Kerry Nelson Jones (CHS ’77)

Kerry Jones has long been interested in music and mathematics – at Rice (B.A.1982, B.Mus/M.Mus. 1982, M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1990) he earned degrees in both. Musically, he studied composition with George Burt, Paul Cooper, Arthur Gottschalk, Arne Mellnäs, Ellsworth Milburn, and Robert X. Rodriguez, as well as tuba performance with Warren Deck. His early works won several state and national awards, including a 1986 ASCAP Foundation Young Composer grant for his second string quartet, Episodes III; he continued to be active as an amateur performer, conductor and composer throughout the next couple of decades, serving also as a music minister for 20 years.

His academic activities, however, were mostly mathematical in nature until he retired in 2009 as Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Since then, he and his wife, Charlotte, have moved to rural Texas, near Fort Worth, where he is able to devote a bit more time to composition (sandwiched between maintaining the fences on the ranch and continuing his commercial software development activities with Pocket Soft, a Houston-based company with which he has been associated since 1979).

Dr. Jones began his composition career as a student at Cleburne High School where Richard Helmcamp, first band director of the Golden Pride of Cleburne High, was instrumental in featuring Jones’ arrangements and original compositions at half-time on the football field, as well as on the concert stage.