The Screen Music of Trevor Jones

Technology, Process, Production

David Cooper, Ian Sapiro, Laura Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317016625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

The first significant publication devoted entirely to Trevor Jones's work, The Screen Music of Trevor Jones: Technology, Process, Production, investigates the key phases of his career within the context of developments in the British and global screen-music industries. This book draws on the direct testimony of the composer and members of his team as well as making use of the full range of archival materials held in the University of Leeds's unique Trevor Jones Archive, which was digitized with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Through a comprehensive series of chapters covering Jones's early career to his recent projects, this book demonstrates how 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.

This is a valuable study for scholars, researchers and professionals in the areas of film music, film-score production and audio-visual media.

Part I
Jones’s early career (1978–87)

1
Musical education and the National Film School

As outlined in the introduction to this book, echoes of Jones’s South African heritage and his musical training in the UK can be heard across his career, and the country of his birth has always been an important part of his personal and professional life. Accordingly, this chapter begins with a brief summary of Jones’s early years in South Africa before exploring his education in the UK at the Royal Academy of Music and the University of York. His years at York are shown to be particularly important in his increasing ease with technological affordances and understanding of how new developments could be harnessed in his scores, something that is particularly apparent in the toolkit scores of the late 1980s that are discussed in Chapter 3. The second part of this chapter focuses on Jones’s engagement with student film projects and his work with other students at the National Film School (now the National Film and Television School) in London and takes The Black Angel (1980) and The Dollar Bottom (1981) as case studies. These projects gesture towards the development of a compositional voice that can be seen to anticipate two broad trends in Jones’s use of musical language: the creation of atmospheric soundscapes including film music toolkits and his large symphonic scores with clear melodic themes. They also mark the beginning of Jones’s lifelong engagement with new technologies, particularly the synthesiser, and throughout this book the influence of technological developments and the connections that he made in his student years and early graduate work are shown to have shaped Jones’s career development.

Early life and musical education

Trevor Jones was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1949 and grew up in the inner-city District Six area, a neighbourhood that had a tough reputation. Music and film provided a means of escape from a harsh environment for him, and as a child he was a keen cinema-goer, sometimes skipping school to go to his local cinema. Even at the age of six he knew that he wanted to compose music for film (Carte Blanche 2014). Jones’s mother worked as a machinist at Rex Trueform but could not afford to pay school fees for her three children; fortunately, Jones won a scholarship that allowed him to attend high school. His grandmother’s piano provided an introduction to the instrument, and at seventeen he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London and was awarded a scholarship for one year. Following a long boat journey from South Africa to Southampton, Jones’s suitcase fell into the harbour while being unloaded, and he began his new life in Britain with minimal possessions.

At the Royal Academy of Music Jones was able to develop as a performer in a conservatoire environment, taking piano lessons with Harry Isaacs (1902–72) and composition classes with John Gardner (1917–2011) between 1969 and 1970. Subsequently he worked in reviewing, cataloguing and recording services at the BBC for a further four years, where he developed strong technical skills in tandem with continuing part-time studies at the Academy. Jones was initially employed as a record filer at the BBC and, following promotion, became a classical cataloguer in the Gramophone Library. He orchestrated popular music in his spare time for commercial purposes and composed a children’s school mass. Thus he was developing experience of orchestration from an early age, a skill that would prove invaluable in his future career (Sorrell 2015). While at the BBC, he applied to study on an undergraduate programme at the University of York, a decision that was shaped by a meeting at the BBC with Wilfrid Mellers, a founding member of the department of music at York. Mellers was impressed with Jones’s musicality and recommended him for their degree programme. Jones described the significance of York in his education:

The course at York was designed really to fill in gaps in my musical education which the Academy hadn’t dealt with: ethnic music, rock, jazz, pop, avant-garde, 20th century, electronic, all kinds of music.

(Fox and Cooper 2008, p. 1)

During his degree studies from 1974 to 1977, it was apparent that Jones, who was registered as a mature student, was already an outstanding pianist and had a high-profile teacher in Yonty Solomon. While an undergraduate Jones studied open form with Richard Orton (who had introduced the electronic studio to the university), producing a realisation of Cardew’s Octet 61. On the musicology course he completed a Beethoven string quartet module led by the composer David Blake, a Bach and Beethoven module led by Mellers, and engaged with ethnomusicology with Neil Sorrell. He also performed a solo piano recital and undertook studies in acoustics. While he appears to have been regarded by his tutors at York principally as a talented pianist, the university’s distinctive degree structure allowed him to shape his course according to his interests. The University of York’s undergraduate programme in Music was atypical at its inception for three main reasons: firstly, it had no final examinations; secondly, its practical project system allowed students to focus on in-depth topics of their choosing provided that there was adequate supervision available; and thirdly, the music history syllabus did not follow a traditional linear chronology from the Middle Ages to the present day. Jones worked on two practical projects that enabled him to draw together various strands of history, composition, and technology: one was a Chinese Revolutionary Opera led by David Blake, and the other was a production of Satie’s Relâche led by David Kershaw (Sorrell 2015). Jones’s technical knowhow and practical skills were praised by Kershaw, and Jones expressed an interest in further research in aspects of film following his degree (Sorrell 2015). Engagement with Satie also seems to have had an early impact on his creative approach; in recent interviews, he has highlighted the influence of this composer on his musical style, noting the impact of recurring motifs in a cyclical pattern without a discernible melody that an audience may respond to subliminally (Jones 2014b). Jones’s interest in film and television scoring also shaped his decision to investigate this area in his solo project during the spring term of 1977. For this independent research module, he worked on a film about the department of music at York and wrote an essay about the differences between television and film as media.

The degree programme equipped Jones with an understanding of a broad range of styles and further experience of the use of electronics. Indeed, York had a reputation for being at the cutting edge of contemporary composition at this time with a number of high-profile composers on the staff or in visiting roles. They included English-American Bernard Rands, who had studied with Pierre Boulez and was known for his modernist style; David Blake, who had studied with Hanns Eisler; David Kershaw who taught composition with a particular interest in film; and Elizabeth Lutyens (1906–83) who became composer in residence in 1976. Rands had interviewed Jones for his place at York in February 1974 and noted his maturity and obvious talent with potential for development at York (Sorrell 2015). While Jones had varying levels of contact with these composers, he particularly recalled the impact of conversations with Lutyens and how they afforded him rich insights into the world of film scoring (Fox and Cooper 2008). Musically influenced by Webern, Lutyens scored for film and television extensively and is best known in this regard for her work in the horror genre, notably the Hammer Horror films. Traces of her influence can be found in Jones’s work from the late 1980s and early 1990s on films such as Angel Heart and Freejack, where he created atmospheric horror/thriller scores using ‘toolkits’ of synthesised sounds.¹

The National Film School

From the autumn of 1977, following his graduation from York, Jones began both to study and to work as a teacher at the UK National Film School (now the National Film and Television School, or NFTS) in Beaconsfield, and he became involved with scoring student films there. The NFTS encouraged its students to create companies to facilitate individual film projects, which allowed them to experience real-world film-making conditions within a supportive environment, and Jones has highlighted how this approach facilitated his move into the industry:

The importance of the film school for me was that the transition to the industry was almost imperceptible. It didn’t matter to us whether we were working on film-school projects or on small commercial projects. […] We would set up a company specifically for a particular short-film project and try to raise money to make it. The company would be disbanded after the film was made. So whenever anyone had a project they’d start a company and find like-minded film-makers to join them in order to complete the project.

(Jones 2014b)

The NFTS has preserved records of its student films from this period, and those for which Jones was credited as composer are listed in Table 1.1 along with their different narrative themes and the festivals at which they were exhibited. In addition, Jones recalls using the NFTS library to access a number of short films made by former students that he used as compositional exercises, noting that:

the scores were written but at best only realized as piano versions. The exercises not only served to develop my compositional ideas about themes and how they could be varied to pertain to scenes in an on-going narrative, but also to developing a writing style and sound for a particular genre and how these themes could be varied in the context of the narrative.

(Jones 2018)

Jones occupied more than the role of composer on several of the projects that he scored for his contemporaries, helping the lighting team, operating the camera and getting involved during both the pre-production and post-production stages. This knowledge of all aspects of film-making would support his later working relationships, equipping him with a shared language and understanding that he has used in discussions with film-makers and production teams across his career. His development of toolkits to enable Alan Parker to make musical decisions about the sound worlds of his films (see Chapter 3), the process of discussing the director’s vision for Notting Hill (see Chapter 5) and Jones’s pivotal relationship with the music editor on Thirteen Days (see Chapter 6) are all cases in point. Films of this early period notable for their musical content include Smile Until I Tell You to Stop (1979) and The Stranger (1980), the scores for both of which include stylistic elements that anticipate his work on later films. Smile Until I Tell You to Stop, for instance, employs sounds including chimes and what is described in the Jones Archive as a ‘synth bong’, while The Stranger combines a string quartet and electronic sounds, a common combination for Jones and one found in his first professional project after film school, The Black Angel.

The Black Angel (1980)

Jones met Roger Christian at the National Film School and would go on to collaborate with him on advertisements and on three films: his directorial debut The Black Angel, the Oscar-winning short film The Dollar Bottom (1981) and The Sender (1982). Christian was best known for his work in the art department for Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and garnered the financial support of George Lucas for The Black Angel, which was planned for exhibition before Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in selected UK cinemas. Jones enjoyed his collaboration with

Table 1.1 Student films scored by Jones at the National Film School

Christian and recalled the creative freedom afforded to him by the director’s open brief for the music on projects:

Roger was very exciting to work with because he allowed me to suggest styles of music, or he left pretty much the kind of stylistic decisions about the score, and in fact where to put music on the film, he left that pretty much to me; it was quite an open brief.

(Jones 2014b)

The Black Angel is the tale of Sir Maddox, a knight who returns from the Crusades to discover that his family have died as a result of disease and his estates have been destroyed. Lost and bereft, he stops by a lake with his horse and accidentally falls in, dragged down by a mysterious current. His death is prevented by the intervention of a young woman (played by Christian’s wife Patricia) who begs Death to allow her to take Sir Maddox’s place. Saved, the knight wishes to repay the woman by saving her from her master, the eponymous black angel. The rest of the film charts his quest to find the black angel and do battle with him. Ultimately, the knight succeeds in freeing the maiden, though he pays for it with his own life.

Jones was provided with a screenplay and a rough cut of the film to aid his composition, and owing to the small scale of the project, he called on friends to participate in the realisation of the orchestral parts. This perhaps explains the slightly idiosyncratic ensemble employed in the film – voices, piccolo/flute, trumpet theorbo/guitar, strings, keyboard and percussion – as outlined on the track sheet in Figure 1.1. Jones was also involved in the post-production phase of the project, contributing to the balancing of the music with the other elements in the sound-scape when the film was dubbed (Jones 2014b).

The Trevor Jones Archive contains audio files from the recording sessions and paperwork relating to the film. There are 48kHz 24-bit recordings, stereo transfers of the final mix, and three two-inch sixteen-track transfer tapes, the contents of which are outlined in Table 1.2.

One of the most interesting aspects these cues is the insight that they provide into the recording process. It is evident that most of those involved are learning about the process while carrying it out, and there are several dialogues between Jones and the musicians about how best to achieve the intended effects with their instruments. This is particularly notable i...