ABSTRACT
This chapter, which draws on research carried out by Sarah Hall in her doctoral thesis on Jones’s television music, breaks down the composer’s narrative television-scoring career into four distinct periods. His ‘Early Career Era’ (1982-5) covers his earliest television scores and his first encounters with telefilms and mini-series, programme types that dominate his televisual output. This is followed by the ‘Telefilm Era’ (1988-93), which overlaps with the period in which he used toolkits in his scores, and then the ‘Hallmark Era’, which is dominated by the two– and three-part mini-series that Jones scored for the company: Gulliver’s Travels (1996), Merlin (1998), Cleopatra (1999) and Dinotopia (2002). The final period, the ‘Recent Career Era’, explores a range of series and mini-series scores in 2002-12, his most recent televisual work to date. This investigation provides a significant opportunity for exploration to explore Jones’s compositional approaches and working practices for television relative to film, as well as affording opportunities to evaluate the relationship between film and television composition more broadly in areas such as narrative construction, musical potential and industrial process.
