MARION SCOTT (1877-1953)
CRITIC, CHAMPION OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC AND WOMEN
If
the name Marion Scott is known at all today it is through her association
with poet-composer Ivor Gurney whose work she championed and promoted
from the time she first met him in 1911 until her death in 1953.
But who was this remarkable woman whose own life
has been obscured by Gurney’s shadow? Was she really the ‘incompetent
mulish old maid’ and ‘fragile fool’ of Gerald Finzi’s often quoted experience
or was she a dynamic, visionary and witty woman whose gifts ranged from
writing and music to business, public relations, education, social activism
and a great ability to organize people. Was she indeed a repressed old
maid or was she a beautiful woman who attracted young men to her and
became for many a trusted confidante, mentor and friend?
It is a well-known fact that Finzi had difficulty
in his dealings with Scott as he tried for many years to work with her
to keep Gurney’s reputation alive. He found her uncooperative and often
felt that she was placing obstacles in his way that prevented him from
cataloguing Gurney’s manuscripts and getting his work published. His
frustration with her is understandable but it fails to take into account
what was going on in her life and why she appeared to be uncooperative
and so possessive of Gurney’s papers.
By the time Finzi met Scott, probably as early
as 1923, she was an established music critic, writer, champion of contemporary
music, and lecturer.(1) She had already enjoyed a professional career
as a violinist, having played in orchestras under the direction of Samuel
Coleridge Taylor, Gustav Holst, Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry and Walter
Parratt in addition to her formation of the Marion Scott Quartet in
1908. As the leader of the Quartet, which was made up equally of men
and women, Scott’s main goal was the performance of contemporary British
music.(2) The ensemble appeared primarily at Aeolian Hall in London
and featured new music by Stanford, Walford Davies, Parry, William Hurlstone,
James Friskin, Frank Bridge, Roger Quilter, Arthur Somervell and others.
Her programming was praised for its boldness and diversity in presenting
works that were ‘as unfamiliar as they were welcome’. Scott did not
limit her choice of music only to quartets but varied her programmes
to include trios and quintets as well as compositions featuring a pianist,
vocal soloist or vocal ensemble.
Scott’s first instrument was the piano but after
enduring several years of lessons with an uninspiring teacher, she discovered
the violin and in it found a ‘faithful friend’ that brought her ‘close
to Heaven’s door’. By the time she was 15, she was performing in public
with her father, Sydney Scott, serving as her accompanist. She was an
electric, appealing soloist who possessed the ability to excite such
enthusiasm among listeners that she was routinely called back to play
encores and was often rewarded with a standing ovation. Her gift was
substantial enough for her father to purchase a fine Guadagnini violin
for his daughter.(3)
Although she was only a teenager, Scott was already
an entrepreneur who understood the importance of marketing and promotion,
gifts that would serve her and others so well in the future. She believed
in performing contemporary music and often introduced it to her audiences.
Her liberal parents encouraged each of their three daughters, of whom
Marion was the eldest, to dream and explore, question and challenge
and to follow her own direction in life. Sydney and Annie Prince Scott
were social activists who used their own wealth and influence to raise
money for those in need and gave their financial support and energy
to the temperance and suffrage movements.(4) From an early age, Scott
was exposed to the inequities of society, particularly those affecting
women. She found the harsh indifference to those less fortunate than
herself intolerable and she worked throughout her life to change public
attitudes towards women, not just in music, where she first encountered
such prejudice, but in society at large.
In 1896, Scott entered the Royal College of Music
to study violin with Fernandez Arbos, piano with Marmaduke Barton and
composition first with Walford Davies and later with Stanford. She was
one of only two women named in a partial listing of Stanford’s pupils:
the other was Rebecca Clarke.(5) Like her friend Ivor Gurney, she was
most comfortable composing songs, preferring texts by Robert Louis Stevenson
above others.
Even though she was a student, Scott was in demand
as a performer outside the walls of the college. In 1901, she achieved
a dream she had held since she was 12 years old, that of performing
on stage at Crystal Palace, which was a few minutes’ walk from her childhood
home at Gipsy Hill. She participated in a chamber music concert and
performed in the Schumann Quintet in E flat with Fanny Davies
at the piano. She was a regular performer on the London recital circuit,
participating in chamber music concerts that often featured music so
new that the musicians had to work from the composer’s manuscript.
Like Gurney, Scott was also interested in poetry.
One year after completing her studies at the R.C.M. in 1904, she published
her first and only volume of poetry, Violin Verses. Employing
her marketing skills, Scott secured generally favourable reviews for
her slim book in eight British newspapers and journals. In 1906, Scott
along with Emily Daymond and Aitken Crawshaw founded the R.C.M. Union
for students which marked the beginning of Scott’s long professional
association with the college.
As she entered her thirties, Scott was building
several careers — secretary of the R.C.M. Union, free-lance musician,
entrepreneur and writer/lecturer. She created a series of talks on music
history designed to appeal to general audiences and courses on the technical
aspects of music for those interested in more serious study, which she
offered for a fee. Simultaneously, she and her sister Stella were acting
as surrogate mothers for their toddler niece Audrey Lovibond whose mother,
the youngest of the Scott sisters, had died two weeks after her birth
in 1908.
Scott was daring and bold at a time when women
were expected to know their proper place in society and not stray from
it. While most women raised in Victorian England worked in low-paying
traditional jobs and were biding their time until a suitable husband
presented himself, Scott was having love affairs and enjoying success
in several careers. She led a busy and diverse social life that included
meetings of the exclusive Beloved Vagabonds Club, concerts, theatre
performances, parties at her parents’ home, European holidays, suffrage
meetings and gatherings with her friends to plan a new venture, the
Society of Women Musicians (SWM).
The first meeting of the new society was held on
11 July 1911, shortly after Scott first met Ivor Gurney, then a new
scholarship student at the R.C.M. News of the event spread rapidly when
Scott’s promotional skills resulted in the appearance of more than a
dozen articles in major London newspapers and music periodicals. As
Scott and co-founder Gertrude Eaton envisioned the organisation, it
would promote a sense of cooperation among women in different fields
of music, provide performance opportunities and advice and would even
help women ‘with regard to the business side of their professional work’.
Scott, Eaton and their council established an organization that had
no political agenda. It was open to men, who were encouraged to join
as dues-paying associate members. As members, they were able to attend
debates, performances and meetings and have their music performed at
SWM concerts.
Gurney’s arrival at the R.C.M. quickly caught Scott’s
attention and they soon became friends. Scott took great interest in
the gifted student whose presence perhaps dulled the pain she endured
in the aftermath of her failed relationship with composer Ernest Farrar
earlier in the year. Scott was clearly impressed by Gurney and encouraged
and supported him in all of his interests. When he was away from London,
they corresponded regularly and Scott had the vision to save all of
his letters. During the war when Gurney was serving at the Front, they
formed an unusual partnership which resulted in the publication of Gurney’s
first volume of poetry, Severn and Somme thanks in part to composer
Thomas Dunhill, another of Scott’s friends, who had connections at Sidgwick
and Jackson. ‘You have given me just what I needed, and what none other
of my friends could supply to keep me in touch with the things which
are my life,’ he wrote to her in the spring of 1917.(6) By this time,
Scott had fallen in love with him.
The war years were difficult for Scott. She was
in a constant state of anxiety over Gurney and poured a tremendous amount
of time and energy into corresponding with him and taking care of his
needs as best she could from a distance. She arranged performances of
his music and publication of his poetry in newspapers. Her health was
often poor and she suffered a number of serious illnesses including
colitis, rubella and mumps, which is dangerous in an adult. She had
several injuries, at least one surgery and nearly died in the summer
of 1916. Her family was also beset with illness during the war and her
sister Stella also came close to dying from appendicitis.
After the war, Scott embarked on a new career as
the London music critic for the Christian Science Monitor, an
international daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts.
She made her debut on 4 January 1919 with a two-part
survey of "The Musical Situation in Italy" and "English
Notes" containing eleven short notices and reviews.
For the most part her articles and criticism for
the Monitor were anonymous — she was known only as the ‘Special
Correspondent’ although occasionally, she did receive a by-line. In
the early years of her association with the Monitor, she sometimes
covered as many as six to eight concerts a month and wrote feature articles
as well. For example, in January 1920, she published three major articles
— ‘John Ireland and His Work’, a profile of Thomas Dunhill and part
one of a two-part series on ‘British Violin Sonatas’ — and covered eight
performances.
She used her powerful position as the London correspondent
to introduce and promote the music of her British friends and colleagues
regularly in America. Her belief in Herbert Howells’s future as a composer
is easily measured by the number of articles and reviews she devoted
to him in the Monitor. She wrote occasionally about Gurney, Arthur
Benjamin, Sydney Shimmin, Charles Stanford, William Harris, Hubert Parry,
Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Thomas Dunhill while reviewing performances
of music by Edward Elgar, John Ireland, Gustav Holst, Arnold Bax, Frank
Bridge, George Butterworth, Armstrong Gibbs and others, including music
by European and American composers. She also covered special events
such as the First National Congress of the British Music Society in
1920, acting as a reporter as well as critic.
Scott set herself a punishing schedule. Not only
was she working for the Monitor, she was writing numerous other
free-lance articles, working at the R.C.M. Union, lecturing, organizing
concerts, serving as mentor to another generation of young composers
and performers, playing an active role in a variety of societies and
organizations, raising her niece and acting as legal guardian and friend
of Ivor Gurney, who had been committed to an asylum in 1922. Eventually,
she cut back on the amount of work she did for the Monitor, and
by the mid-to-late 1920s, her articles signed MMS or Marion Scott appeared
only occasionally. She ended her association with the newspaper in 1934.
In addition to her essays,
articles and criticism, Marion Scott wrote programme notes for the BBC
Symphony Orchestra, the Haydn Orchestra and for the Royal Philharmonic
Society, delivered papers to the Musical Association (now the Royal
Music Association), produced broadcasts for Music Magazine, and
wrote entries for Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music,
Cobbett’s Chamber Music Supplement, and Grove’s Dictionary
of Music and Musicians. Scott established herself as an international
authority on Haydn, publishing dozens of articles and studies about
him between 1930 and 1952. She published her own editions of Haydn’s
music with Oxford University Press. From 1919 on, her writing on a broad
range of musical topics appeared in Music and Letters, The
Music Student, Music and Youth, The Musical Quarterly,
The Listener, The Music Review, Monthly Musical Record,
Music Magazine, The Musical Times, Music Bulletin,
Royal College of Music Magazine, Radio Times, The Sackbut,
Daily Telegraph, Observer, Christian Science Monitor.
She published several hundred articles, essays, critical pieces,
programme notes, book reviews and lectures.
Scott’s activism on the part of women convinced
the BBC in 1930 that women instrumentalists should be included in the
newly formed BBC Orchestra. Scott and three other members of the Society
of Women Musicians dared to approach the BBC hierarchy and demand, tactfully
but firmly, that all musicians be auditioned behind screens to give
women an equal chance to be judged on their ability and not be dismissed
without a hearing because of their sex.
Marion Scott published her
only full-length book, Beethoven in 1934 under the J. M. Dent
& Sons, Ltd. imprint as part of the Music Masters Series. This 343-page
illustrated biography remains a classic study of the man and his music.
The book met with both critical and public acclaim, the degree of its
popularity underscored by the fact that it was reprinted nine times:
1937, 1940, 1944, 1949, 1951, 1956, 1960, 1965, 1974 (in a revised version
by Sir Jack Westrup). Although Scott’s Beethoven was replaced
in the series in 1985 by Denis Matthews’ study, her book is still in
demand today and is often quoted by contemporary writers discussing
the metaphysical, or new age’, perspectives of Beethoven’s life and
work. Her
brief study of Mendelssohn later appeared in the Novello series of Biographies
of Great Musicians.
In 1936, she
became the editor of the R.C.M. Magazine, a post she held until
1944, carrying the publication through the ‘disheartening difficulties
of five war years’, which she ‘surmounted by unyielding energy and courage
[and] her untiring vigour and noble scholarship’, according to Sir Percy
Buck, her successor.(7) Scott and her family left London in August 1939
to wait out the war at Bridgwater, mainly out of concern for her mother
who was in her late eighties. After Mrs. Scott’s death in 1942, Marion
returned to her bomb-damaged home on Porchester Terrace where she had
settled some years earlier with her niece. In 1945, Scott sister Stella
suffered a devastating stroke and her care fell to Marion, who was nearing
70, and to Stella’s husband, who was not in good health himself.
At a time when most people were already retired,
Scott continued her research on Haydn, her free-lance writing, lecturing
and her active participation in different organisations including the
Royal Music Association, the Royal Philharmonic Association, the Society
of Women Musicians, the Musicians Benevolent Fund, the Critics’ Circle,
the London Society Music Centre and the Haydn Society. She continued
to live a demanding life in spite of her increasing ill health and the
responsibilities of her family while at the same time trying to deal
with the demands of Gerald Finzi who had no idea how busy Scott’s life
was. But it wasn’t only her full schedule and ill health that made Scott
a reluctant and sometimes unwilling participant in Finzi’s quest to
keep Gurney’s reputation alive. She was possessive of Gurney’s manuscripts
and his letters that filled trunks in her home because they were all
she had left of him aside from memories. To give up a single piece of
paper connected with Gurney was a sacrifice she was incapable of making
even years after his death.
Scott’s health broke down completely in July 1953
when she was diagnosed with colon cancer. She was too weak to venture
outdoors but continued her work on Haydn, relying on friends to go to
libraries and conduct research for her while she continued to write
at home.
Scott’s condition worsened in November and on Christmas
Eve 1953, she died, just two days shy of the sixteenth anniversary of
Gurney’s death.
In a tribute to Marion Scott, her friend Herbert
Howells wrote: ‘She was never robust. A frail appearance threw into
brilliant relief an unflagging vitality. Sheer grit and will-power compensated
for the lack of physical strength. In no one else have I known fragility
so neutralized by steel-like courage. So it came about that so-called
"strong" men accepted her as their equal. The most masterful
and domineering musician I ever knew once confessed that the only woman
he feared was Marion Scott. It was his way of admiration and tribute.’(8)
Marion Scott’s achievements were many and varied
but it was her commitment to Ivor Gurney and their unusual partnership
that kept her name alive. As a result, her own considerable and vital
contribution as an insightful commentator on British music during the
first half of the twentieth century has been overlooked until recently.
Efforts are now being made to explore the wealth of music history that
she preserved and to make it available to contemporary audiences. Pamela
Blevins © 2002
Notes
1. It is likely Scott was the moving force behind the
first performance of a composition by Finzi, the premiere of his By
Footpath and Stile at a British Music Society concert on 24 October
1923 at the Contemporary Music Centre.
2. Members of the quartet were Herbert Kinze, second
violin, Ivor James, cello, Sybil Maturin, viola, Scott, first violin
with pianists William H. Harris and Harold Darke and singer Maria Yelland
joining them when needed.
3. At the time of her death in 1953, Scott still owned
the violin.
4. Scott was half American. Her mother, Annie Prince
(1853-1942) was from an old Salem, Massachusetts family of explorers,
adventurers, entrepreneurs whose history in the New World dates back
to 1639. Annie was reared in St. Petersburg, Russia, where her father
ran a large family import-export enterprise. Sydney Scott (1850-1936)
was a gifted young man who qualified as a solicitor before he was actually
old enough to practice. He was also an accomplished musician and a long-standing
member of the Society of Psychical Research (as a debunker of the paranormal),
where one of his close friends was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sydney and
Marion shared a metaphysical philosophy and practice of life. The Scotts
were married in St. Petersburg in 1876. Marion was born in 1877 (died
1953); Stella in 1881 (died 1949) and Freda in 1884 (died 1908).
5. Quoted in Stephen Banfield’s Sensibility and English Song,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 38.
6. Ivor Gurney to Marion Scott, 2 April 1917, R.K.R. Thornton, Ivor
Gurney Collected Letters (Ashington: MidNAG/Carcanet) 1991, p. 240.
7. Scott’s father died in 1936 and Ivor Gurney died in 1937.
8. Herbert Howells, Marion Margaret Scott: 1877-1953, Music and
Letters, April 1954.
A Select list of Marion Scott’s
Writing
The Listener
"In Memoriam: Ivor Gurney",
14 July 1938
"Michael Tippett and his Music",
8 April 1943
"Holst, Cotswold Man and Mystic",
18 May 1944
The Monthly Musical Record
"Recollections of Ivor Gurney"
February 1938
The Musical Times
"Contemporary British War-Poetry,
Music and Patriotism" 1917
"London Concerts" a review
of Gerald Finzi’s A Young Man’s Exhortation, 1934
"London Concerts" review
of Gerald Finzi’s Interlude, 1936
Music and Letters
"Antonio Stradivari: Violin Maker",
XVIII 1937
"A Complaint of the Decay of Violin
Solos", VI 1925
"A Dictionary of Chamber Music
[Cobbett], X 1929
"Haydn Stayed Here [Roxford, Hertingfordbury]",
XXXII 1951
"Haydn Thereabouts or There",
XXI 1940
"Immanent Form" XVII 1936
"Ivor Gurney: The Man" XIX
1938
"Maddalena Lombardini, Madame
Syrmen" XIV 1933
"Shostakovitch: ‘Leningard Symphony’",
(posth.) 1954
The Music Bulletin
"Introduction: Herbert Howells",
May 1924
The Music Student
"Herbert Howells" Piano Quartet,
November 1918
Radio Times
"Beethoven is for everyone",
30 December 1949
"We may well marvel at Haydn’s
Story" 28 April 1950
Royal College of Music Magazine
"Second Lieut. Ernest Bristowe
Farrar" obituary, XV September 1918
"Ivor Gurney" obituary, XXXIV
March 1938
The Sackbut
"Poets’ Touches", an essay
on poetry and music, June 1920
The Christian Science Monitor
— feature articles
"The Royal College of Music",
a two-part article illustrated with a pencil drawing of the college,
10 May and 17 May 1919
"English Society of Women Musicians",
7 June 1919
"A Young Composer of Promise",
profile of Herbert Howells, illustrated with pencil portrait of
Howells, 14 June 1919
"The Gloucestershire Group",
a three part feature about the history of Gloucestershire and the
composers and poets, including Gurney,
Howells and F. W. Harvey, associated with it, 26 July, 2 August and
9 August 1919
"The Word Setting of a Song",
an essay on poetry and music, 29 August 1919
"John Ireland and His Work",
a profile of the composer, 3 January 1920
"British Violin Sonatas",
a two-part feature on the 17th and 18th century
works and works by modern composers, 17 January and 7 February 1920
"A Man of Large Endowments",
a profile of Thomas Dunhill, 24 January 1920,
"Treasure Trove in Folk Song",
discusses of folk song in America and England, 13 March 1920
"Cecil Sharp and Folk Song",
examines Sharp’s role as a folk song collector, 2 April 1920
"British Music Society",
two part article -- reportorial coverage of the organization’s first
National Congress and debates with a history, 12 June and 19 June 1920
"A Folk-Song Gift to Herbert
Howells", an account of the music at Howells’ wedding, 11
September 1920
"Herbert Howells, His ‘In Gloucestershire’,
feature on Howells string quartet, 25 December 1920
"Gustav Holst", profile of
the composer, 5 March 1921
The Christian Science Monitor
— Criticism
Premiere of Sir Charles Stanford’s
Magnificat, the Bach Choir under Dr. H. P. Allen, June 1919
Festival of the Royal College of Music
which featured music by English composers, including Gurney, 6 September
1919
Organ recitals by her friends Harold
Darke and George Thalben-Ball, 18 September 1919
Performance of American composer Henry
Hadley’s The Culprit Fay at the Proms, also mention of Howells’
Puck’s Minuet, (September 25th concert) 1 November
1919
"A New Elgar ‘Cello Concerto’
", review of the premiere of the concerto by the London Symphony
Orchestra with Elgar conducting (27 October), 13 December 1919
A Queen’s Hall symphony concert performance
of George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, 23 February 1920
Royal Philharmonic Society concert
featuring works by Holst, Delius and Granville Bantock, 20 March 1920
"Sir C. V. Stanford’s New Opera",
The Traveling Companion, 17 April 1920
Royal Philharmonic Society performance
of Delius’s Song of the High Hills, 19 April 1920
"New Piano Sonata by John Ireland",
24 July 1920
The publication of songs by Herbert
Howells and C. Armstrong Gibbs, no date but 1920
"Stravinsky, A Concert of His
Chamber Music", 21 August 1920
Three Choirs Festival, Worcester, 9
October 1920
"‘Merry-Eye’ by Herbert Howells"
30 October 1920
"Programs by the English Singers"
featured Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme, 25 December 1920
Pamela Blevins © 2002
Marion Scott’s
Repertoire
Solo, Chamber,
Orchestral
A Select List
First public performance, March 21, 1893, a Gipsy Rondo (unattributed
but probably Haydn)
Founded The Marion Scott Quartet in December 1908
Contemporary British — Instrumental
and Ensemble
Frank Bridge: Piano Trio
Walford Davies: String Quartet (gave premiere 1908)
Six Pastorals
Ernest Farrar: Celtic Suite
James Friskin: Piano Trio
Edward German: Bolero
William Hurlstone: Phantasie Quartet
Charles Hubert Parry: Suite in F major
Cyril Rootham: Quintet in D
Marion Scott: Russian Folk Song Arrangements
Charles V. Stanford: Quartet in G minor
Other Chamber Music
Thomas Arne: Trio Sonata
Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin
Sonatas for violin and keyboard
Beethoven: "Kreutzer" Sonata and others
William Croft: Sonata in G minor
Debussy: Romance
Debussy: Legend
Grieg: Sonata in F Major
Handel: Sonata in D for Violin
Jenö Hubay: Hejre Kati
Vincent D’Indy: Quartet in D
H.A. Keyser: Quintet in C
Fritz Kreisler: Schön Rosmarin
Édouard Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole (with piano)
Lederer: Poeme Hongroise
Jean-Marie Leclair: Sonata for violin and viola
Mascagni: Intermezzo from Cavaleria Rusticana
Mendelssohn: Trio in D minor
Emil Mlynarski: Mazurka
Guido Papini: Saltarella
Franz Pries: Gondoliers
Purcell: Fantasias for Strings (1680)
Saint Saëns: The Swan
Sarasate: Ziguenerweisen
Schumann: Quintet in E flat
Simonetti: Madrigals
Solomon Sulzer: Sarabande
Antonio Tenaglia: Air for Violin
Jósef Wieniaski: Polonaise
Orchestral Works as Orchestral
Player
Bach: Concerto for Three Pianos
Beethoven: Piano Concerto in B flat
William Sterndale Bennett: Caprice for Piano and Orchestra
Léon Boëllmann: Symphonic Variations for Cello and Orchestra
Borodin: Symphony No. 1 in E flat
Coleridge Taylor: Onaway! Awake, Beloved
C.H. Doring: Gigue
Thomas Dunhill: Valse-Fantasia for Flute & Orchestra
Dvo ák: Nocturne for Strings
Serenade in E
Elgar: Enigma Variations
Nicholas Gatty: Old King Cole Variations
Arthur De Greef: Ballad on a Flemish tune
Grieg: Suite for String Orchestra "Holberg", op 40
Handel: Concerto Grosso
Hurlstone: Variations for Orchestra on a Hungarian Theme
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor
Emmanuel Moor: Serenade
Mozart: Jupiter Symphony
Eduard Nàpravnik: Melancolie
Parry: Ode to Music
Saint Saens: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Schubert: German Dances
Schubert: Minuet
Schumann: Genoveva
Piano Concerto in A minor
Stanford: Te Deum
Johann Svendsen: Two Icelandic Melodies
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor
Friedrich Volkman: Serenade for Strings in C
Wagner: Die Meistersinger
Solo Orchestral
Bach: Various concertos
Bruch: Violin Concerto in D minor
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor
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