Ray Martin

Ray Martin (11 October 1918 - 7 February 1988) was a British orchestra leader. He was noted for his Light Music Compositions. Raymond Stuart (Ray) Martin was born in Vienna and was initially a violinist. He went to the State Academy of Music and Fine Art in Vienna. In 1937, he immigrated to England and was a Carroll Levis Discovery. After the start of World War II, in 1940, he joined the British Army. As he was multilingual, he served in the Intelligence Corps for six years. He became an arranger and composer for the Royal Air Force Band, After the war's end, he worked in radio for the British Forces Network in Hamburg, Germany and later form his own orchestra for a program called "Melody from the Sky" which had over 500 performances. He became the conductor of the BBC Variety Orchestra and also worked for EMI as a producer and arranger. In this period he wrote many scores for TV and movies. He moved to the USA in 1957, where he worked on both Broadway and Hollywood productions. Martin composed more than 2000 works, many of which were recorded for RCA and Polydor. He returned to the UK in 1972, but was comparatively unproductive. In 1980 he moved to South Africa where he died in 1988. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.