Composer and
Music Director

Frank E. Tours was a musician whose career embraced the distinct, but related worlds of classical and popular music in the early twentieth century. As a music director in London, he brought his training at the Royal College of Music to George Edwardes’ musical comedies with scores by Lionel Monckton, Paul Rubens, and Ivan Caryll. And when he migrated permanently to the United States in 1910, he brought his skill and experience to musicals by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter on Broadway, shows that helped to define an emerging American musical identity in popular music. As a composer, though, he took a different path, one where he remained faithful to his upbringing in a multi-generational musical family and to his education as the student of the finest composition teacher of his generation in England. Though he occasionally wrote the scores for musical comedies early in his career and later for films, Tours was a dedicated and accomplished composer of songs for voice and piano. Throughout his career as a music director, he constantly returned to the genre as an outlet for his creative energies. His songs were widely respected in their day for their craftsmanship and expressive power.