Archive
Edwin Astley, 1922-1998
Composer, arranger and conductor Edwin “Ted” Astley died in Goring, Oxfordshire, England, on May 19, 1998, at the age of 76, following several years of declining health.
One of the defining musical voices of British adventure television during the 1950s and 1960s, Astley created memorable themes and incidental scores for Danger Man, The Saint, The Baron, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), while also writing for cinema and documentary television.
Edwin Thomas Astley was born in Warrington, Cheshire, on April 12, 1922. He left school at 14 and initially worked for a gas-oven manufacturer, but music quickly became his profession. During World War II he joined the Royal Army Service Corps band, playing clarinet and saxophone and arranging military and dance-band music. After the war he led the Ted Astley Orchestra before moving to London, where he became an arranger for singers including Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton.
Astley began composing for film and television in the mid-1950s. His early television work included The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he supplied incidental music and a memorable brass fanfare, followed by The Buccaneers and International Detective. His film assignments included the science-fiction monster film The Giant Behemoth (1959), Peter Sellers’s comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959), The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960) and Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera (1962), for which he composed both the dramatic score and original operatic material. Read more…
Albert Glasser, 1916-1998
Composer, conductor and arranger Albert Glasser died in Los Angeles on May 4, 1998, at the age of 82, following a heart attack.
One of the most prolific composers in American low-budget cinema, Glasser wrote music for well over 100 films and became particularly associated with the science-fiction and horror pictures of the 1950s. His scores for The Amazing Colossal Man, The Cyclops, Beginning of the End, Earth vs. the Spider and Attack of the Puppet People helped define the sound of an entire era of B-movie filmmaking.
Albert Glasser was born in Chicago on January 25, 1916, the son of Latvian immigrants. He took up the flute as a youngster and developed an enthusiasm for orchestral music, especially Wagner and Richard Strauss. At 18 he received a scholarship to study composition and orchestration at the University of Southern California, and in 1935 joined Warner Bros. as a music copyist. There he encountered the work of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Hugo Friedhofer at close range, an invaluable practical education in the techniques of Hollywood scoring.
After further work as an orchestrator and arranger, Glasser received his first credited feature assignment with the Poverty Row horror film The Monster Maker in 1944. He subsequently wrote for westerns, crime pictures and adventure films, including several Cisco Kid features. His music for those films was later adapted for the popular television series, while he also composed extensively for radio programs including Hopalong Cassidy, Tarzan and Clyde Beatty. Read more…
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