Cyril Scott
From Kook Science
| Cyril Scott | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Photo by A.Z. Coburn, dated 1916 | |
| Born | 27 September 1879 Oxton, Cheshire, England, UK |
| Died | 31 December 1970 (91) Eastbourne, Sussex, England, UK |
Cyril Meir Scott (September 27, 1879 - December 31, 1970) was a British composer, pianist, poet, and writer linked to Theosophy and associated strains of esotericism. Scott was credited with the authorship of an extensive selection of music, including operas (both composition and libretti), symphonies, orchestral, chamber, choral, and concertante works, as well as several books, collections of poetry, and pamphlets. His musical contributions have been favourably compared with Edvard Grieg and Claude Debussy by some few critics — Debussy himself said Scott was "one of the rarest artists of the present generation" while conductor Eugene Goossens once called Scott the "father of British modern music" — but such favour was not widely shared, and Scott's corpus has become an outlier, existing largely on the fringe of musical scholarship, and primarily represented in performance and recording by some few of his piano concertos.
Selected Bibliography
- His Pupil (Anon.) (1920), The Initiate: Some Impressions of a Great Soul, The Initiate, London: Routledge & K. Paul
- (Anon.) (1920), The Adept of Galilee – A Story and an Argument, London: Routledge
- His Pupil (Anon.) (1927), The Initiate in the New World, The Initiate, London: Routledge
- His Pupil (Anon.) (1932), The Initiate in the Dark Cycle, The Initiate, London: Routledge
- (Anon.) (1933), Vision of the Nazarene, London: Routledge
- Scott, Cyril (1933), Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages
- Scott, Cyril (1935), Outline of Modern Occultism, London: E.P. Dutton & Co.
- Scott, Cyril (1957), Occultism: An Alternative to Scientific Humanism
Press Coverage
- Rosenfeld, Paul (March 1921), "Cyril Scott: A Portrait of the English Modernist Composer", Vanity Fair, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1921/3/cyril-scott