Everyman
and His Music
Percy
Scholes
(1877-1958)
View
Elgar Letters
Sir
Edward Elgar writing to the eminent
scholar and musicologist. Dr Percy
Scholes. This letter, together with
others from the Musician-Laureate
as Scholes affectionately labelled
him, forms a small, but significant
part of a vast and unique archive.
One that offers fitting testimony
to the life and achievements of a
musician who, for over fifty years,
was a dominant and highly influential
force in British music.
Percy Alfred Scholes
was born at Headingley, Leeds on 24th
July, 1877, the third son of commercial
agent, Thomas Scholes and his wife,
Katherine. Largely self-taught, his
early life severely blighted by chronic
bronchitis, Scholes was educated at
home by private tutors. After some
years as Assistant Librarian at Yorkshire
College (later the University of Leeds),
he then taught music at Kent College
before moving to Kingswood College,
Grahamstown, South Africa.
Returning home to
Leeds in 1905, Scholes initially joined
the city’s School of Music, working
during the winter months as an
Extension Lecturer for the University
of Manchester. Here, amid a typically
no-nonsense approach, he became noted
for his successful specialization,
the educational advancement of the
non-specialist listener. Much in need
of summer employment, in 1907, he
approached the Co-operative Holiday
Association and was sent to lecture
on musical appreciation at Abbey House,
spectacularly based, three hundred
steps up the cliffs at Whitby, North
Yorkshire.
At the end of that
particular summer, there was a general
wish for such activity to continue
throughout the year. Scholes, enthusiastic
as always then sought help and advice
from three old friends, fellow Leeds
musicians – Herbert Fricker, the distinguished
City Organist, Dr. (later Sir) Edward
Bairstow, famed Organist of Leeds
Parish Church and Thomas Hoggett,
a specialist church conductor and
a member of the university music department.
Together, they agreed to form an association
of localised music circles – monthly
meetings of like-minded enthusiasts,
all embraced by a national support
organisation entitled, The Home Study
Union. An advertisement
was duly placed in The Musical
Times and a cyclostyled sheet
of suggestions for future projects
then sent out to all interested parties.
Typically innovative, Scholes had
also persuaded the publishers of C.
H. Parry’s Studies of Great Composers
to supply each new recruit with a
special discounted copy, priced very
generously at only one shilling.
While membership
was to all intents and purposes free,
a sole condition of joining entailed
a subscription of four shillings a
year to cover the cost of the Union’s
monthly journal. Originally merely
a single typewritten sheet, in November
1908, with a new title, The Music
Student, it was now considerably
expanded into magazine form. Soon,
under the editorship of Scholes, the
periodical began to attract writers
of the calibre of Percy Buck, Rutland
Boughton, Ernest Bullock, H. C. Colles,
Ernest Walker and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Most generously Walter Willson Cobbett
personally subsidised a chamber music
supplement, which would alternate
with a special feature for school
orchestral players. From 1,000 copies
in 1910, within a few years the magazine’s
circulation had shot up to 5,000 per
month. Likewise its advertising revenue
had risen from 10 column inches in
1910 to almost 60 column inches by
the outbreak of the Great War.
A further exciting
innovation available only to members,
was the annual holiday course held
each summer at assorted venues throughout
the United Kingdom. These ranged from
the Derbyshire Dales, to Bideford
in Devon and perhaps the most popular,
The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland
Always over-subscribed, all in fees
for such courses, including living,
lodging and learning worked out at
the group rate of 50 shillings for
ten people.
1908 was to prove
a particularly propitious one for
Scholes. On a purely personal level,
he married Dora Wingate, a talented
pianist, whose many musical accomplishments
so perfectly complemented and supported
his. Academically also, he was now
the proud owner of a B.mus degree
from the University of Oxford. Further
dramatic advancement followed when,
in July, in the highly distinguished
company of Stewart Macpherson and
Ernest Read, Scholes instantly moved
from provincial populiser to national
standing, as he helped inaugurate
the Music Teachers’ Association.
In 1912, somewhat
apprehensively, Scholes and his wife
moved south to London. Here, in addition
to running the rapidly expanding Music
Student magazine, he also became
Assistant Music Critic of a second
publication, The Queen. Between
1913 and 1920, moving inexorably upward,
he served as Music Critic of The
Evening Standard, supplementing
his still meagre income with work
as an Extension Lecturer for the Universities
of Oxford, London and Cambridge. International
recognition followed in 1914, with
the first of many lecture tours to
America.
When war broke out,
though deemed unfit for military service,
nevertheless Scholes served in France
as Organising Secretary of the Music
for Troops Section of the Y.M.C.A.
Formed "to develop musical
activities in YMCA huts and centres
throughout the field of war, amongst
the training camps and hospitals in
this country, and internment camps
in neutral enemy countries,"
Scholes had put out an appeal
in the magazine, The Musical Standard,
for help and support from fellow musicians
who were either over age or unfit
for military service. Among those
whom the organisation initially rejected,
fearing that he might be regarded
as of German origin, was a certain
Gustav von Holst. It was in fact Scholes
who, to break the somewhat embarrassing
impasse, tactfully suggested to the
composer that, in the circumstances,
it may be in his best interest to
drop the ‘von’ from his name. Thus,
after much consideration, on 18th
September 1918, Holst decided to change
his name by deed poll to Gustav Theodore
Holst.
On finding thousands
of troops without music, Scholes,
in his somewhat brusque no-nonsense
manner, duly organised
a very successful mouth organ appeal.
A shilling donation secured a simple
harmonica, of which 25,000 were sent
to serving forces together with almost
a quarter of a million invaluable
pieces of sheet music. He also successfully
persuaded many distinguished musicians
to donate instruments to the troops.
Elgar was one who led by example with
the gift of his trombone.
Purchased by Evans
Brothers in 1916, The Music Student
had, by then, also been adopted by
the Music Teachers’ Association. Having
successfully overseen its early development,
in 1920, after twelve years in the
editorial chair, Scholes left the
magazine to succeed Ernest Newman
as Music Critic of The Observer.
A year later The Music Student
re-emerged as Music Teacher, its
title new, but its basic precepts
tried and tested. Happily still very
much with us, though times may be
different, it remains an invaluable
old friend, always eager to dispense
help and advice when and where required.
Not everyone, however,
proved to be a fan of Scholes’s critical
powers. Philip Heseltine alias
Peter Warlock, for one, regularly
rebelled, initially incensed by what
he felt to be some of Scholes’s highly
uninformed comments on the music of
Franz Liszt. Never one to hold back,
particularly against anyone he felt
to be a member of the London’s musical
establishment, Heseltine, in February
1925, publicly labelled Scholes as,
‘an impudent charlatan obtaining
money by false pretences by posing
as an authority on a subject of which
he was grossly ignorant’. Privately
he was less inhibited, describing
Scholes as ‘a stinking bag of putrescent
tripe’.
A few months later
in Heseltine’s view, Scholes erred
once again. His less than flattering
review of a Wigmore Hall concert unfortunately
re-ignited the controversy. The event,
at the Wigmore Hall, organised at
his own expense by Ernest Moeran,
featured music by Moeran, Hugo Anson,
John Ireland and Herbert Foss. Heseltine
took particular exception to Scholes’s
critique of a Foss song-cycle.
June 14th1925
Eynsford
Kent
Dear Mr. Scholes
Please forgive
me for detaining you yesterday
when your bladder was evidently
full and overfull: one should
have had more consideration so
soon after closing time.
Once again,
in your notice of Moeran’s concert
in to-day’s ‘Observer’, you have
given a conspicuous example of
your incompetence and dishonesty
as a critic. If you had said that
Foss ‘has still to find a harmonic
idiom that means anything’ to
yourself, you would have been
within your rights, but you have
no right to saddle Foss with your
own utter insensitiveness to any
but the most elementary kind of
diatonic harmony by suggesting
that his own music means nothing
to him–in other words that he
has deliberately written, rehearsed
and performed pages of absolute
nonsense; and your statement that
he ‘introduces long pauses in
the singer’s part regardless of
the sense of the words’ is a direct
lie.
Foss
as a composer is nothing if not
strictly self-critical, and as
a musical critic he has solid
qualifications of musical achievement
to qualify him for being one-which
is more than can be said for you
and most of your journalistic
confrères; and the spectacle
of you and your pedantic like
doing your utmost to thwart the
efforts of composers and concert-givers
who are doing their best to advance
the cause of serious music in
this country is becoming more
and more disgusting.
Instead
of appreciating the initiative
of a young and by no means wealthy
musician who gives a series of
concerts of new and unfamiliar
music, you can only complain that
they are given on a Saturday afternoon
when you would like to be playing
tennis instead of earning your
ill-gotten living.
Permit
me to suggest that, abandoning
the pretence that you are in any
way qualified to pass judgement
on music you would be much better
employed in playing tennis than
reporting concerts at any time,
and that you would be still better
employed in buggering yourself
with a pair of exceptionally
well-greased bellows
Yours Faithfully
Philip Heseltine.
Perhaps not unreasonably,
Scholes, somewhat disconcerted by
this further outspoken attack on his
integrity, let it be known that he
was now considering legal action.
Undeterred Heseltine responded in
kind once again:
June 20th
1925
Eynsford
Kent
Dear Mr. Scholes
I hear you have
been talking of having your revenge
on me for accusing you of ‘incompetence
and dishonesty’ by having the
law on me on account of my last
letter. Very well: do so. And
let me tell you this:-I have no
illusions about the value of my
contribution to music as a composer-that
will be forgotten, possibly before
I am. But there is one thing I
am out to do and that is to purge
musical criticism of reporters
who have no qualification whatever
for being such.
You are
a dirty little place-hunting cur,
and if you didn’t wear spectacles
I would tell you so in actions
rather than words, the next time
I set eyes on your exceedingly
unprepossessing face.
Yours Faithfully
Philip Heseltine
Never one to rest
on his laurels, Heseltine then took
special delight in organising a very
public petition, its sole objective
to secure Scholes’s immediate dismissal
from The Observer. Unbeknown
to most people, he also bombarded
his foe with an incessant flow of
obscene postcards, usually containing
highly scurrilous limericks in which
Scholes was both crudely and cruelly
lampooned. More serious and disturbing
was the constant stream of drunken
phone calls both he and his wife would
receive at all hours of the day or
night.
Amid the vilification,
Scholes never lost his sense of perspective.
When asked later why he had not pursued
the matter more rigorously, he quietly
replied, ‘I did not want
to send a genius to gaol’. It
was a view he felt was entirely vindicated,
when, somewhat ironically, he was
unknowingly asked by the Trustees
of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust
to write the initial analysis and
appreciation of the composer’s masterly
song-cycle, The Curlew
Happily, after almost
twelve months since the problem first
began, The Curlew allowed a
discreet veil to be drawn over what
had been a very unsavoury episode.
Seemingly chastened, Warlock as he
now signed himself, sent Scholes a
most ingratiating letter in response
to the analysis. As always he tended
to have the final word:
June 12th
1926
Eynsford
Kent
Dear Mr. Scholes
While sending you
an announcement of yet another performance
of ‘The Curlew’, I feel I must write
a few words to thank you for the extraordinarily
helpful and illuminating commentary
which you wrote about this work on
the occasion of its recent performance
at the Newcastle broadcasting studio.
I remember, with profound gratitude,
how much trouble you took, when the
work was first published, in studying
the score and writing the official
account of it for the Carnegie Trustees’
pamphlet, and I must confess that
I felt extremely flattered when I
saw that you had been kind enough
to write yet another article about
this little composition of mine-and
such an article! When I read it, I
began to think that I had never yet
completely understood the significance
of my own work myself.
Yours devotedly,
Peter Warlock
During his time at
The Observer, Scholes became
an early and enthusiastic champion
of broadcasting, the gramophone and
the player piano. One of the first
journalists to print reviews of gramophone
records, he also became a popular
broadcaster, his weekly impromptu
radio talks, like his journalism,
seamlessly blending enjoyment with
enlightenment. From 1926 until 1928,
he was Music Editor of Radio Times.
In this influential role as an intimate
of Sir John Reith, Director General
of the BBC, he proved an important
conduit helping secure the future
of the Promenade Concerts when, for
a time, their future seemed rather
uncertain.
While many in the
appreciation movement, particularly
Read and Macpherson, were initially
sceptical of the use of both radio
and the gramophone within an educational
context, not so Scholes. In an instant
he had realised what exciting possibilities
the mechanical reproduction of music
would mean for the future of mass
education. Never slow to grasp the
nettle, somewhat single-mindedly he
led the way with a number of new and
innovative projects, not least, The
Columbia History of Music Through
Eye and Ear. This huge undertaking
of some forty 78s, rather in the style
of the BBC Third Programme, in cleverly
matching its text to specifically
prepared recordings, proved an early
forerunner of the talking book.
As Scholes’s reputation
expanded and advanced, so did his
sphere of influence. Thus in 1928,
he and his wife moved to Switzerland
with a lucrative contract to provide
pianola rolls for the Aeolian Company.
When the pianola movement collapsed
in 1929 as a result of the Wall Street
Crash, a generous settlement allowed
him to focus on a more long-term project
that would eventually establish his
worldwide reputation, The Oxford
Companion To Music, published
in 1938.
This huge, single
volume compendium of almost 2,000
pages, typically lucid, methodical
and scholarly in approach was undoubtedly
the product of a remarkable card-index
mind and, like most of Scholes’s considerable
output, aimed specifically at enlightening
the general listener. Apart from the
article on tonic sol-fa by William
McNaught and the plots of the operas,
contributed by W. R. Anderson, everything
else among the million or so words,
bears testimony to the indefatigable
industry and skill of Scholes himself.
It was he who also cleverly built
on its initial success, keeping the
franchise fresh with regular revised
reprints. Continued after his death
by his former assistant, John Owen
Ward, in 1983, Dennis Arnold, took
the opportunity to incorporate much
welcome new research into a completely
updated and enhanced two volume edition,
now suitably entitled, The New
Oxford Companion To Music.
In 1940, just before
the fall of France, Scholes and his
wife providentially returned to Britain.
Initially settling at Aberystwyth,
the wartime home of the British Museum
Print Room, here, courtesy of the
generosity of Oxford University Press,
he had unfettered access to microfilm
anything and everything that he thought
might be of future use to him. From
this resulted The Mirror Of Music
1844-1944, a most comprehensive
record of a century of British musical
life as seen through the eyes of that
most august journal, The Musical
Times. Further scholarly works
followed in quick succession, notably
The Puritans And Music, The Life
of Dr. Burney and an exhaustive
study of the national anthem, God
Save The King! Its History and Romance.
Settling for a time
in Oxford, Scholes was elected a member
of the newly created Faculty of Music.
In later years, leading a somewhat
nomadic existence, he fought a constant
battle against the complications brought
on by his lifelong bronchial condition.
Thankfully this proved but little
bar to his industry or creativity,
his card-index mind now fully focused
on further lexicographical labours.
The result was The Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Music, followed
two years later by his final work,
appropriately for young people, The
Oxford Junior Companion To Music.
In a letter to Gerald
Abraham in 1948, Scholes wrote, ‘You,
Eric Blom and I are labouring ants,
rushing hither and thither and piling
ever higher our ant hills of paper’.
Undoubtedly Scholes lived up to the
example of his most industrious role
model as evidenced by the contents
of his most expansive library. Here
4,000 or so specially constructed
boxes and files contained his unique
collection of cuttings culled from
newspapers, journals, concert programmes,
research notes, broadcast scripts,
reviews, pamphlets, programmes and
periodicals. Meticulously catalogued,
undoubtedly Scholes, his assistants
and, not least, his wife, Dora, must
have spent many hours individually
indexing all relevant literature.
Equally well organised
were 2,500 picture files, 3,000 books,
sets of collected works, 450 scholarly
editions, 30 runs of periodicals and,
not least, the real treasure trove,
letters from readers, colleagues and
fellow musicians. These include many
major figures from the first half
of the twentieth century, Arnold Bax,
Arthur Bliss, Rutland Boughton, Arnold
Dolmetsch, John Ireland, Edmund Rubbra,
Ralph Vaughan Williams and, as we
have seen, Edward Elgar and Philip
Heseltine. In addition, while the
emphasis is undoubtedly on the 19th
and 20th century British
composers, the collection also holds
some fascinating material on Russian
composers, most notably Scriabin.
Towards the end of
1956, Scholes, now in increasingly
poor health and wishing to return
to Switzerland, decided the time was
right to dispose of this vast archive,
the legacy of a lifetime of earnest
endeavour. Save for his research material
on Dr. Charles Burney, deposited in
the James Osbourne Collection of the
Beinecke Library, Yale University,
it was decided to sell his huge collection
as a whole. Buyers were initially
sought to keep it complete and in
the United Kingdom, but disappointingly
perhaps, no institution expressed
an interest. Eventually, through the
auspices of friend and fellow musicologist,
Dennis Stevens, the entire collection
was eagerly snapped up by the newly
formed National Library of Canada
in Ottawa, Ontario. For the removal
men, the library represented the biggest
cargo they had ever transported.
Professionally, to
many musicians, Scholes’s rather straightforward
Yorkshire approach was often controversial,
and even on occasion, divisive. The
Founder and General Secretary of the
Anglo-American Musical Education Conferences
held in Lausanne in 1929 and repeated
two years later, in 1930, he was elected
an Officer of the Star of Rumania.
An Honorary Fellow and Trustee of
his old college, St. Edmund Hall,
Oxford, Scholes was also President
of both the Society of Recorder Players
and the Welsh Folksong Society. In
1957, in recognition of his services
to music, somewhat belatedly, he was
awarded an O.B.E.
Privately, among
a wide circle of friends, he was hugely
admired, a man of warm humanitarian
means and a most patriotic liberal.
Patron of The League Against Cruel
Sports and a Vice President of The
Vegetarian Society, as ever fully
committed to the cause, here he delivered
the 1931 Arnold F. Hills Memorial
Lecture. His talk, Some Aesthetic
And Everyday Reflections On
The Vegetarian System Of Diet,
later published, added yet another
distinctive essay to an already distinguished
list.
Teacher, populiser,
journalist, educationalist, lexicographer,
critic and scholar, amid an unceasing
quest to help all enjoy music from
the cradle to the grave, Percy Scholes
died a week after his 81st
birthday, on 31st July
1958. As Music Teacher, the
magazine he excitedly launched in
November 1908, celebrates its centenary,
take a moment to spare a thought for
its founder. Without any special advantages,
he created one of the most active
and successful careers known to musicians.
While undoubtedly his works of scholarship
provide more than a fitting monument
to his memory, his great love of learning
never led him to ignore the everyday
needs of the ordinary listener. Few
would surely disagree that he more
than deserved the epitaph he so fervently
desired, ‘The common people heard
him gladly’.
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List of Selected Publications
by Scholes
|
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1907
|
Candidates Self Examiner
in Scales, etc.
|
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1908
|
The Music Student (editor).
Later renamed The Music Teacher
|
|
1917
|
Introduction to French Music
|
|
1917
|
Everyman and his Music
|
|
1918
|
An Introduction to British
Music
|
|
1919
|
Listener’s Guide to Music
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1920
|
Musical Appreciation in Schools
|
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1921
|
Learning to Listen by Means
of the Gramophone
|
|
1922
|
Beginner’s Guide to Harmony
|
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1923
|
The Book of the Great Musicians
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1924
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The First Book of the Gramophone
Record
|
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1925
|
The Appreciation of Music
by Means of the Pianola and
Duo-Art
|
|
1925
|
Everybody’s Guide to Broadcast
Music
|
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1928
|
Miniature History of Music
|
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1930
|
Columbia History of Music
Through Ear and Eye (5 parts)
|
|
1931
|
Miniature History of Opera
|
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1933
|
Practical Lesson Plans in
Musical Appreciation by Means
of the Gramophone
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1934
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Puritans and Music
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|
1935
|
Music: the Child and the
Masterpiece
|
|
1935
|
Radio Times Music Handbook
|
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1938
|
Oxford Companion to Music
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|
1942
|
God Save the King! Its History
and Romance
|
|
1947
|
The Mirror of Music
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|
1948
|
The Great Doctor Burney
|
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1952
|
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
of Music
|
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1953
|
The Life and Adventures of
Sir John Hawkins
|
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1954
|
Oxford Junior Companion to
Music
|
Kenneth
Shenton
Letters reproduced by kind permission
of The Percy A. Scholes Collection,
National Library of Canada.
