WALTER MURPHY
Walter Murphy (born December 19, 1952) is an American composer, arranger, pianist, musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known for the instrumental “A Fifth of Beethoven”, a disco adaptation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which topped the charts in 1976 and was featured on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. In a career spanning over four decades, Murphy has written music for numerous films and TV shows; he has had a long-running partnership with Seth MacFarlane, composing music for his films and TV shows such as Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, American Dad!, and Ted. (More from Wikipedia)
I am pretty sure that I must have heard a track or two by the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption on college radio back in the day; otherwise, I don’t know how Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” would sound so familiar to me. The opening track on their self-titled debut album in 1969, Ekseption – simply called “The 5th” – is based on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This might be the first pop treatment of the symphony, though there have been many others over the years. Of course, there is the disco version called “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy.
(January 2013)
