55 Facts About Angela Morley

Angela Morley was an English composer and conductor who became familiar to BBC Radio listeners in the 1950s under the name of Wally Stott.

Angela Morley attributed her entry into composing and arranging largely to the influence and encouragement of the Canadian light music composer Robert Farnon.

Angela Morley transitioned in 1972 and thereafter lived openly as a transgender woman.

Angela Morley won three Emmy Awards for her work in music arrangement.

Angela Morley received eight Emmy nominations for composing music for television series such as Dynasty and Dallas.

Angela Morley was twice nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Original Song Score: first for The Little Prince, a nomination shared with Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, and Douglas Gamley; and second for The Slipper and the Rose, which Morley shared with Richard M Sherman and Robert B Sherman.

Angela Morley was the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Angela Morley was born in Leeds, Yorkshire on 10 March 1924 under the name of Walter "Wally" Stott.

Angela Morley's father was a watchmaker who played the ukulele-banjo, and the family lived above their jewellery shop.

Angela Morley was a fan of dance music before being able to read the labels on the records, listening notably to Jack Payne and Henry Hall as a child, and began learning the piano at the age of eight on a Challen upright piano.

Angela Morley's father died of angina in 1933 at the age of 39, after which the family moved to Swinton and she ceased piano lessons.

Angela Morley then tried playing violin at age 10 and the accordion at age 11, including in competitions, before choosing the clarinet and alto saxophone as primary instruments, taking clarinet lessons and playing in the school orchestra.

Angela Morley then played in the semi-professional band led by Bert Clegg in Mexborough.

Angela Morley continued to play saxophone in British dance bands during the period of World War II, joining the Oscar Rabin Band as lead alto in 1941, at age 17.

Angela Morley later joined Geraldo's band, which performed for BBC Radio several times a week, in 1942 or 1944.

Angela Morley studied harmony and musical composition in London with the British-Hungarian composer Matyas Seiber and conducting with the German conductor Walter Goehr.

At the age of 26, Angela Morley stopped playing in bands to instead work solely as a writer, composer, and arranger, and would go on to work in recording, radio, television, and film.

Angela Morley worked with the Chappell Recorded Music Library and Reader's Digest.

Angela Morley is known for writing the theme tune, with its iconic tuba partition, and incidental music for Hancock's Half Hour in both its radio and television incarnations, and was the musical director for The Goon Show from the third series in 1952 to the last show in 1960, conducting the BBC Dance Orchestra.

In 1953, Angela Morley became musical director for the British section of Philips Records, arranging for and accompanying the company's artists alongside producer Johnny Franz.

Angela Morley notably worked with Frankie Vaughan on "The Garden of Eden" in 1957.

Angela Morley was the head of an orchestra and a chorale at this team, releasing records as "Wally Stott and His Orchestra" and "The Wally Stott Chorale" respectively.

Angela Morley worked with artists such as Noel Coward and Dusty Springfield and on the first four solo albums by Scott Walker.

In 1962 and 1963, Angela Morley arranged the United Kingdom entries for the Eurovision Song Contest, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" and "Say Wonderful Things", both sung by Ronnie Carroll.

Angela Morley was credited with a rhythmic drum solo in the 1960 horror film Peeping Tom, which a dancer plays on a tape recorder.

In 1961, Angela Morley provided the orchestral accompaniments for a selection of choral arrangements made by Norman Luboff for an RCA album that was recorded in London's Walthamstow Town Hall.

Angela Morley stepped back from the music and film industry between 1970 and 1972 in order privately to undergo gender transition.

Angela Morley had to be persuaded by Franz to continue conducting because of the scrutiny she might face.

Angela Morley then orchestrated, arranged, and aided in the composition of the music for the final musical film collaboration of Lerner and Loewe, The Little Prince, released in 1974.

Angela Morley was the composer, conductor, arranger and orchestrator for the Sherman Brothers' musical film adaptation of the Cinderella story, The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella in 1976, however she was only credited as conductor and arranger.

Angela Morley was again nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Music, Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score for this film along with the Sherman Brothers and again was present at the award ceremony.

Angela Morley had to work quickly based on work drafted by Malcolm Williamson, then Master of the Queen's Music, who left the project.

Angela Morley collaborated with Andre Previn, Lionel Newman, Miklos Rozsa, and Richard Rodney Bennett.

Angela Morley was nominated six times for Emmy Awards for composing and won three times for music direction, notably of two Julie Andrews television specials.

Angela Morley relocated again to Scottsdale, Arizona in 1994, where she recorded two CDs with the John Wilson Orchestra.

Angela Morley lectured at the University of Southern California on film scoring and founded the Chorale of the Alliance francaise of Greater Phoenix.

Angela Morley was a transgender woman and began transitioning to live openly as a woman in 1970, at the age of 46.

Angela Morley chose the new surname Morley as it was her grandmother's maiden name.

Angela Morley's first wife, Beryl Stott, was a singer and choral arranger who founded the Beryl Stott Singers, known as the Beryl Stott Chorus or Beryl Stott Group.

Angela Morley met Christine Parker, a singer, in London, and they married on 1 June 1970.

Angela Morley had grandchildren and great-grandchildren at the time of her passing.

Angela Morley had many friendships with fellow musicians and industry colleagues.

Angela Morley noted that she was lifelong friends with Herbert W Spencer from 1955, while working on Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, until his death in 1992.

Angela Morley died in Scottsdale, Arizona on 14 January 2009 at the age of 84.

Angela Morley's death was a result of complications of a fall and a heart attack.

Angela Morley was interviewed for the biography of her Goon Show colleague Peter Sellers by his biographer Ed Sikov prior to the book's publication in 2002.

Angela Morley's work has been compared to that of Wendy Carlos, given that they were both transgender women composing film scores in the same time period, though they never met; notably, the composer and researcher Jack Curtis Dubowsky analysed and compared their careers and styles in a chapter of his book Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness.

Angela Morley is commemorated by a Rainbow Plaque placed by Leeds Pride at the entrance to the BBC Leeds building, and by a blue plaque at her birthplace in Kirkstall.

Angela Morley's work was influenced by a number of genres and styles.

Angela Morley initially played in British dance bands, and spent much of her career composing music that was labelled as light and easy listening, as well as film scores and television soundtracks.

Light music and easy listening were generally not taken seriously or given much respect at the time that Angela Morley was composing, which Dubowsky credits partially to misogyny, due to the genre's association with femininity.

Beyond her light and easy listening work, Angela Morley collaborated with many kinds of artists at Philips Records, from folk music to rock and roll, produced her own recordings of music from Christmas music to show tunes, and later focused her attention on orchestral, classical and choral arrangements that went beyond the scope of light music and easy listening.

Angela Morley credited her eventual turn away from film scores to technological changes: tape recording, new types of microphones, and the advent of stereophonic sound had reached the wider music industry, but not film.

For Watership Down, Angela Morley created a character theme for Kehaar, voiced by Zero Mostel.

Alto sax takes the tune; the surrounding orchestration has a rich, symphonic, romantic, classical Hollywood sound, not unlike the orchestrations Angela Morley did for John Williams.