Ford was born in
Warminster, Wiltshire, England, the son of Edward Ford, the vestry clerk and organist there. From 1868 to 1873, he sang in the chorus at
Salisbury Cathedral. He studied under
Arthur Sullivan at the
Royal Academy of Music in London, where, in 1875, he received the first Goss Scholarship. Ford studied in Paris under
Édouard Lalo and also toured America. There, his motet, a setting of the Psalm
Domine Deus, was performed at a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of
Harvard University. During the 1880s, Ford was the official accompanist at the Saturday
Popular Concerts at St James's Hall, London. He also wrote a number of operas and operettas in the 1880s and early 1890s, including ''Daniel O' Rourke
(1884); Nydia
(a duologue by Justin H. M. Carthy, 1889); Joan
(Robert Martin, 1890); and Weatherwise'' (1893). Ford became the assistant musical director for the
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at the
Savoy Theatre in 1888, serving in this position for five years. In 1891, Ford and
François Cellier conducted Sullivan's
grand opera,
Ivanhoe, which opened
Richard D'Oyly Carte's
Royal English Opera House. Ford also arranged the piano score for
Ivanhoe. While serving as music director at the Savoy, Ford wrote the music for the one-act operetta
Mr. Jericho, first performed there in March 1893 as a curtain-raiser for Sullivan's
Haddon Hall. The piece has a libretto by
Harry Greenbank. In May of the same year, Ford supplied the music for the full-length
J. M. Barrie and
Arthur Conan Doyle comic opera,
Jane Annie, a flop that nevertheless toured until September of that year. Later, Ford became musical director of the
Trafalgar Theatre in London. There, he revised and rewrote the music for the comic opera
The Wedding Eve. He also composed much of the music for ballets produced at the
Empire Theatre between 1894 and 1897, including
La Frolique, Brighton Pier, Faust and
La Danse. He became conductor of the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society in 1897. Ford also composed a volume of settings of poems by
Percy Bysshe Shelley, many other songs and chamber music, an
Elegy for violin and orchestra and a cantata,
The Eve of the Festa. and beginning in 1916 he taught composition there. As a writer, he published
A Short History of Music in England (1912). In 1903 he contributed a chapter to H. Saxe Wyndham's biography of Sullivan, entitled "Sullivan as Composer." They had two daughters, Frances Lily Helen Dixon Ford (1897–1957) and Eileen Carlota Ford (born 1899). ==See also==