Motorway: Production Music of the 1960s

Production Music (better known in some parts of the world as ‘Library Music’) has always featured prominently in this Guild series. GLCD 5115 was devoted exclusively to the Bosworth Library, one of the earliest, dating back to the 1930s, and GLCD 5164 and 5183 were collections of tracks from other libraries. GLCD 5220 and 5224 were devoted to library music from the 1940s and ’50s, and now we have a collection from the 1960s. By this time, although Chappell, Boosey & Hawkes, Paxton, and Bosworth were still the major players, many other music publishers had realised that, with the rapid expansion of television and a growing demand for corporate videos, there was a potential market for such music. Charles Brull, Conroy, Francis Day & Hunter, Impress, KPM, Southern, and Weinberger were among those who provided radio and TV stations, film producers, and anyone else they thought might use their music with free copies in the hope that they would be used and thus generate some royalty payments for the publisher and the composer. Some composers wrote for more than one company and there is at least one instance of a composer submitting the same tune to two publishers under different titles and getting both published – there is no suggestion that he was one of those featured here! With music by Robert Farnon, Charles Williams, Trevor Duncan, Ernest Tomlinson, et al, this collection is a real ‘Who’s Who’ of Light Music.