Kenneth V Jones, film composer, organist, orchestra founder and choir director – obituary
He drove a diesel engine in Canterbury Cathedral and was once playing a crematorium organ when the corpse sat bolt upright
Kenneth V Jones conducting Wimbledon Symphony Orchestra
Credit: family
Kenneth V Jones, who has died aged 96, was a prolific film composer whose lush orchestral scores can be heard on dozens of movies including How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957), Oscar Wilde (1960) and The Projected Man (1966).
He helped Ava Gardner to look plausible as a pianist in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and stepped in at the last minute to write the score for the Alec Guinness showcase based on the Joyce Cary novel, The Horse’s Mouth (1958), which includes an adaptation of Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite.
The Blue Danube
No other piece of music better illustrates the ‘flop to hit’ reversal than Johann Strauss II’s By the Beautiful Blue Danube. Here’s a waltz everybody knows, but the audience at its premiere did not entirely go with the flow. The work was intended to boost Viennese morale after Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in the Seven Weeks’ War. And so it might have, had ‘humorous’ lyrics intended to make light of Austria’s problems not then been added. The first-night crowd hated them and the piece received just one encore making it, in Strauss’s terms, a disaster.