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A gift for music across the gender divide
Thanks to Christine for bring this to my attention.
From the Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/a-gift-for-music-across-the-gender-divide/2009/02/02/1233423131067.htmlAngela Morley, 1924-2009
AdvertisementANGELA MORLEY, bandleader, composer and arranger, created many radio, television and film scores and won three Emmys.
In the first half of her life she was Wally Stott, best known for his work with the BBC radio comedy classics Hancock’s Half Hour and the Goon Show and his Wally Stott’s Orchestra and Chorus, among England’s favourite bands for 20 years.
Walter Stott/Angela Morley, who has died at 84, was born in Leeds, where his father had a watchmaker’s business. From an early age, he had a keen interest in big band music, and mastered several instruments before playing the saxophone in a semi-professional dance band. He left school at 15 to tour with a juvenile band and, at 17, joined Oscar Rabin as lead alto.
In 1944 he joined the Geraldo Orchestra, where he honed his skills as an arranger, and soon obtained work with BBC radio. Hitherto self-taught, Stott then studied harmony, counterpoint and composition with the Hungarian composer Matyas Seiber and took a conducting course with Walter Goehr. By 1953 he had become the resident musical director at Philips records and the radio commissions continued.
He had met Peter Sellers and in 1952 conducted the BBC Dance Orchestra in the third series of the Goon Show. Stott told Ed Sikov, author of Mr Strangelove (2002), a biography of the actor: “I hate to believe that there was any harm in Peter. He was a very likeable person.”
When Hancock’s Half Hour began its radio run in 1954, Stott composed the theme tune, in which the opening notes on the tuba were intended to represent Tony Hancock’s persona. The association continued with pre-recorded, incidental music for the series, and in its even more successful television version, from 1956 to 1961.
Stott’s accredited film scores, from 1953, included the rhythmic piece leading up to Moira Shearer’s murder in Peeping Tom (1960); The Looking Glass War (1969), based on the novel by John Le Carre, and When Eight Bells Toll (1971).
Although Stott had been married and had children, he had, in the words of Max Geldray, the harmonica player who featured in the Goon Show, “a lifelong mental struggle with gender identity, a fact that, for all those years, he had kept sealed tightly inside himself”. It was only after his first wife, Beryl, had died and he met his second wife, Christine Parker, whom he married in 1970, that he was able to confront, and resolve, his identity crisis.
Two years after the marriage, Stott underwent what was then termed a sex-rectifying operation. He became Angela Morley, taking his mother’s maiden name. He continued to arrange versions of standards for BBC Radio 2 and to conduct the BBC Radio Orchestra. Geldray recalled: “In all the ways that mattered, the person I found now was still the person I had known.”
By 1974 Morley was working on Stanley Donen’s film The Little Prince, with the songwriting team of Lerner and Loewe, which brought her an Oscar nomination.
Another followed for Bryan Forbes’s version of the Cinderella story The Slipper and the Rose (1976). Her best-known film work was probably the score for the animated feature Watership Down (1978), on which she replaced the ailing Malcolm Williamson. She also helped John Williams with the orchestration of his scores for Star Wars, Superman and The Empire Strikes Back.
In 1980, Morley relocated to the United States, where, after The Brink’s Job (1978), she worked mainly on episodes of television series, including the soaps Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest. She was nominated six times for an Emmy for television composing and won three for arranging. She also worked for fellow composers, including Miklos Rozsa and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett.
Angela Morley is survived by her wife Christine and a son from her first marriage. Beryl and a daughter from her first marriage predeceased her.
Gavin Gaughan, Guardian News & Media
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