Walter Murphy
b. 1952, New York City, New York, USA. Murphy was responsible for one of the biggest and most bizarre early disco hits, "A Fifth Of Beethoven". As its title suggests, the number 1 single was based on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Murphy was schooled in music as a child and worked for the Tonight show in the USA as a musical arranger after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music. He then worked as a jingle writer, scoring for television films. His first foray into the new disco sound was in 1975 with dance-oriented Christmas singles, which were not successful. Murphy came up with the idea for "A Fifth Of Beethoven" in early 1976 and recorded his arrangement, playing nearly all of the instruments himself (despite billing the record as being by Walter Murphy And The Big Apple Band). It was released on Private Stock Records and by the autumn had risen to number 1 in the US. An album of similar material reached number 15 during the same period. A follow-up single, "Flight '76", based on Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight Of The Bumble Bee", hit number 44 in late 1976, and an album, Rhapsody In Blue, including Murphy's reworking of the George Gershwin title song, made the lower rungs of that chart. Murphy was out of the charts for six years, resurfacing in 1982 with "Theme From E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial)", from the hit movie.
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- A Fifth of Beethoven
- A Fifth of Beethoven (Based on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony)
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