Music arranger Angela Morley, who won Emmys for arranging two of Julie Andrews television specials has died at 84 in Scottsdale, Arizona. She's said to have passed away from complications of a fall and a subsequent heart attack.
The three-time Emmy winner, also received Oscar nominations for adaptaing the songs in the musicals "The Little Prince" and "The Slipper and the Rose"
This prolific woman also wrote her own official bio for her web site, which we reprint below. A very full life! Our thoughts and prayers go out to her partner Christine Parker, along with her son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren during this difficult time.
For more information, visit http://www.angelamorley.com/
I was born at Leeds, Yorkshire in 1924. My father was a watchmaker, and had a family shop that sold watches, clocks, jewellery and silver plate. My earliest musical memory was of sitting on the floor surrounded by records of the bands of Jack Payne and Henry Hall and playing them on our enormous wind up gramophone. My dad played the ukulele-banjo that he used to let me tune for him, using his pitch pipe, to either G-C-E-A or A-D-F#-B. My mother had a contralto voice and sang: There is a Lady Passing By and, her favorite, Big Lady Moon.
When I was eight years old, my dad bought a brand new Challen upright piano that had pride of place in our over-the-shop Sunday sitting room, and sent me to a lady a few streets away for piano lessons. Three months later, my dad became ill and very unexpectedly died at the early age of thirty-nine. My piano lessons were immediately stopped and never recommenced. They are the only piano lessons that I ever had. A year later, my mother, who had no head for business, sold the shop and we went off to live with her parents at Swinton near Rotherham, Yorks.
At age ten, I had a month-long love affair with the violin but my grandfather, a prankster who didn't like the violin, smeared butter on my bow and very effectively brought my career as a violinist to an end. At eleven, I started to play the accordion, had lessons and won a couple of competitions. A judge from the BBC advised my mother that there was no future in the accordion, and that I should learn a band or orchestral instrument, for instance the clarinet or saxophone. My mother bought me a clarinet at the local pawnbroker's for one pound ($4 at the time). It was built all in one piece; it was a simple system instrument that was ‘high pitch' and had a broken mouthpiece. I had lessons on it and started to play in the school orchestra. Several months later, a kind mother bought me an alto saxophone that said ‘Pennsylvania' across the bell. I started to play, unpaid of course, in the semi-pro band of Bert Clegg at the Empress Ballroom, Mexborough, Yorks.
I left high school at fifteen and went on tour with Archie's Juvenile Band for ten shillings a week ($2 at the time). On joining the band, I was asked to name my favorite band. ‘Ambrose' I replied, whereupon they all laughed themselves silly and queried, ‘What, you've never heard of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey'? I confessed that I hadn't, and my education was taken in hand that very moment as we all headed off to the nearest record shop. I started to take down arrangements from records about this time under the tutelage of the pianist, Eddie Taylor, who was an old hand at it.
World War II started and created a new dimension to my life that was anything but a hindrance. Suddenly, with all the bands starting to lose musicians to the ‘draft', a fifteen-year-old musician who could sight-read was eagerly sought by every bandleader in the UK. Before I was seventeen and a half, I'd gone from band to band in quick succession until, at seventeen and a half, I found myself playing lead alto with Oscar Rabin's Band. Still touring alas, but broadcasting and making records too. It was during my two years with this band that I graduated from taking down records to writing arrangements for pay.
At age twenty in 1944, I joined the Geraldo Orchestra, arguably the best band in the UK at the time. The Geraldo Band practically lived at the BBC doing several radio programmes a week. The great bonus for a developing arranger was that the band might be a swing band on Monday and then augmented to symphonic size on Tuesday, while on other days perhaps various combinations in-between, and on occasion even adding a choir. Since I got to arrange for all these combinations, was there ever a better arranging academy? I doubt that anything like that exists today.
