20 Facts About Percy Scholes

Percy Alfred Scholes PhD OBE 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.

Percy Scholes was born in Headingly, Leeds in 1877, the third of six children of Thomas Scholes, a commercial agent and Katharine Elizabeth Pugh.

Percy Scholes was educated privately, owing to his poor health as a child.

Percy Scholes became an organist, schoolteacher, music journalist, lecturer, an Inspector of Music in Schools to London University and the Organist and Music Master of Kent College, Canterbury, All Saints, Vevey, Switzerland as well as Kingswood College, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Percy Scholes was Registrar at the City of Leeds School of Music.

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At various times Scholes was music critic for the Evening Standard, The Observer and the Radio Times.

Percy Scholes was made an Officer of the Star of Rumania in 1930 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in 1938.

Percy Scholes was founder and general secretary of the Anglo-American Conference on Musical Education, Lausanne.

Percy Scholes was assisted by various clerical assistants, but wrote virtually all the text himself.

Percy Scholes was the author of Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations.

Percy Scholes was deeply concerned with connecting music with a wider audience through musical appreciation in the tradition of Dr Burney, an influence he cited himself and the subject of his biography in 1948.

Percy Scholes recognised very early the possibilities of the gramophone as an aid to knowledge and understanding of music.

From 1930 onwards, Percy Scholes collaborated with the Columbia Graphophone Company in The Columbia History of Music by Ear and Eye; this comprised five volumes, each containing an explanatory booklet and eight 78rpm records specially made for the series, including Renaissance vocal and instrumental items performed by Arnold Dolmetsch and his family.

Percy Scholes worked on the innovative 'AudioGraphic' project for the Aeolian Company creating richly annotated player-piano rolls, having joined as Secretary the Honorary Advisory Committee on the Use of Piano-Player Rolls in Education, chaired by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, in 1925.

Percy Scholes 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".

Percy Scholes led the public denunciations of Arthur Eaglefield Hull when it was found that his book Music: Classical, Romantic and Modern was found to have borrowed material from other writers.

Percy Scholes took his own life by throwing himself under a train at Huddersfield station on 4 November, 1928.

Percy Scholes made enemies amongst The Sackbut group which included Philip Heseltine and Ursula Greville.

Percy Scholes sought legal advice on this matter but took no action.

Percy Scholes died in 1958, aged eighty-one, in Vevey, Switzerland, where he had been living for many years.