John W. Morgan - R.I.P.

I just found out that John W. Morgan passed away ... exactly 6 months ago today!

Morgan was responsible for reconstructing classic film scores including Max Steiner's King Kong and Korngold's Adventures of Robin Hood, along with many others, which were then recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Stromberg and released on the Naxos label.

In 1999, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Morgan, because I heard that he did orchestrations for Bruce Broughton in the 1970s, and wondered if that included any of Broughton's Five-O scores. He replied, "I didn't do anything for Bruce on the series, but ... I orchestrated the two Fred Steiner episodes ... one with dog-napping and another with celestial star gazing or something. As I remember, they weren't the best of episodes."

Later, in another e-mail to a friend, he said, "I remember attending some Hawaii Five-O sessions that had music I orchestrated and they would routinely record in three track...not for stereo, but for ease of final mixing. Usually the strings would all be on one track, the brass and woodwinds may be on a track and percussion on a third."

In another message to me in 2010, he added, "I think we agree that the sound of Five-O has always and will be always Mort Stevens. And Five-O has had some marvelous composers, but Mort really was the sound, the energy and color for this series."

John made a lot of contributions to FILMUS-L, a discussion group which has been preserved here:

https://filmus-l.bernardherrmann.org/

To search for his postings, put quote marks around his name like this: "John Morgan"