Lyle "Spud" Murphy earned his primary renown as composer and arranger through creation of the innovative 12-tone Equal Interval System, which he designed to free composers from the limitations imposed by traditional classical structures. Born in Berlin on August 19, 1908, he moved at age four to Salt Lake City, UT, where his early talents quickly surfaced. Displaying prodigious ability, he sequentially mastered the trumpet, every member of the saxophone family, and ultimately all remaining woodwinds. He launched his professional life at 16; then, in 1933, he shifted to New York City and rapidly established himself as a highly regarded arranger.
Murphy achieved peak commercial success through his work with Benny Goodman, for whom he crafted arrangements of the bandleader's hits "Get Happy" and "Jingle Bells." As the 1930s drew to a close, he headed to Hollywood, where he composed and arranged film scores for Columbia Pictures and reworked the familiar children's tune "Three Blind Mice" into the signature theme for the Three Stooges. Between 1938 and 1941 he also directed his own big band. During World War II he enlisted in the merchant marine. Once discharged, Murphy resumed his Hollywood career and entered his most productive phase, ultimately supplying music for more than 50 films. Colleagues grew so fascinated by his distinctive, self-developed approach that he eventually committed the method to writing and began teaching it under the name Equal Interval System. Across subsequent decades he instructed thousands of students and working musicians, among them Oscar Peterson, Gerald Wiggins, and Curtis Counce, the latter of whom contributed bass to Murphy's space age pop albums New Orbits in Sound and Gone with the Woodwinds!. Following surgery, he died in Hollywood on August 5, 2005.
