I finally decided to try to be creative with my YouTube video “thumbnails” — the image that appears wherever a video is displayed or linked, before the user clicks “play.” Besides providing a bit of color, the display makes sure that anyone viewing the video directly on YouTube sees my website’s URL, since it’s here on JeffreyLJonesMusic.com that the action is! By default, the YouTube videos leverage the first “page” of the score, a detailed bit of black-and-white notes that’s desperately boring, and not particularly informative. Below, I’ve included examples of the new thumbnails. Click on each to see larger versions, to see details.
Each description has links to the compositions’ various project pages. You should go have a listen!
My very first composition — my string quartet — got the simplest treatment, the graphic I’ve been using to brand my “career” as a composer, chronicled here.
My software exports of individual movements from “20-20…” now have an abstract image created from an original picture my son Brice Jones shot. This image appears on the cover of the score…
…that was used in the live performance of the work by the Lexington Chamber Choral. The picture used at left was also taken by Brice, immediately at the completion of the performance. This video, of course, is NOT a software export!
My short composition for children’s choir (written for a competition) uses a completely fictitious picture generated by Bing’s AI image creator. I had a bit of fun with that!
I took this pic for my tone poem for chamber orchestra. A black-and-white version of it is on the cover page of the orchestral score. I had originally intended to assemble a bunch of images and videos into a visual/artistic illustration of the tone poem’s topic. I may still!
My composition for brass quintet got some images of various brass instruments “stolen” from copyright-free sources. I created separate ones for the individual variation exports.
My latest composition, the dance suite (still unfinished, I’m afraid), got a treatment courtesy of several Bing AI-generated images — the larger “branding” the whole work. The others represent each of the different dances.
Jeffrey L. Jones, Composer 