The Professional Career and Output of Trevor Jones

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With a career spanning nearly 40 years, Trevor Jones is one of the most successful contemporary British-based composers of film music and is seen by peers as an influential figure in the industry. He is distinguished by the range of projects he has worked on, the directors he has collaborated with, and his development of novel approaches to the creation of film music. His output includes scores for the groundbreaking animatronic films of Jim Henson ('The Dark Crystal', 1982; 'Labyrinth', 1986), films with significant cultural impact such as 'Brassed Off!' (1996) and 'Notting Hill' (1999), and those dealing with political issues both in the UK and abroad. The latter include 'In the Name of the Father' (1993) which investigates the wrongful arrest and treatment of the Guildford Four, and 'Mississippi Burning' (1988), which deals with the struggles of black civil-rights activists and the Ku Klux Klan in the southern US in the 1960s. Many of the films he has scored retain currency and continue to appear regularly on British television schedules many years after their theatrical releases.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. In the audio sphere, this period saw the development of the digital audio workstation, the digital synthesizer and other electronic instruments that significantly impacted on the collaborative process of film-score production. Jones has been in the vanguard in his use of such technology and continues to operate at the forefront of the profession.In 2005 Jones donated a very large collection of materials relating to his film scores to the University of Leeds, which already had an established reputation for film-music study, with an agreement that they may be used exclusively for research and teaching. The donation consisted of more than 400 multi-track analogue tapes, including session recordings and demonstration mock-ups of cues, as well as an array of paperwork such as spotting notes, mixer settings and other records of communication between members of the music and production teams, and Jones has continued to add to the holdings through the provision of digital files for recent film projects, and notated scores (which often include drafts and sketches). In 2010 he made a second donation of archival materials, around 300 items, including rough and fine cuts for several pictures (on video), additional multi-track and demo recordings, and some final mixes.The approach to scholarly investigation of film music and its composers has developed over time as researchers have gained access to resources that permit more detailed study, progressing from the aural analysis of the music as heard in the theatrical release of a film to the use of additional materials to supplement the soundtrack, notably the composers' manuscript scores. Continuing this development, the value of archival resources relating to the film-score production process has recently begun to be recognised by researchers, since these materials can often establish the context of the notated score, enabling scholars to evaluate previous incarnations of musical ideas and structures, and to chart the ways in which musical and filmic decisions have impacted on the composer's music. The proposed project will utilise the Jones Archive to create public events, educational materials, a monograph on Jones (the first significant publication devoted to the composer) that investigates and evaluates key phases in his career within the context of developments in both the British and global film-music industries, conference papers and proceedings, a PhD dissertation, and a digital archive of materials relating to Jones's film work for use in research and teaching (as per the University's agreement with Jones).