Dan Jones (composer)

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Dan Jones is a British composer and sound designer working in film and theatre. He read music at the University of Oxford, studied contemporary music theatre at the Banff Centre for the Arts and studied electro-acoustic composition and programming at the Centro Ricerche Musicali in Rome. Having explored various means of generating music algorithmically, he is the author of one of the earliest pieces of software for generating fractal or self-similar music. [1] He has won BAFTA and Ivor Novello Awards. He composed the score for the Peabody Award-winning documentary film Bobi Wine: The People's President. [2]

Contents

Career

His scores for feature films include Shadow of the Vampire (starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe), In Transit (also starring John Malkovich), Jericho Mansions (starring James Caan) and Menno Meyjes' Max (starring John Cusack), for which he received the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Score 2004. He also scored Meyjes' follow up film Manolete (starring Adrien Brody and Penélope Cruz).

He has written for all the major British television broadcasters and his work includes Sir David Attenborough's The Life of Mammals , the BBC series Strange , Pawel Pawlikowski's drama "Twockers", Charlie Brooker's Channel 4 horror series "Dead Set" and Francesca Joseph's "Tomorrow La Scala", Channel 4's three-part documentary " Visions of Heaven and Hell" shown in 1994. He collaborated with Sebastião Salgado, John Berger and Paul Carlin on the BBC Arena (television) special "The Spectre of Hope". He recently composed the music for the BAFTA Best Drama Serial Any Human Heart for Channel 4 which also won both BAFTA and Ivor Novello Best Television Score Awards. More recently, he composed the music for ITV's controversial Fred West drama, 'Appropriate Adult'.

In 1997 he teamed up with British trip hop group Alpha producing orchestral arrangements for their albums ComeFromHeaven , The Impossible Thrill and Jarvis Cocker's cover of "This is Where I Came In" for Massive Attack's Melankolic label.

He has also created music and soundscapes for large scale public artworks. He is the co-creator, with artist Luke Jerram, of Sky Orchestra where music is played from seven hot air balloons positioned over a city, making it one of the largest sound works in the world. After an initial informal performance in Bristol in 2003, Sky Orchestra was first successfully staged in Birmingham commissioned by Fierce! and was later re-commissioned by Fierce and the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the Complete Works Festival. Sky Orchestra opened the Sydney Festival in 2007 and has also toured to Canada and Switzerland. [3] He also produced the sound design for "Listening Posts, an art work by Daphne Wright to commemorate the Irish emigrants who left Cork's harbourside which produces an ever changing sound score throughout the year. [4] His most recent work is Suburban Counterpoint subtitled "Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans" which was co-commissioned by London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), Norfolk and Norwich Festival and The Sydney Festival. In an idea dating back to 2000 the work, as the title suggests, uses seven ice cream vans to produce a surround sound score which inhabits an entire neighbourhood at once. [5] [6]

Other works include the score for the Rambert Dance Company's "Slippage" by choreographer William Tuckett. His music has been used by The European Space Agency and incorporated into Isaac Julien's Paradise Omeros which is exhibited at Tate Modern, London.

He is founding member and co-artistic director of Sound and Fury Theatre Company whose productions pioneer the immersive use of experimental sound design. He co-directed and sound designed the theatre production Kursk which toured the UK after a sellout run at the Young Vic theatre in London. [7] [8] [9] It was also performed at the Drill Hall in Edinburgh in 2009 at the festival [10] and at the Sydney Opera House in 2011.

He was the first ever recipient of a special jury prize for sound design at the Prague Quadrennial for his work on Sound and Fury's production of Kursk alongside fellow sound designer Kathrine Sandys for her piece Hush.

In 2019 he was commissioned to create a work for the PRS New Music Biennial for which he adapted Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans which played outside on the Southbank Centre and toured to Hull [11]

His musical work is published by Faber Music

Awards and nominations

Discography

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References

  1. ↑ Dan Jones Official Resso - List of songs and albums by Dan Jones | Resso , retrieved 17 August 2022
  2. ↑ https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/bobi-wine/
  3. ↑ "Sky Orchestra". The Sydney Morning Herald. 18 December 2006.
  4. ↑ "Archived News 2007 > News >". CorkCity.ie. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012. Retrieved 26 February 2012.
  5. ↑ Eddie Mair (21 May 2010). "PM: Music for Ice Cream Vans". BBC. Retrieved 26 February 2012.
  6. ↑ "LIFT – Plunge". Liftfestival.com. Archived from the original on 10 November 2010. Retrieved 26 February 2012.
  7. ↑ Mountford, Fiona (30 March 2010). "Kursk is unmissable". London Evening Standard . Archived from the original on 9 April 2010. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
  8. ↑ Marlowe, Sam (31 March 2010). "Kursk at the Young Vic, SE1". The Times . London. Archived from the original on 15 June 2011. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
  9. ↑ Gardner, Lyn (31 March 2010). "Kursk". The Guardian . London. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
  10. ↑ Innes, Kirstin (12 August 2009). "Kursk – Submarine Drama". The List . Retrieved 28 April 2015.
  11. ↑ "Composers and Commissions 2019". PRS Foundation New Music Biennial. London. 1 March 2019. Retrieved 23 November 2024.
  12. ↑ Creamer, Jon (22 November 2024). "BBC Tops Grierson Nods with 16". Televisual. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
  13. ↑ Taylor, Mark (15 October 2024). "Nominations for The Ivors Classical Awards 2024 announced". The Ivors Academy. Retrieved 15 October 2024.
  14. ↑ Brown, Anna (12 November 2024). "The Ivors Classical Awards 2024 winners announced". The Ivors Academy. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  15. ↑ "Winners announced at The Ivors Classical Awards 2024". www.classical-music.com. Retrieved 13 November 2024.
  16. ↑ "Dan Jones: Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans". nmc-recordings. 20 September 2019. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
  17. ↑ "New Music Biennial 2019". nmc-recordings. 20 September 2019. Retrieved 22 November 2024.
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