My friend and colleague Albert Chatterley, known to his friends as Jack, who has died aged 84, spent more than 20 years until 1986 as a music producer, later becoming assistant head of BBC School Radio.
His brilliant programmes ranged from sessions in which teenagers composed tunes by twanging rubber bands and rulers to those in which he shared music with five-year-old listeners, as a friendly, personal voice. After retirement, he became an expert on Thomas Watson, the little-known Elizabethan poet and musician, whose Italian Madrigals Englished (Vol 74 of Musica Britannica, 1999) he transcribed and edited in both Italian and English, with the music. He also contributed the entry on Watson to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Son of Burt and Marion, Jack was born and grew up in Astwood Bank, near Redditch, in Worcestershire, and was educated at Redditch high school, from where he won an organ scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, the first in his family to go to university. He took his experience from national service in the Royal Army Educational Corps and as a teacher at both Henry Thornton school, south London, and Bath Teacher Training College, to the BBC. He created many innovative School Radio programmes. The writers, presenters and singers Mari Griffith and Sandra Kerr, who both worked with Jack, recall his relaxed humour, skill and kindness.
Listeners were invited to send in their own compositions for broadcast, often performed on everyday objects – and sometimes recorded on tape wound round bits of cardboard. His experiences in radio were further developed in books such as Five Songs for Fun (1967), Seventy Simple Songs with Ostinati (1969) and Music Club Book of Improvisation Projects (1978). He also devised a unique experiment to teach young children notation by the use of animal sounds – for example a crotchet as the bark of a fox, a quaver a quack, a minim a moo, and so on.
Jack relished unexpected challenges. Once, recording a new song in the studio, the composer John Tavener asked without warning for one long, loud organ note. Jack instantly adjourned to the hallowed Broadcasting House concert hall and played an organ note at such volume and length that the clock fell off the wall.
He was an excellent keyboard player, and his performance with the Music and Movement producer Vera Gray of Fauré’s piano duet Berceuse, to bring Listen With Mother to a drowsy close, aired for five days a week until 1982.
Jack is survived by Eleanor (nee Christie), whom he married in 1993, and by Kim and Ben, the sons from his first marriage, to Marie Oppenheim. She died in 1989.
