of the work of many of Elizabeth Poston’s male contemporaries, friends and colleagues such as Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Arthur Bliss, Lennox Berkeley, Herbert Howells, Benjamin Britten, Gerald Finzi and Peter Warlock.

Many of Poston’s works have never seen performances beyond their premieres decades ago and our exciting project will represent the most-extensive study and publication of her original works to date.  

We are greatly enjoying working closely with the British Library which owns and looks after the physical material of Elizabeth’s music manuscripts. In time we hope to digitise many of Elizabeth’s manuscripts and letters so that we can share them with the public. 

This is a unique project; we believe this musical and literary archive to be the largest of any historical female British composer and, with her circle of friends including such notable figures as Sir David Willcocks, the novelist (and former tenant of her home) E M Forster, and with much still to be discovered about her many close friendships in the music world, we know this archive to be of national importance. 

The charity is using its royalties income from performances, recordings and broadcasts of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree to help fund this project, and we hope eventually to become self-sufficient in this respect, however as most performances of that work take place during Divine Worship they are therefore exempt from the payment of such royalties, meaning that we need to find multiple alternative sources of income for this work. 

Contributions of any size are very welcome and we are seeking private individuals or sponsors who might like to support the publication of a particular musical or literary work. 

Raising funds for the project:

Our project is dependent on the royalties income derived from performances and broadcasts of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, however fees the charity urgently needs public donations to continue its detailed, forensic work. 

This QR code will take you to our dedicated Poston Project page at the Charities Aid Foundation. Contributions of any size are very welcome; sponsorship of individual works is encouraged. For further information about how you could help please email poston@multitudeofvoyces.co.uk 

https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/22923