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. Morley provided incidental music for The Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour. She attributed her entry into composing and arranging largely to the influence and encouragement of the Canadian light music composer Robert Farnon. Morley transitioned in 1972 and thereafter lived openly as a transgender woman. Later in life, she lived in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Morley won three Emmy Awards for her work in music arrangement. These were in the category of Outstanding Music Direction, in 1985, 1988 and 1990, for Christmas in Washington and two television specials starring Julie Andrews. Morley also received eight Emmy nominations for composing music for television series such as Dynasty and Dallas. She 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. She was the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Early life and education
Morley was born in Leeds, Yorkshire on 10 March 1924 under the name of Walter Stott. Morley's father was a watchmaker who played the ukulele-banjo, and the family lived above their jewellery shop. Her mother also sang. Morley, who became known familiarly as "Wally", 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. 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. She then tried playing violin at the age of 10 and the accordion at 11, including in competitions, before choosing the clarinet and alto saxophone as primary instruments, taking clarinet lessons and playing in the school orchestra. Morley then played in the semi-professional band led by Bert Clegg in Mexborough.As a mostly self-taught musician able to sight-read, Morley left school at the age of 15 to tour with Archie's Juvenile Band, earning a weekly wage of 10 shillings, and also worked as a projectionist. Her mentor at this time was the pianist Eddie Taylor. 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. With this band, she began writing arrangements for pay and made a recording debut with the tracks "Waiting for Sally" and "Love in Bloom". She later joined Geraldo's band, which performed for BBC Radio several times a week, in 1942 or 1944. With Geraldo's band Morley gained experience arranging for bands of many sizes and styles. She studied harmony and musical composition in London with the British-Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber and conducting with the German conductor Walter Goehr. Morley's early work was also influenced by Robert Farnon and Bill Finegan.
Career
Pre-transition work
At the age of 26, 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. She was originally a composer of light music or easy listening, best known for pieces such as the jaunty "Rotten Row" and "A Canadian in Mayfair", the latter dedicated to Robert Farnon. She also worked with the Chappell Recorded Music Library and Reader's Digest.Morley is known for writing the theme tune, with its iconic tuba part, and incidental music for Hancock's Half Hour in both its radio and television incarnations, and was also the musical director for The Goon Show from the third series in 1952 to the last show in 1960, conducting the BBC Dance Orchestra. At this time, she was known to work quickly and would sometimes write music for The Goon Show the same day of recording, which consisted of two full-band arrangements per week and incidental music. Another short but remembered theme composed by Morley was the 12-note-long "Ident Zoom-2", written for Lew Grade's Associated TeleVision, in use from the introduction of colour television in 1969, until the demise of ATV in 1981. By 1953, Morley was also scoring films for the Associated British Picture Corporation under music director Louis Levy.
In 1953, Morley became musical director for the British section of Philips Records, arranging for and accompanying the company's artists alongside producer Johnny Franz. She notably worked with Frankie Vaughan on "The Garden of Eden" in 1957. In 1958, she began an association with Welsh singer Shirley Bassey, including work for Bassey's recordings of "The Banana Boat Song", "As I Love You", which reached no. 1 in the UK Singles Chart in January 1959, and "Kiss Me Honey Kiss Me". She was the head of an orchestra and a chorale at this time, releasing records as "Wally Stott and His Orchestra" and "The Wally Stott Chorale" respectively. She also worked with artists such as Noël Coward and Dusty Springfield and on the first four solo albums by Scott Walker. The next hits she worked on were Robert Earl's "I May Never Pass this Way Again" and Frankie Vaughan's "Tower of Strength".
In 1962 and 1963, Morley arranged the United Kingdom entries for the Eurovision Song Contest, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" and "Say Wonderful Things", both sung by Ronnie Carroll. The former was conducted on the Eurovision stage in Luxembourg. She was also credited with a rhythmic drum solo in the 1960 horror film Peeping Tom, which a dancer plays on a tape recorder.
In 1961, 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. The New Symphony Orchestra or the Bulgarian New Symphony Orchestra, was conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and the professional British choir, namely the Ambrosian Singers as rehearsed by Luboff, performed such favourites as "Deep River", Handel's "Largo", Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", Rachmaninoff's "Vocalise", under the album's title Inspiration. In 1962, she arranged and conducted the RCA Red Seal debut album Romantic Italian Songs for Italian-born tenor Sergio Franchi, and later did the arrangements and conducting for Franchi's 1963 RCA album, Women in My Life.
Some of her other notable works in the years before transitioning include the composition and arrangement for the films The Looking Glass War, released in 1970, and When Eight Bells Toll, released in 1971. She stepped back from the music and film industry between 1970 and 1972 in order to privately undergo gender transition. During this time, Morley studied clarinet chamber music at the Watford School of Music for eighteen months.
After transitioning to living publicly as a woman in 1972, Morley continued to work in music, now using the name Angela Morley professionally. Due to worries about how she would be received publicly as a transgender woman, she declined opportunities to appear on television, such as on The Last Goon Show of All in 1972, though she continued to work with many of her previous colleagues. Because of the scrutiny she might face, she had to be persuaded by Franz to continue conducting. One of her first projects upon her return to public life was as an orchestrator on Jesus Christ Superstar. She 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. Her contribution to the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation and she travelled to California for the award ceremony.
Morley was also 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, but she was only credited as conductor and arranger. She 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. Though initially reluctant, citing lack of preparation and unfamiliarity with the novel, Morley wrote most of the score for the animated Watership Down film, released in 1978. She had to work quickly based on work drafted by Malcolm Williamson, then Master of the Queen's Music, who left the project. At this time, she was a regular guest conductor of the BBC Radio Orchestra and BBC Big Band.
Work in the United States
Following the success of Watership Down, Morley lived for a time in Brentwood, Los Angeles, where she began working for Warner Bros. She permanently relocated to Los Angeles in 1979 and began working primarily on American television soundtracks, including those of Dynasty, Dallas, Cagney & Lacey, Wonder Woman and Falcon Crest, working with the music departments of major production companies, including Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox Television.Thanks to a mutual friend, Herbert W. Spencer, Morley collaborated with John Williams throughout the 1970s and 1980s, arranging for the Boston Pops Orchestra under Williams' direction and working on films such as Star Wars, Superman, The Empire Strikes Back, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Schindler's List, though in an uncredited capacity. She also collaborated with André Previn, Lionel Newman, Miklós Rózsa, and Richard Rodney Bennett. Later, she would work with soloists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. She was nominated six times for Emmy Awards for composing and won three times for music direction, notably of two Julie Andrews television specials.
Morley continued to work in television until 1990. She relocated again to Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1994, where she recorded two CDs with the John Wilson Orchestra. She also lectured at the University of Southern California on film scoring and founded the Chorale of the Alliance française of Greater Phoenix. Her last film credit was for the Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame II in 2002, where she worked as an additional orchestrator and composer of additional music.