The Screen Music of Trevor Jones ― Technology, Process, Production

Trevor Jones is one of the most successful contemporary British-based composers of film and television music and is seen by his peers as an influential figure in the industry. He is distinguished by the range and volume of high profile projects he has worked on, the directors with whom he has collaborated, and his development of novel approaches to the creation of film music. Jones has been active in an industry that has experienced a prolonged period of major technological change, including the switchover from analogue to digital production and post-production techniques, and developments in computer software for score production and sound recording/editing. He has been in the vanguard in his use of such technology and continues to operate at the forefront of the profession. Drawing on the resources in the Trevor Jones Archive at the University of Leeds, Cooper, Sapiro and Anderson undertake a critical investigation of Jones’s career and output from his time at the National Film School to the present. The study analyses the development of Jones’s working practices over time, notably with respect to technological advances, evaluating key phases in his career within the context of changes in both the British and global film- and television-music industries. Through the lens of Jones’s scoring projects, the book also considers matters of the film-score production process (in the UK and more widely), the impact of technology on film-score composition, and the nature and value of audio-visual archives.

David Cooper is Professor of Music and Technology in the School of Music, and Dean of the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications, at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist and has published extensively on film music, the music of BartA3k, and the traditional music of Ireland. He is author of the Cambridge Handbook on BartA3k’s Concerto for Orchestra (1996), monographs on Bernard Herrmann’s scores for the films Vertigo (2001) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (2005), and the study The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora: Community and Conflict (2009). He edited the first modern edition of George Petrie’s seminal The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (2002, 2005). He is the co-editor with Kevin Dawe of The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences (2005); with Christopher Fox and Ian Sapiro of Cinemusic? Constructing the Film Score (2008); and with Rachel Cowgill and Clive Brown of Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton (2010). He has recently completed a large-scale study of BartA3k for Yale University Press. Ian Sapiro is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications, and Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds. His research interests include film music, particularly the processes of film-score creation and production, musical theatre, and orchestration, and the crossovers between these areas. He is author of a monograph on Ilan Eshkeri’s score for the film Stardust (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013), and ’The Filmmaker’s Contract: Controlling Sonic Space in the Films of Peter Greenaway’ in Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema (edited by James Wierzbicki, 2012), and co-editor of Cinemusic? Constructing the Film Score (2008) with David Cooper and Christopher Fox. He is currently writing a monographScoring the Score: The Role of the Orchestrator in the Contempo