Charles Kennedy Scott (Romsey, 16 November 1876 – 2 July 1965 in London) was an English organist and choral conductor who played an important part in developing the performance of choral and polyphonic music in England, especially of early and modern English music.
Contents |
Educated at Southampton Grammar School, he entered the Brussels Conservatory in 1894. Beginning by studying the violin, he transferred to the organ under the outstanding virtuoso and teacher Alphonse Mailly (1833-1918), who encouraged a special interest in plainchant and in the phrasing of J. S. Bach's organ music: he also studied composition under Hubert Ferdinand Kufferath (1818-1896) (a pupil of Mendelssohn's), teacher of Counterpoint and Fugue, and under the organist-composer Edgar Tinel (1854-1912). In 1897 he took the Premier Prix avec distinction and the Mailly Prize for organ playing. He settled in London in 1898 as a professional organist and teacher, and married a cousin who had also studied at Brussels.[1][2]
In 1904 Scott founded the Oriana Madrigal Society, consisting of 36 voices, which made its first public appearance at the Portman Rooms in July 1905.[3] Its initially stated object was 'to press the claims of our Elizabethan school', and 'to devote itself solely to the singing of English madrigals.'[4] Scott was by chance shown the publications of the Musical Antiquarian Society, including a volume of madrigals by John Wilbye, and formed the determination to lift English Elizabethan music from its position of comparative neglect. He scored many examples over the next years and held gatherings which became the core of his society.[5] Later on the number of voices was increased to 60, and its work was extended to include modern compositions, both English and foreign, but always with emphasis on the English.[6]
The Oriana Choir brought high standards of precision and flexibility to choral performance, which had a beneficial influence on choral music in general.[7] Their work naturally drew Scott towards the contemporary English scene, and he came to know Balfour Gardiner and Arnold Bax, and through them Norman O'Neill, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger, Benjamin Dale, Roger Quilter and others.[8] Thus the Oriana gave madrigal concerts in the two series devoted to English contemporary music, of 1912 and 1913, promoted by Gardiner,[9] and in the Philharmonic Society concert of 20 November 1913, under Scott and Balfour Gardiner, which also included Stanford, Gardiner and Parry part-songs.[10] In 1920 they gave the first hearing of Delius's unaccompanied choruses To be sung of a Summer Night on the Water.[11] In 1922 they sang in a special concert of the works of Arnold Bax, with the Goossens Orchestra,[12] giving the first performance of his motet for double choir Mater ora filium, a work dedicated to Charles Kennedy Scott.[13] In 1926 and 1927 the Oriana joined with the Bach Cantata Club for performances of the Bach Mass in B Minor: in 1931 they sang works by Bax, Warlock and Holst at a Festival for the International Society of Contemporary Music, and in 1936 they formed the core of a 100-voice chorus for the first London performance of Fauré's Requiem, and for Schütz's History of the Resurrection under Nadia Boulanger.[14] All of these performances were given at the Queen's Hall, but latterly most Oriana concerts were at the Aeolian Hall, usually three times yearly, and often in collaboration with the English Folk Dance Society.
In October 1919 Scott founded the Philharmonic Choir, the predecessor of the present London Philharmonic Choir.[15] This first appeared at a Philharmonic Society concert in February 1920, to give the first performance of Delius's A Song of the High Hills, and also Bach's Sing Ye to the Lord and Beethoven's Choral Symphony (directed by Scott, under Albert Coates).[16] Most of its concerts took place in the Queen's Hall, where the space available limited the membership to about 300. The choir contained a large professional element, especially among the tenors, in order to achieve a high standard of performance: the costs of their employment were met principally by Balfour Gardiner.[17]
The Choir gave two or three concerts of its own each season under its own conductor, but also made very numerous appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Society, the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC, and the Courtauld-Sargent Concerts (established 1929). On March 25 1920 they gave the first performance of Holst's The Hymn of Jesus, the composer conducting: they went on to introduce many modern works to London, including Delius's Requiem and Songs of Farewell, César Franck's Psyche: St Patrick's Breastplate, Walsinghame and This Worldes Joie by Bax; Requiem Mass by Sir George Henschel; April by Balfour Gardiner; Psalmus Hungaricus of Zoltan Kodaly; San Francesco d'Assisi of Malipiero; The Prison by Ethel Smyth; The Canterbury Pilgrims and In Honour of the City by George Dyson; Ode on a Grecian Urn by Philip Napier Miles; Magnificat and Flourish for a Coronation by Vaughan Williams; Constant Lambert's Summer's Last Will and Testament, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Rachmaninoff's The Bells and Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler.[18] The choir was suspended in 1939 at the outbreak of War: when the London Philharmonic Choir was formed in 1946 Scott was unable to resume direction, and a new conductor was appointed.[19]
The choir played a major part with the LSO in Sir Thomas Beecham's 'revitalization' of Handel's Messiah in December 1926, and undertook much of the choral work in the Delius Festival of 1929. They gave many performances of the great standard works such as the B Minor Mass, the St Matthew Passion and St John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the Requiems of Mozart and Brahms, and many of the Handel oratorios.[20] As an offshoot of the Philharmonic Choir appeared the Junior Philharmonic Choir, consisting of two to three hundred girls and young men from the London Secondary Schools' Festival, who gave several concerts from 1932 onwards in major religious works by Bach.
Scott created the A Cappella Singers as a small group of 14 professional singers, for singing madrigals and part-songs under chamber-music conditions rather than in the concert hall. It was first assembled in 1922, and gave most of its performances in private houses or for music clubs, though occasionally singing at Queen's Hall in company with other Kennedy Scott choirs.[23]
Also in 1922 Scott founded the Euterpe String Players.[26]
The Bach Cantata Club was formed in 1926, with the aim of making known the church and secular cantatas of J. S. Bach and his instrumental works, performed with resources similar to those which Bach himself must have planned for when he was composing. In this project Scott was joined by Hubert J. Foss and E. Stanley Roper (organist of the Chapel Royal), and they received assistance from the Bach musicologist Dr Charles Sandford Terry (who contributed programme notes, and gave a lecture on Bach's Chorales and Chorale Preludes in 1927) and from Dr W. G. Whittaker, director of the Newcastle Bach Choir (on which the London Club was partly modelled). The Vice-President was Dr Albert Schweitzer, who from time to time acted as organist at the Society's concerts. The choir of the Club consisted of twenty-five singers, mostly professional, while the instrumental work was an ensemble of London players called the Bach Chamber Orchestra. The choral concerts mostly took place at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and the orchestral performances at the Royal College of Music.[27] A command performance of the unaccompanied motets was given before Their Majesties at Buckingham Palace in 1927, and the Motet 'Jesu Joy and Treasure' was recorded for HMV in the same year.[28]
On 27 November 1929, at the Annual Extra Meeting, a bicentennial performance of the St Matthew Passion, in English, using Dr Troutbeck's version and rejecting the Elgar-Atkin treatment, was given at Westminster with a 90-minute interval for dinner. The following resources were employed:[29]
For the grand event of 1930 the Christmas Oratorio was given complete with Dorothy Silk, Margaret Balfour, Henry Wendon and Keith Falkner.
By this date the Club had held 22 meetings including three performances of the Mass in B Minor (one in St Margaret's Church and one in Queen's Hall), twenty-five Church Cantatas, four Motets, three secular Cantatas, and various composite programmes and instrumental works. The subscription rate was 24 shillings (£1.4s.0d., i.e. £1.20p sterling) for a single seat to five concerts, £2.2s.0d. (two guineas) for a double ticket and £3 for a treble. Single Guest Tickets were 5s.9d. per concert.[30]
There was a plan to amalgamate all four of the Kennedy choirs in 1939 for a series of 9 concerts illustrating a survey of choral music, but this was abandoned owing to the war.
Scott was a member of staff of Trinity College of Music, Marylebone, London, from 1929 to 1965. He taught singing, conducted the College Choir, and was involved in the governance of the College. The College holds an archive relating to him, including manuscripts of some choral works, personal notebooks, concert programmes including many for the Oriana Madrigal Society, press cuttings and letters including correspondence received from well-known English composers. The collection also includes programmes from the memorial services of famous musicians which belonged to Kathleen Ewart, a singer in the Phoebus Singers, also a choir conducted by Scott.[33]
Charles Kennedy Scott married Mary Donaldson: they were the parents of the aviator C. W. A. Scott (1903-1946), John Kennedy Scott and of Barbara Hamilton Scott, who married Major Leslie Stewart-Brown in October 1926.[34]