SIDNEY JONES

:''Sidney Jones is also the name of the SouthEast Asia programme director of International Crisis Group''
'James Sidney Jones' (17 June 1861 - 29 January 1946), usually credited as 'Sidney Jones', was an English composer, born in Islington, London, most famous for producing the scores for a series of musical comedy hits in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Contents

Life and career

Early career

First composing successes

Daly's Theatre years and later years

Selected works and collaborations

References

External links

Life and career

Early career

Jones' father was Musical Director of the Grand Theatre in Leeds and he gained his first professional experience playing clarionet in his father's band.
In 1886, actress/producer Kate Santley hired Jones as musical director for the tour of her musical ''Vetah''. He then worked for Henry Leslie for nearly four years as conductor of tours of Alfred Cellier's comic opera hit ''Dorothy'' (starring Lucy Carr Shaw, sister to George Bernard Shaw), ''Doris'', and ''The Red Hussar''. He was then music director for a tour of the Gaiety Theatre piece ''Little Jack Sheppard'' under the management of comedian J. J. Dallas. Back in London, he conducted ''In Town'' and ''Morocco Bound'', and became one of the West End's best known conductors. After that, George Edwardes hired him as musical director for the Gaiety Theatre's 1891 tour of America and Australia, conducting the burlesque ''Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué''.

First composing successes

At the same time, he also began to establish himself as a composer. He composed original music for the pantomime ''Aladdin II'' at Leeds (1889). When Edwardes's touring company produced the burlesque ''Cinder-Ellen Up-too-Late'' in Australia, Jones contributed a dance number to Meyer Lutz's score. Jones also composed an operetta, ''Our Family Legend'' (1892), written with Reginald Stockton, and he supplied individual numbers for various musicals, including "Linger Longer, Loo", which became a hit at Edwardes's Gaiety Theatre in the burlesque ''Don Yuan'' (1893).
When journalist Jimmy Davis, writing under the pseudonym Owen Hall, produced a script for ''A Gaiety Girl'' (1893), Edwardes gave Jones the opportunity to write the music, and the result was a show that set the trend for a new era of popular musical theatre. Jones's style owed much to the music of Arthur Sullivan and Cellier, which Jones had conducted for so long, but it was lighter and breezier, appealing to the popular tastes of the time.

Daly's Theatre years and later years

While continuing to provide songs for others' musicals, Jones eventually became house composer and music director for George Edwardes's new Daly's Theatre. After ''A Gaiety Girl'', Jones again combined with Hall and lyricist Harry Greenbank to produce another success, ''An Artist's Model'' (1894), and this, in turn, was followed by three of the most successful musical comedies of the 1890s: ''The Geisha'', ''A Greek Slave'', and ''San Toy''.
Other musicals followed, but Jones' only real successes during this period were ''My Lady Molly'' in 1902 and ''King of Cadonia'' in 1908. Later, back at the light-hearted Gaiety Theatre, with ''The Girl from Utah'' in 1913 and ''The Happy Day'' in 1916 Jones achieved two last modest successes. However, Jones, like his sometime collaborator Lionel Monckton, fell victim to changing musical fashions around the time of World War I and retired from composition.

Selected works and collaborations

★ 1889 ''Aladdin II''

★ 1892 ''Our Family Legend''

★ 1893 ''Don Yuan''

★ 1893 ''A Gaiety Girl''

★ 1894 ''An Artist's Model''

★ 1896 ''The Geisha''

★ 1898 ''A Greek Slave''

★ 1899 ''San Toy''

★ 1902 ''My Lady Molly''

★ 1903 ''The Medal and the Maid''

★ 1906 ''See See''

★ 1908 ''King of Cadonia''

★ 1913 ''The Girl from Utah''

★ 1916 ''The Happy Day''

References

★ Murray, Roderick: "Sidney Jones and Star Blossom" in ''The Gaiety'' Annual (2002), pp. 15-18

★ Biography of Sidney Jones

★ Listing of Jones' musicals with performance info

★ Information about Jones and ''The Geisha''

★ Gänzl, Kurt, "Jones, (James) Sidney (1861–1946)" in ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography' (2004) available here with subscription

External links

★ Edwardian light opera site

★ Listing of English musicals with links