Percy Scholes
Percy Alfred Scholes (pronounced skolz)
Career
He was born in
At various times Scholes was music critic for the Evening Standard (1913-1920), The Observer (1920–1925) (immediately following Ernest Newman's departure) and the Radio Times (1923–1929). From 1923 up until 1928 (when he departed for Switzerland) he was making regular music appreciation broadcasts on BBC radio.[4][5]
He was made an Officer of the Star of Rumania in 1930 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in 1938.[1] He was founder and general secretary of the Anglo-American Conference on Musical Education, Lausanne (1929 and 1931). Scholes and his wife came back to the UK in 1940, but with his health in decline they returned to Switzerland at the end of 1956. He ended his days in Cornaux, Chamby sur Montreux.[2][6]
Work
Scholes wrote over 30 books, mainly concerning music appreciation. His best-known work is The Oxford Companion to Music, which was first published in 1938.
He was also the author of Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations (1934).[10] [11] In 1947 he produced the two volume, 960 page The Mirror of Music, compiling, enlarging and commenting on material published in The Musical Times between 1844 and 1944.[3]
Scholes was deeply concerned with connecting music with a wider audience through musical appreciation in the tradition of
Style and temperament
"Nothing he put out was ever "ghosted"; all bore the individual stamp of the salty P.A.S style." wrote W.R Anderson in 1958.[13] In his writing for this work, and elsewhere, Scholes never believed in holding back his personal views in favour of a neutral point of view. He is credited with the description of harpsichord music as sounding like "a toasting fork on a birdcage"; when describing Handel and Bach, he said that "Handel was the more elegant composer, but Bach was the more thorough".
Scholes led the public denunciations of Arthur Eaglefield Hull when his book Music: Classical, Romantic and Modern (1927) was found to include material borrowed from other writers. How much of this was plagiarism and how much a mere careless, hasty failure to cite sources is not known, but the scandal left Hull very upset. He took his own life by throwing himself under a train at Huddersfield station on 4 November, 1928.[14][15] Scholes also made enemies amongst The Sackbut group which included Philip Heseltine and Ursula Greville. Scholes' criticism of Hubert Foss' Song-cycle on Poems of Thomas Hardy infuriated Heseltine, who sent Scholes abusive letters, took to telephoning him late at night, and circulated a petition seeking his sacking from the Observer. Scholes sought legal advice on this matter but took no action.[1] Reviews of Christian Darnton's You and Music (1940) were generally positive until Scholes catalogued so many serious and obvious errors (such as “Binary form may be represented by A.B.A.”) that he presented the work as an elaborate joke to trap unwary reviewers.[16]
In The Oxford Companion to Music some composers (Berg, Schönberg and Webern, for example) were described in somewhat unsympathetic and dismissive terms. His article on Jazz states that "jazz is to serious music as daily journalism is to serious writing"; similarly, his article on the composer John Henry Maunder states that Maunder's "seemingly inexhaustible cantatas, Penitence, Pardon and Peace and From Olivet to Calvary, long enjoyed popularity, and still aid the devotions of undemanding congregations in less sophisticated areas."
Death and legacy
Scholes died in 1958, aged eighty-one, in
His former assistant John Owen Ward revised the Tenth Edition of the Companion in 1970. Ward considered it "inappropriate to change radically the characteristic rich anecdotal quality of Dr. Scholes' style." and left much of Scholes' distinctive work intact.[18] In 1983 Oxford University Press produced The New Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Denis Arnold, which consciously tried to overcome some of the perceived deficiencies of the Scholes' work. This included taking a more eclectic line on music to be included, and resulted in a two-volume work of some 2000 pages. The 2002 edition, edited by Alison Latham, reverted to the original title, and single-volume format.
Publications
- Candidates Self Examiner in Scales, etc. (1907)
- The Music Student (ed). (1908 – 1921, later renamed The Music Teacher)
- Introduction to French Music (1917)
- Everyman and his Music (1917)
- An Introduction to British Music (1918)
- Listener’s Guide to Music (1919)
- Musical Appreciation in Schools (1920)
- Learning to Listen by Means of the Gramophone (1921)
- New works by modern British composers, Carnegie UK Trust (Series 1 and 2, 1921, 1924)
- Beginner’s Guide to Harmony (1922)
- The Book of the Great Musicians (1923)
- The First Book of the Gramophone Record (1924)
- The Appreciation of Music by Means of the Pianola and Duo-Art (1925)
- Everybody’s Guide to Broadcast Music (1925)
- Miniature History of Music (1928)
- Columbia History of Music Through Ear and Eye (1930, in five parts)
- Miniature History of Opera (1931)
- Some Aesthetic and Everyday Reflections on the Vegetarian System of Diet (1931)
- Practical Lesson Plans in Musical Appreciation by Means of the Gramophone (1933)
- Puritans and Music (1934)
- Music: the Child and the Masterpiece (1935)
- Radio Times Music Handbook (1935)
- Oxford Companion to Music (1938)
- God Save the King! Its History and Romance (1942)
- The Mirror of Music (1947)
- The Great Doctor Burney (1948)
- Why I am a Vegetarian (1948)
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (1952)
- The Life and Adventures of Sir John Hawkins (1953)
- Oxford Junior Companion to Music (1954)
- God Save the Queen! The History and Romance of the World's First National Anthem (1954)
References
- ^ a b c d e Prictor, Megan J. (2000). Music and the ordinary listener: music appreciation and the media in England, 1918-1939. PhD thesis, Faculty of Music, The University of Melbourne.
- ^ a b John Owen Ward. 'Scholes, Percy A(lfred)' in Grove Music Online (2001)
- ^ a b Shenton, Kenneth. Everyman and His Music: Percy Scholes (1877-1958) (2008)
- ^ Prictor, Megan. 'To Catch the World: Percy Scholes and the English Musical Association Movement, 1918-1939', in Context 15 and 16 (1998)
- ^ Radio Times, Issue 3, 30 September 1923, p. 15
- ^ Obituary, New York Times, 3 August 1958
- ^ Percy A. Scholes. The Oxford Companion to Music, First Edition (1938) and Seventh Edition (1947), Oxford University Press
- ^ Dibble, Jeremy, and Horton, Julian (eds.). British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought - 1850-1950 (2018), p, 4
- ^ Ward, J.O. Scholes, Percy Alfred (1877-1958) in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
- ISBN 978-1-376-20676-0.
- ^ Percy A. Scholes (1962). The Puritans And Music In England And New England. Universal Digital Library. Russell & Russell.
- ^ 'Percy Scholes: Pioneer of Musical Appreciation', in The Times, 2 August, 1957, p. 10
- ^ Musical Times No 1387, September 1958, p 501
- ^ Sibley Music Library: Arthur Eaglefield Hull
- ^ Scholes, Percy. "The Ethics of Borrowing", Musical Times, No 1019, 1 January 1928, p 59
- ^ Scholes, Percy A. "Our Humourless Reviewers", Musical Times No 1179, May 1941, p 176-177
- ^ Library and Archives Canada
- ^ John Owen Ward. Preface to the Tenth Edition (1969)