Percy Scholes

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Percy Alfred Scholes (1877–1958) was an English musician, journalist and prolific writer, whose best-known achievement was his compilation of the first edition of The Oxford Companion to Music. His 1948 biography The Great Dr Burney was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

He was born in Leeds in 1877 and was educated privately, owing to his poor health as a child. He became an organist, schoolteacher, music journalist and lecturer. At various times he was music critic for the Evening Standard, The Observer (1920-1927) and the Radio Times (1923-1929).

He wrote over 30 books, mainly concerning music appreciation, but his best-known work is The Oxford Companion to Music, which was first published in 1938. This work took him six years to produce and consisted of over a million words (surpassing the length of the Bible). Scholes was assisted by various clerical assistants, but wrote virtually all the text himself. The only exceptions were the article on tonic sol-fa (for which he was dissatisfied with his own article) and the synopses of the plots of operas (which he regarded as too boring). Although the Oxford Companion to Music was (and is) regarded as authoritative, the text of the first edition is enlivened by Scholes' own anecdotal and sometimes quirky style.

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".

In The Oxford Companion to Music itself 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."

Scholes died in 1958, aged eighty-one, in Vevey, Switzerland, where he had been living for many years. Shortly before his death, his "professional" library was acquired by the National Library of Canada. This comprised approximately 50 linear metres of research files and correspondence.^[1]

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. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather bulky two-volume work of some 2000 pages. The 2002 edition, edited by Alison Latham, reverted to the original title, and single-volume format.